Lessons to be learnt after the awful treatment of Elise Christie on social media

17 February 2014 03:23

Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ social media has become a huge part of our personal lives, business and our news. We are surrounded by it. It’s used to get reunited with old friends, meet new people, to play games and to keep up with those you wish to.

Athletes whom are under so much intense pressure by those around them and what they put on themselves, the last thing they need are distractions and social media is growing to becoming more of a problem between every competition.

Social Media can be great, we saw in London, with the riots how people used all sorts of ways to communicate to organise clean-up efforts. When social media is used for good, it brings back hope in such horrific situations.

When social media turns against you though, it can develop at an extreme pace and hit closer to home more than ever. We've seen how with the example of Tom Daley in the Olympics receiving extreme abuse, some relating to his late father after the doubles event because he didn't end in a medal position as anticipated. People are fast to react and criticise when sports men and women don't reach expectation. A similar type of disgusting behaviour has risen again with Elise Christie, a Great British Speed-Skater in the Sochi Winter Olympics. In her first race (500m), she was disqualified after she crashed into Arianna Fontana of Italy and Park Seung-Hi of South Korea on Thursday and then again on Saturday in the 1500m, she had a DNF (Did not finish) after she crossed the line a centimetre wide, being ruled as off track. After the race she explained to BBC television that she'd received abuse on twitter before the event, mostly believed to originate from South Korea due to her crashing into Park Seung-Hi who ended up with bronze from her disqualification and has had to, after some deliberation with her GB team to take down her account.

I would admit after I heard Christie had been penalised again I was like "oh no, how has she done it again" but this is sport, it can be unpredictable and just because you’re believed to be the best, doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed that. Obviously in this situation, most of the abuse is from an opposition’s country but it’s that same process of thinking negative thoughts and feeling the need to express them in such a way. It helps no one it just destroys another human beings mental state and looks badly on whoever has written the tweet or post. She had already been penalised for the incident and didn’t deserve anymore pain or grief, it should’ve ended there.

Controlling these sites is extremely difficult, due to freedom of speech. This minority group need to realise athletes can be effected by their failures and they know better than anyone how they should be performing. They don’t need any more destructive criticism. It's awful that Christie has had to deal with such abuse and not only that it has clearly affected her confidence in a sport she’s extremely good at. Hopefully now she’s closed her account and still got one more event to go, she will be able to gain some confidence back and come back fighting.

To a point though we all do it from time to time, shout at the television because a player hasn’t done this or that. What we need to learn as a society is that sometimes you need to just take a moment to think, we are all human and to get the best out of people is belief. If you feel extremely strongly about a player’s performance or a disappointing result, we need to learn to be constructive about our criticism and not to release it straight away as we can so easily with our smart phones. The only way we can get proper control is the people using the service and put the sword to this behaviour, to lessen and rid of it.

Social media can be fantastic, it allows you to be closer and support those who you idolise and be able to interact much more with sports athletes, whom in modern times tend to live in a sporting bubble. At the moment hate is all too quick from being just round the corner and becomes way too personal when it doesn’t need to be. The moment we have more respect for others and stop and think before pressing send, to know our words have an impact on others then we might see this disgusting behaviour to be further singled out and see some change for the good.

Source: DSG