NBC, which made the Tokyo Olympics the "Simone Biles Games," seems oblivious to its role in her exit

https://slate.com/culture/2021/07/simone-biles-nbc-olympics-gymnastics-attention-pressure-responsibility.html

During NBC's coverage of Simone Biles' withdrawal this week, the network has ignored "the role it may have played in creating the conditions for Biles’ sudden exit," says Justin Peters. "As per its cyclical mandate to give casual American sports fans one or two big-name U.S. Olympians for whom to root, NBC has effectively turned the Tokyo Games into the Simone Biles Games. In the run-up to the Olympics and during the first few days of competition, you could hardly visit any NBC-branded property without encountering some sort of coverage of Biles, her chances for matching or exceeding her memorable Rio performance, and her uncharacteristic stumbles in the Olympic trials and in the qualifying rounds. The American gymnastics squad is filled with immensely talented and likable athletes. As far as NBC is concerned, though, there’s Simone Biles, and then there’s all these other people who just happen to be on her team." Peters adds: "As the leading promoter of the Olympics in the U.S., it is a bit rich for NBC to report on the psychological pressures faced by Biles without also reflecting on the ways in which its choice to make Tokyo the Simone Games surely intensified those pressures. It’d be sort of like if your boss announced to an auditorium filled with your co-workers that the fate of the company was riding on your work output, and then took you aside to sympathetically observe that you looked stressed, and that the key to happiness was a healthy work-life balance. While I cannot blame NBC for featuring Biles as its star attraction, the network ought to be able to candidly assess and admit the ramifications of its own wall-to-wall coverage. Simone Biles made herself a champion. NBC tried to make her into a superhero. The fact that she chose to reject the cape should prompt a reevaluation of the process by which it was sewn for her in the first place. The job of creating quadrennial TV sports heroes isn’t an easy one. The discontinuous nature of the Olympics means that casual fans don’t have many opportunities to develop deep rooting interests in most of the sports therein. As such, most people really do rely on NBC and its affiliates to curate a roster of superstars to cheer for and complain about. This is the reason why NBC focuses so intensely and unflinchingly on five or six people each games. With only two-and-a-half weeks to work with, the network needs to go overboard drumming it into your head that these are the people to watch. For the people being watched, though, this sudden, inescapable pressure and attention can be an incredibly alienating experience. Unlike basketball, football, and baseball players in the United States, elite Olympic athletes like Biles do not exist under a continuous microscope. Outside of their sports’ superfans, most Americans watch them intensely for a couple of weeks every four years, and then basically don’t think about them unless they appear in a Subway commercial or their sport makes the news for its abusive practices. We put all this pressure on them to perform, and then feign confusion when they cite all that pressure as the reason why they didn’t perform."