The Crybaby Olympics

You would have forgiven Akio Kaminaga for losing his cool. Heading into the gold-medal match at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, the Japanese judo champion was under enormous pressure. That year’s games heralded Japan’s comeback after its wartime defeat, and judo in particular was a symbol of national pride. The Japanese judo team was on the verge of sweeping all of the medals. Kaminaga just needed one more victory—against a giant Dutchman named Antonius Geesink, who stood eight inches taller than him.

Kaminaga lost to Geesink in two minutes. The arena was shocked; some people cried. Still, Kaminaga bowed to Geesink, smiled, and shook his hand. As the press began to swarm the competition floor, Geesink waved them off to spare Kaminaga the embarrassment. It’s remembered as a moment of sportsmanship and mutual respect.

The judo scene at this year’s Olympics is unlikely to be recalled so fondly. Last week in Paris, the Japanese star Ryuju Nagayama refused to shake his opponent’s hand after a loss. Uta Abe, the defending women’s gold medalist, shrieked on the sidelines for several minutes after losing in the second round. Most egregious of all, the Georgian judoka Guram Tushishvili reacted to defeat by kicking France’s Teddy Riner in the crotch and then pushing his head into the mat, earning himself a red card and disqualification.

[Devin Gordon: How sports got so whiny]

And that’s in a sport that prizes etiquette. Elsewhere, the Georgian fencer Sandro Bazadze threw a fit after his loss, berating the referee, repeatedly yelling “shame,” and refusing to leave the piste while the crowd booed. The American tennis player Emma Navarro exchanged tense words with her victorious opponent, China’s Qinwen Zheng. “I just told her I didn’t respect her as a competitor,” Navarro said to reporters. Their Polish competitor Iga Swiatek, the top-rated women’s player in the world, couldn’t handle losing to Zheng either, refusing to shake hands with the chair umpire and skipping several of her obligatory post-match interviews.

Sports has always had sore losers. John McEnroe made an art of it. No one at Paris 2024 has yet bitten their opponent’s ear off. But based on this year’s games, athletes seem to be getting worse at losing well. As with most sports stories, this one appears to be about more than sports. Whether in politics, business, or culture, dignity in defeat is going out of fashion.

It’s not just in our head. In a 2017 survey of referees in the United States, 57 percent said that sportsmanship was getting worse. By 2023, that number had climbed to 69 percent, and half said they’d at some point feared for their safety. “I think society as a whole has moved away from good sportspersonship,” David Matsumoto, a former Olympic judo coach and a psychology professor at San Francisco State University, told me.

The main culprit, according to some experts, is increasing pressure. Young athletes start earlier and spend more time training than in the past. More money is at stake too: Sponsors reward success even in obscure sports such as handball and artistic swimming, and many athletes make an income as influencers. A number of countries pay their Olympic athletes, with big bonuses for medaling. Losing the gold can mean losing gold.

Boorish athletes might also be reacting to growing amounts of attention. Stephen Garcia, a psychologist at the University of Michigan who studies competition, told me that athletes often suffer “evaluation apprehension” based on the number of people watching them. The bigger the audience, the more stress they feel. Now that anyone with a phone can broadcast an event in real time, and highlights (and lowlights) live on in social-media feeds, the feeling of being watched is more powerful than ever, Garcia said.

Another possibility: People everywhere are becoming more selfish. Studies have shown that as countries get richer, their citizens become more individualistic. Because good sportsmanship is largely about subordinating one’s own emotions for the sake of the group, Matsumoto said, it follows that a decline in collectivist thinking could lead to more blowups.

The lack of self-regulation extends beyond sports. The sorest loser of all needs no introduction. Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election was unprecedented at the time. Since then, voicing doubts about elections has become contagious within the Republican Party. In the 2022 midterms, a raft of GOP candidates refused to concede their losses. Trump has also rejected the court decisions against him—one jury found him civilly liable for sexual abuse, another criminally guilty of falsifying business records—as illegitimate. The generous take is that stubbornness is less about lying than about projecting strength. (Hillary Clinton “fought on” in the 2008 primaries long past the point of having any chance of beating Barack Obama.) Or perhaps it’s the Shaggy theory of denial: Say it enough times, and people will believe it.

[From the November 2022 issue: Bad losers]

There’s no L bigger than death, and we’re trying to avoid that too. Venture-capital funds are investing billions in longevity research. Rich people are paying to have themselves frozen when they die, and even if their body expires, AI promises to preserve their digital self. We never have to say goodbye to our cultural idols, either: Thanks to hologram technology, we can watch Abba and Elvis and someday, probably, Post Malone in concert for the rest of our eternal life.

In some contexts, there’s beauty in refusing to accept loss. Raging against the dying of the light can be moving, even inspiring. “Death, be not proud,” we say, ignoring the Grim Reaper’s undefeated record.

When it comes to sports, however, denying reality isn’t poetic; it’s just dumb. Athletics is one of the few realms in life where the results are definitive. That’s why we watch: The finality is the point. A society that can’t accept losing in sports is not equipped to handle more difficult truths.