When should we stop fighting?
Kamila Valiyeva and Eteri Tutberizde looped through my head all week. I couldn't stop thinking about the dangers of "never give up" guidance.
I was a figure skater for over a decade – longer than I’ve been a teacher – and this week, those twin interests converged. Russian teenager Kamila Valiyeva tested positive for a banned substance last week, and the IOC’s decision to allow her skate essentially sucked all of the joy out of everyone’s favorite every-four-years athletic event (credit to Kaori Sakamoto, though, who dazzled us despite it all). Since the quality of Wordle declined immediately after the NYT takeover, I found myself filling every spare waking moment tracking the messy evolution of the doping backstory.
The short version of the story: it really seems like there’s no way that Valiyeva’s coach, Eteri Tutberidze, isn’t entirely responsible for the cheating.
Moreover, it’s pretty clear that she’s generally a life-ruiner. At the risk of ruining your day, I encourage you to scroll through the Twitter page I linked above: it details the Karolyi-esque cocktail of starvation/puberty blockers/overtraining/verbal abuse combination that’s “built” the success of current champions Valiyeva, Trusova, and Scherbakova, along with the countless other teenagers (girls specifically) who’ve dominated the Olympics and World Championships in the sport across the last decade. A litter of other girls and boys, bursting like supernovas – bright at 14, retired by 19 – never even make it onto the international stage.
Across the last few days, the media has captured a few astonishing images:
Valiyeva entering the rink unaccompanied, wearing a black knitted hat pulled over her entire face;
Trusova screaming (in Russian; wish I spoke it) at her coach that she “hates this sport”;
Scherbakova, the erstwhile Olympic champion, sitting alone in the Kiss + Cry (where athletes learn their final scores) entirely alone, without a coach or companion, to celebrate, because her coaches are off-screen berating her teammates.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
I’m not much of an empath; aside from a classic victory story, I don’t get emotional while watching television in general, and when I do, they’re usually positive emotions (like when I saw this video for the first time). Watching this event, though, and then returning to school each day to talk and joke and encourage and coach my own fifteen-year students, I became emotional. I can’t stop thinking about the moment when Tutberidze asked Valiyeva, after falling in a long program performed after a week under the sudden scrutiny of every publication in the world: “why did you stop fighting?”
I don’t know what it means to coach Olympic figure skaters, and I hesitate to tell people how to do their jobs, because I hate when people try to tell me how to do mine. But I have coached competitive athletes, taught outstanding students. I’ve been taught by incredible teachers, coached by great coaches. I’ve also been coached by bad coaches, coaches whose approaches to me profoundly (and negatively) impacted my health and belief in myself for years after. Between reading, learning from mentors, and witnessing my own experiences, I’ve noticed some general truths about working with kids. Tutberidze flouts them all.
My minds as a teacher, as a former athlete, and as a figure skating fan converge here: there is a time to stop fighting. As adults in kids’ lives, it’s our job to help kids identify that time.
Though I’m wary of media generalizations about teenagers, I do find that the two stereotypes about teenagers that I often find floating around the zeitgeist are useful, not because they’re accurate but because they help to frame our more complex reality. In the media, adolescents are either apathetic and disengaged, totally unwilling to push themselves, or they’re anxious and riled up, unwilling to ever pull back from the best possible effort. In reality, the former certainly exist, but they’re usually not totally apathetic. They’re just completely uninterested in pushing themselves in the areas that their families would prefer they do. The latter also exist, but usually, one encounters hyperanxious kids who aren’t pushing themselves that hard, but whose crippling anxiety is actually impeding their ability to act. And, of course, as I name these gradations to the binary, I think of myriad other variations on the theme that complicate my own descriptions.
Particularly in cultures – not only national cultures, like the United States or Russia, but also communities or schools – which purport to value hard work and merit, it can seem that hard work is king and hypermotivation is ideal. Part of what feel so offensive about the Valiyeva case is that it upsets this idea that absolutely dazzling, best in our lifetime (I actually said this about her! Last week!) labor and achievement is grounded on cheating and abuse. It’s like finding out that people in the United States have less social mobility than people in most other developing nations. It deflates our idea that if I just don’t stop fighting, I’ll make it happen.
