12 Days of JOURNOS, Day Five: The Mental-Health Olympics

On the Fifth Day of JOURNOS, we sprint, dive, and slalom into the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, held in summer of 2021. We glory at the spectacle of so many controversies, from bribery and shameful resignations to a stadium sourced from endangered rainforests and the traditional procession of vomiting Australians that ends every Olympiad.

We linger voyeuristically at that other tradition: how Olympians are going to screw each other. This time around, it was complicated by cardboard no-sex beds, a utopian vision of corrugated-cardboard idealism from the 1960s that like everything these days was infected by disinformation.

The event we really gathered for, though? The conversation about athletes' mental health this year, from Simone Biles to Naomi Osaka. Brandon & Stephen wonder whether the pandemic contributed to these struggles, and maybe made it more okay to talk about them. (Certainly, more sports figures are.)

With all of us dealing with a two-year anxiety marathon, the athletes who take a pass on competition for their own good may end up being the really inspirational story of this 2020(+1) Olympiad.

Your sex-box or mine?