Olympic swimmer Rebecca Adlington, shown here on Aug. 16, 2008, with the gold medal she won in the women's 800-meter freestyle in Beijing, is the latest Twitter quitter to give up on social media during intense competition. Photo: Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press
Olympic freestyle swimmer Rebecca Adlington’s decision to cut ties with the Twitterverse during the Summer Olympic Games so she can avoid morons and trolls is an increasingly common decision by elite athletes who find it necessary to unplug during high-level competition.
The 23-year-old Briton, who won two gold medals in Beijing and is expected to repeat her performance in London, says she simply doesn’t want to deal with the stress and distraction of negative comments — which typically have little to do with her performance in the pool — and the impact they have on her psyche.
“The messages of support are amazing but you do have the chance of someone saying something that is going to be annoying,” Adlington, who could not be reached for comment, told The Guardian. “You don’t want that added stress. You don’t want to be thinking about that. I think I will just Tweet once it is over.”
Adlington, who has 50,232 followers, says the problem isn’t criticism of her performance, but her looks. “It’s just nasty comments about things I can’t control,” she said.
Adlington is but the latest high-profile Twitter quitter who’s abandoned social media to hunker down at crunch time. Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers shunned Twitter for the duration of last season, and LeBron James and Dwayne Wade of the Miami Heat have signed off during the playoffs.
Athletes are closer than ever to their fans, who expect — and sometimes demands — direct and frequent engagement. It can be stressful, sports psychologists said, and distracting enough for an athlete to go dark.
“It just feels like another pressure, another constituency that you need to respond to,” said Dr. Bob Corb, director of the sports psychology program at UCLA. “Athletes are already responsible for their coaches, their team, their family, and now this virtual family.”
Anyone, even someone so self-assured as a two-time Olympic gold medalist, can be thrown off by personal insults. But Tweets and comments need not be negative to take a toll. The pressure of having every move scrutinized, positively or negatively, can be overwhelming, Corb said. Many respond by retreating from the Internet entirely. Some go so far as to stop reading or watching the news or tuning into sports radio.
“Adlington sounds like a really psychologically-minded athlete, so for her own self-confidence she doesn’t want to see or hear anything negative,” Corb said. “In this case, filtering out messages is probably a positive thing.”
The pressure can be so extreme, Corb said, that it isn’t unusual to see entire teams sequester themselves from the Internet before major events like the World Cup or the Olympics.
However, the ability of the Internet in general and social media in particular to become a stressor before and during competition depends upon the athlete in question. Some get a charge out of it, drawing inspiration from anything and everything people say. Oklahoma City Thunder guard James Harden has tweeted throughout the playoffs and seems to thrive on the community he’s built.
“An upside of being connected is the positive feedback, simple as that,” said Kay Porter, author of The Mental Athlete and a sports psychologist who has worked with many Olympic hopefuls. “It’s like someone virtually cheering for you. You know that people care about you and what you do.”
Still, she said, it’s easy to see why Adlington might tune out the background noise and focus on the task at hand.
“I know a lot of people who just don’t read anything about themselves,” Porter said. “You’d be best off not to read your own press. It’s stimulus overload, and you don’t want that while you’re preparing for the Olympics.
