Screen & Roll: ‘The Weight of Gold’ and the state of mental health in athletics
This week we discuss the new HBO Sports documentary “The Weight of Gold,” which focuses on mental health issues faced by Olympic athletes. Through one-on-one interviews, you hear from some of the most accomplished and visible athletes in the world including Michael Phelps, Apolo Ohno and Lolo Jones, who discuss the mental health challenges that they have dealt with as athletes.
Aidan Berg: I had my qualms about this documentary, but I’m going to start with what I thought was the best and most impactful aspect: the brutality of the interviewees’ answers. “The Weight of Gold” features a ton of star power with former Olympians Michael Phelps (who also narrates — I’ll get to that later), Apolo Ohno, Shaun White, Gracie Gold and others. So their words about depression, not getting the help they needed and not being paid carry even more significance.
Lauren Mattice: There’s definitely some sort of … I don’t know whether to call it a confrontation or something else? Like these athletes are the ones we grew up watching, adoring and emulating before I think most of us understood mental health in a more introspective way. And as I was watching, I took a second to think, “Where do I know them from?” Like, it was never outside the context of sports or product endorsements, and that erased a lot of humanity from them. I remember a whole segment at the height of Phelps’ career where the commentators described why his body was made specifically for swimming, listing off measurements of his wingspan and leg strength, and I might as well have been hearing someone describe a robot athlete.
AB: I also saw some issues with the cast, though. Firstly, it’s virtually all white athletes, which feels really wrong. And while the notoriety of every interviewee does add something, it also erases some of the impact of the message. Yes, even the biggest stars go through a lot of horrible experiences, but what about the U.S. athletes who never even make it that far? There was a point when Ohno was talking about how no one cares if you don’t win a gold, and if you don’t medal you’re practically worthless; the entire time I was thinking “I’d like to hear about this from the perspective of someone who isn’t the most decorated Winter Olympic athlete in U.S. history.” And I think it’s a larger issue with the film: The subjects have received so many accolades that it’s hard to relate at times.
LM: You’re right, it is incredibly and painfully white. Going back to this idea of humanizing athletes again, this whole documentary ignores aspects of mental health related to racism and bigotry. Take Fox News executive vice president John Moody’s column talking point that he wrote ahead of the 2018 Winter Games: “Unless it’s changed overnight, the motto of the Olympics, since 1894, has been ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger.’ It appears that the U.S. Olympic Committee would like to change that to ‘Darker, Gayer, Different.’ If your goal is to win medals, that won’t work.” I think almost every athlete would prove that wrong. These aren’t competitions to just be won, they are culminations of hard work, failure, commitment and tenacity that are inextricably linked to identity and mental health — and this doc definitely failed to highlight that.
AB: I thought the best question raised in the film was the “Now what?” that comes about following an Olympics. It spoke more to me than the idea that the hard and singularly-focused work Olympians do really affects them later in life because you have to work hard if you want to do anything impactful in this world. But the idea that all those years of work could come down to about 40 seconds and then after that, even if you accomplished your goal, everything else seems to lose significance because you’ve already been at the mountaintop. That is more specifically applicable to Olympians who only get their shot every four years.
LM: That’s tough to contend with because personally, I’m not an Olympian and I can’t ever be in their shoes. What do you do? You can’t say “Well why don’t you do something else?” because they’ve been working up to that moment for years (not that they don’t have other projects going on simultaneously that fulfill them). I will think this answer or this concept can be revealed with the addition of karate, surfing and skateboarding to the Summer Olympics lineup. They’re sports that in some shape or form focus on longevity and carry an additional recreational component that can live beyond competition.
AB: There are a few filmmaking things I want to get your thoughts on, Lauren. The first is the creepy piano music and slow-mo black and white shots of Phelps spliced throughout the film. I know we’re dealing in serious subject matter, but that made it feel like a horror movie or something, and I didn’t really think it jived with the rest of the doc. I also thought Phelps’ narration was pretty awkward and clunky at times, although he was better in those talking-head interviews. I think he hit his stride more at the end when he was talking about his own journey and about the trend of Olympian suicides, but it was hard for me to get into it at the beginning.
LM: I was thinking the same, like why would you want to go with the dreadful and morbid approach to issues of mental health, like seriously? Depression manifests in myriad ways for different people, and this framing seemed to brush it with one general stroke. I can’t decide whether it worked as well for the portrayal of Steven Holcomb and Jeret Peterson’s lives. Those sorts of formal decisions should, and I hope were, approved and made by their family and friends. You’re asking a lot of these athletes to speak candidly about their very private experiences, but complete despair was not the thread to connect them.
AB: I know one of the complaints reviewers had was that the hourlong run time was too short to deal with such complex and important subject matter, and I think this film could have solved a lot of its issues if it was longer. They could have included a more diverse array of athletes and they could have given more time to the specific changes they’d like to see made. If I’m being honest, this felt like I was being bludgeoned over the head with repeated tragic stories without much resolution about how it could be fixed, and while providing a platform for venting is worthwhile, I also would have liked to hear more about ideas for improvement from people who experienced first-hand how problematic the U.S. Olympic culture is.
LM: It felt a lot like the only way the creators thought we could relate to these athletes or feel sorry for them was to be inundated with stories of their trauma, and that is so, so tired. We’ve seen it especially for athletes of color outside of the Olympics for professional drafting and such, and frankly, though Phelps is one of the executive producers on this project, I don’t think that framing was thought through enough, if at all. “Now what?” Yes! Now what! The opportunity was there to discuss it, and if there isn’t another follow-up to this or some other type of media that addresses this question, it might be lost in other media coverage for a long time to come.
Aidan Berg and Lauren Mattice are seniors writing about sports culture and entertainment. They are also the deputy outreach director and digital managing editor of the Daily Trojan, respectively. Their column, “Screen & Roll,” runs every other Monday.