As a teenager, I believed that hard work was all that mattered. I clung to sports, like rowing, which seemed to allow for an almost direct relationship between the work I put in – working out for three or four hours in a day, restricting calories to lose weight – because they affirmed this belief that I could completely control my destiny. As an adult, I’ve learned that life never allows us to do everything we can to the best of our ability, and that the illusion of meritocracy hurts both me and those around me more than it helps. For highly motivated people – people who, like me, so yearn to be special – the earlier we learn to lay off the always-fighting, the better; if the adults in our lives direct us to calm down a bit, they’re doing us a service, because they’re fostering a realistic vision of what work means rather than perpetuating a fantasy. Alexandra Trusova caused a scene at the awards ceremony after the women’s event because she could not understand why her record-breaking five quadruple jumps didn’t earn her a gold medal; she’d been told that if she just did more, just kept fighting, she would get what she wanted. The adults in her life fostered a simplistic narrative of what success and work should mean, and she sacrificed her childhood for the moment she would learn that narrative was incomplete.
Figure skating doesn’t really draw people who aren’t highly motivated. I mean competitive figure skating here, not the kind of skating that I did when I was young, the kind better suited to kids who, like me, weighed more and were taller than most Olympic gold medalists by fourth grade. Anyone who’s worked with kids dead-set on attending Harvard, landing a record deal, or even just winning a state championship know what it’s like to work with a kid who’s conditioned to fight. There’s no single profile. The reasons could come from anywhere. Who even knows how Valiyeva, Trusova, Scherbakova got into figure skating? Who really seems to care? As a person who works with teenagers, I know that some kids need encouragement to fight. The ones who don’t need that encouragement need our encouragement to stop.
When a kid’s life is already torn apart – when her body is falling apart, when her parents sleep a thousand miles away, when her competitors and role models refuse to acknowledge her – she doesn’t need to fight. My bet? The guilt of knowing that, if she made the podium, no skaters would receive a medal weighed so heavily that Valiyeva threw the event on purpose. Perhaps Tutberizde believes that Valiyeva will regret not pretending that nothing was happening to her while her vision of herself, her work, and her life crumbled around her. As a person who works with teenagers under even a modicum of parallel pressure – the expectations of extraordinarily wealthy and powerul parents, for example, or the expectations parents who’ve sacrificed financial security to send their children to a private school – I’d be horrified by that logic.
My acting career lasted about as long as my figure skating career did. In the seventh grade play, Twelfth Night, I played Malvolio, and I recited – uncomfortably – the following line: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. I didn’t identify, even then, with the first part or the last; rather, I thought that the middle part was all I could lean upon. People like Tutberidze, like all of us, wager so hard on the middle part of the trinity that they forget about the other parts. It’s the responsibility of adults to remind kids that our achievements don’t just come from our ability to fight.
Ultimately, this isn’t my story. As a teacher, though, and a person whose days are filled with fifteen-year-olds, I’ve started to see that, in a way, it is. Certainly, most kids who I know could push themselves harder. But for all but a very few kids, complete apathy isn’t the issue: often, kids want to achieve but don’t know how, or they want to work hard, but not at what their parents or teachers want them to work hard at. With very few exceptions, our conversations shouldn’t be about fighting harder – they should be about fighting differently, fighting more strategically, fighting more conscientiously. Kids – especially the high-achieving kind – feel powerless much more often than they feel powerful, hopeless much more than they feel hopeful. There’s no pleasure in watching people – our kids, our star athletes, our friends, our peers – grimace through their days the way that Valiyeva grimaced through her short program on Monday morning.
It’s not that we should never push our kids, our friends, or ourselves – it’s that those pushes must always have limits. If our pushing is grounded in a delusion – the delusion of pure meritocracy – then it appears unbounded. If our pushing is grounded in care – the recognition that Malvolio’s words are timeless – then those who we push (including ourselves) know that we don’t have to always say yes, never back down. The way to success isn’t a perpetual “yes.” And we don’t have to cheat.
Tutberidze has cast bad coaching, bad teaching into the light. She’s shown us what a world of mentorship and guidance thrown off balance looks like. I leave this week’s skating reminded of this: that tangible measures of “success” as a teacher often measure success when we’ve actually failed kids, and that perceived failures can, perhaps, be successes. This moment gives us a chance to consider the implication of our imbalanced ambitions and our misplaced guidance. It gives us a chance to step back from our kids, and even ourselves, to see what we already know: that winning isn’t everything.