My Take

MY TAKE

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When an NBC correspondent stuck a microphone in Sasha Cohen's face shortly after she won the ladies' short program at the Olympics and reminded her that she has a reputation for being unable to pull off two good programs, it occurred to me that sports journalists ought to put at least as much thought into what comes out of their mouths as Bode Miller does.

Reporters are not supposed to "care" about the athlete. Such concern might influence the choices they make when reporting on the athlete. In return, the athlete is expected to be equally detached from reporters, not allowing their questions or stories to impact her performance. This works about as well as the old scoring system in figure skating: good in theory, but not in practice.

The problem does not so much lie in journalists' belief in detachment, but in their blanket application of it to both mature athletes who earn millions of dollars a year in the world of professional sports and to young athletes -- many of them teenagers -- who may appear sophisticated, charming and confident, but are nonetheless unaccustomed to the level of public attention and pressure they receive during the Olympics.

As I worked on my book, "By a Fraction of a Second," the story of Olympic-level swimmers training for the 2000 Games, I was surprised when one of the top coaches in the sport refused to give me access to his athletes. He did not want me talking to them about past or future performances at times when he didn't want them thinking about them. As a journalist, I wouldn't know what he knew as a coach: when the reminder of an athlete's weaknesses -- or successeses -- would help her in the future and when it would disrupt her mental training.

The coach was unusually controlling, but his comments made me think seriously about the impact my questions and my storytelling had on the athletes I was covering. I decided not to interview any of them during the three months prior to the Olympic Trials, although I stayed in contact with their coaches. Nor did I try to talk to any of them at Trials until they had completed all of their races.

While one could argue that a good athlete should be able to block out what I, or any journalist, want to talk about and focus only on what she or her coach thinks is important, that is more idealistic than true of human relations. Athletes often enlist the help of sports psychologists to help them maintain an optimal frame of mind during high-stress competitions.

Many Olympic-level athletes spend their lives training in relative obscurity. Most are "known" only during the two weeks of the Olympic Games -- and then, only if they stand on the podium to receive a medal (or fail to do so, in light of media expectations). In writing my book, I wanted to respect and preserve, as much as possible, the environment in which the swimmers live and train for the three years and 50 weeks between Olympic competitions. I cared about these athletes. That didn't affect how I portrayed them, but it did motivate me to want to write the story that would unfold if I hadn't been writing about them at all.

Sasha Cohen is not as obscure a sports figure as some of the other Olympic athletes. She is no longer a teenager. She chooses to participate in a sport with drama and bright lights. She recognizes that she has a responsibility to make herself available to the public that supports the sport. (If only because failure to do so, even for the sake of self-protection, creates its own media drama completely out of the control of the athlete.) And I have no way of knowing whether Cohen's self-confidence was shaken by the NBC reporter's question.

But an athlete's graciousness in meeting her journalistic obligations should not leave her vulnerable to ill-timed, insensitive questions that might impact the athlete's mental preparation for her performance.

Like all athletes, Cohen has a responsibility to control her own mind chatter. But reporters cannot place all the responsibility for an athlete's state of mind on the athlete -- especially those who are young and especially during the heightened period of media attention and intense pressure that is the Olympics.

Journalists have to do their jobs, but athletes have to do theirs as well. While sports reporters cannot do theirs without the athlete, athletes can -- and often must -- do their job without any news coverage at all.

When journalists decide to enter the world of the elite, amateur athlete, who has made sacrifices and given years of dedication to earn a shot at an Olympic medal, they should care enough about the athlete to minimize the impact of that intrusion.

Yes, the athlete chooses to be in the public eye and has a responsibility to that public. But at the end of the race, it's the athlete's life; it's only the public's entertainment.