‘The Weight of Gold,’ ‘Athlete A’ and How the USA is Failing Olympians

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics were supposed to start this week. Thousands of athletes from every corner of the world were going to compete for the chance of eternal glory, but now those dreams are deferred for at least a year. So is the pain of a post-Olympics letdown that has reached epidemic-level. As HBO’s new hour-long documentary The Weight of Gold illustrates, Olympians might have access to elite physical training in their pursuit of medals, but they are bereft when it comes to their own mental health. Together, HBO’s The Weight of Gold and the Netflix doc Athlete A present a troubling peak into the mental anguish, financial pressure, and needless trauma inflicted upon Olympians. It’s hard to watch both films and not feel that the USA is failing its Olympians.

When The Weight of Gold premieres on HBO tonight, it will be the second devastating documentary about the rot secretly eating away at USA Olympics to debut this summer. Last month’s Athlete A delved into the horrific crimes of convicted sexual offender Larry Nassar and USA Gymnastics’ culpability in covering his atrocious crimes up. Athlete A focused on specifically on Maggie Nichols, a talented gymnast who rose to prominence alongside superstar Simone Biles. But after Nichols and her family flagged Nassar’s actions to USA Gymnastics, Nichols was coincidentally cut from the Olympics team. Athlete A is a horrific watch in part because it not only doesn’t shy away from vivid accounts of Nasser’s hundreds of crimes, but it ultimately proves that USA Gymnastics put the image of the brand and the opportunity to win gold medals ahead of the physical and mental safety of its athletes.

HBO’s The Weight of Gold may not feature a villain on the scale of Larry Nassar, but it still feels absolutely horrific. Produced and presented by Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time, it’s a haunting excavation of the psychological toll inflicted upon Olympians. As Phelps and his fellow spotlighted Olympians explain, it’s not just that there’s little attention given to the post-Olympics blues that afflicts them all, but USA Olympics has essentially nothing set up to support the mental health of athletes. And with few exceptions, the fiscal cost of training to an Olympic level puts an unwieldy level of stress on the athletes.

However, The Weight of Gold will get under your skin when the interviewed athletes describe in detail how the anomie of being an Olympian made it so impossible to cope with real life, many of them contemplated suicide. Figure skater Gracie Gold calls the problem an actual epidemic and Phelps even details his own suicidal ideation after a second DUI arrest. What hammers the problem home isn’t just a look back at the tragic death by suicide of beloved Winter Olympian Jeret Peterson, but the revelation that one of the interviewed athletes also died by suicide.

While Athlete A is roiling with a sense of righteous fury, there’s an urgent desperation to The Weight of Gold. Phelps has assembled a list of some of the most famous faces to compete at the Olympics in the last two decades along with lesser known sports stars. Together they form of a chorus of dread. All of them, including the most illustrious of their set, have felt let down by the same system designed to put them on top of a podium. The Weight of Gold is not a nuanced work of art, but an alarm bell going off. At some point, the Olympics — which were designed by 19th century scholars and society folk to be a mix of diplomatic shindig, amateur sporting event, and classic Greek nerd stuff — have become a corporate machine built for both greed and speed. It’s the athletes who literally devote their lives to these games who pay the highest cost.

Michael Phelps may be the most decorated Olympic athlete in history, but his greatest contribution to society is his devotion to spreading awareness about these mental health issues. Likewise, Athlete A‘s Maggie Nichols might have been robbed a ticket to Rio, but by speaking up about Nassar’s abuse, she created a paper trail that indicted USA Gymnastics, allowing hundreds of women to find justice.

Sports fans may be without the Olympics this summer, but that doesn’t mean that our Olympians should be ignored. If anything, The Weight of Gold and Athlete A serve as a call to action to fans and athletes alike. So long as the infrastructure in place is designed to a support a constant churn of gold medal-winners, the people who dedicate their lives in pursuit of this glory will be treated like chum. They’ll be torn up and thrown out, just to feed a beast that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

The Weight of Gold and Athlete A are both must-watch for sports fans. Difficult, harrowing, and devastating, they nonetheless show the human cost for all those shiny gold medals, corporate sponsorships, and national celebrations.

Watch Athlete A on Netflix

Where to stream The Weight of Gold