When Your Worth Is Based on Your Medals

How athletes struggle with an achievement-centered view of personal value.

Reviewed by Margaret Foley

Key points

• Many athletes struggle with a sense of personal worth that's based on their wins and records.
• These athletes often grew up in settings where they were seen as instruments for acquiring gold medals.
• Treating athletes as "mere means to an end" is dehumanizing and can degrade self-worth and autonomy.

This post is part two in a series on the struggles of recovering athletes.

In my last post I talked about the loss of meaning, purpose, and sense of self that often plagues athletes upon their retirement. In this post, I consider another common theme of struggle for recovering athletes: the notion that their personal value is based on their achievements.

An Achievement-Centered View of Personal Value

One of the first things that emerges in conversations with athletes when we’re talking about what’s most important in their lives is their sense that their value as a human being is based on their wins, medals, or records. And this is precisely the root of one of the big crises of retirement. They worry: If I’m not winning anymore, what am I worth? What’s the point of my life? What makes me special?

As they explain this state of mind, athletes often tell stories of childhood coaches (and sometimes parents) who only praised them for their achievements and were hypercritical of them for every mistake. There was a conditional nature to the attention and care they were given growing up, sending the message that it is not who they are but what they do (and more specifically, the result of what they do in comparison to others) that is most important. Athletes internalize this message and adopt the notion that they are only worthy as people—and only worthy of love—when they win. Thus, they are stuck in the unstable and anxious predicament of having their personal worth rise and fall with the chaos of outcomes that are largely outside of their control.

When asked about other potential sources of personal value, like their thoughts, feelings, aspirations, perspectives, personality, creativity, character, courage, work ethic, way of being a friend, or just their unique and irreplaceable way of being themselves, many athletes say that those things were not recognized growing up, not considered interesting, or worse—they were silenced. “The focus was always on the results.” “We didn’t really have a voice.” “There was not a chance to express an opinion about anything or make our own choices.” “Nobody really knew me. Anything that was ‘me’ was pushed down.”

What mattered to coaches and often parents was performance: serving the goals and reputation of the team full-time, fulfilling expectations of glory, and getting results. The focus was on the destination, not the journey…and certainly not who was on that journey. Athletes were considered worthwhile in terms of their function on the team alone and continually under threat of being discarded if they did not fulfill that function. This was expressed in the popular coach’s mantra: “If you can’t get results, there are plenty of people waiting in line to take your place on the team.”

Treating Humans as “Mere Means to an End”

In discussions of ethics, philosophers might put it this way: These athletes were being treated as mere “means to an end.” That means they were treated merely as “instrumentally valuable,” rather than as “intrinsically valuable.” They were being used as mere tools to fulfill some other goal deemed more important than they were—more important than their own humanity.

This type of treatment is identified as a failure of morality in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. For Kant, morality demands that we treat and respect human beings as entities of absolute worth or as “ends in themselves,” not merely as instruments for some further purpose. It is, thus, a moral imperative that you “[a]ct in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means” (Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals).

These athletes, in being treated as “mere means to an end,” were treated as things, objects, or performance machines, not as people who are precious in their own right, whose well-being matters for its own sake, and who have a right to their own autonomy (i.e., their own self-governance in their thinking, judgments, actions, and pursuits).

Effects on Athletes’ Sense of Self-Esteem

The kind of dehumanizing treatment of young athletes that runs rampant in the culture of competitive sports has deeply damaging effects on athletes’ self-esteem. If the athlete who is treated as only instrumentally valuable does not win or makes a mistake, they feel worthless and like they have failed as a person.

You’d think that the other side of the coin of this mindset would be that they would feel self-affirmation and triumph when they succeed at performing better than their competition. But even gold-medal winners confess that they have trouble enjoying their win. They sense they will face criticisms about some flaw in their performance, return to being a tool for the next competition deemed "the most important thing," or be discarded in favor of a younger athlete.

It’s common for athletes to internalize and accept the message that they’re worthwhile only as an instrument to fulfill some external goal, and to end up treating themselves as a means to an end as well. They regularly become willing to sacrifice themselves—their mental and physical well-being, their deeper values, their autonomy—on the altar of some golden trophy because they’ve also come to believe that’s all they’re good for.

After retirement, athletes who grew up in such an achievement-focused culture often become hyper-comparative and competitive over the littlest details of life. They might be unable to stop sizing themselves up against those around them (even over mundane things), or feel paralyzing embarrassment if they think they might appear “less than” their peers when trying something new. They may seek out a coach surrogate who will use them to achieve new external goals (like profit or reputation). And they may have difficulty building friendships based on care, love, and trust because they cannot stop worrying that everyone is judging them or believing they are interesting only for their use-value.

There’s Another Way

In my conversations with athletes, I often ask them to describe (or imagine) a different training situation: one in which they feel recognized as whole human beings and are valued for who they are.

One client spoke of an assistant coach that she and her teammates truly respected. He showed that he was proud of the team for working hard and supporting each other, even if they didn’t win. He was concerned if they were injured, exhausted, or dealing with fear, and cared if there was a problem going on at home or at school. He talked with the team (not at them). He asked and took questions, and he gave good advice about how to think about challenges, nerves, and disappointments. He could come up with alternatives when a member of the team was struggling with a skill. The athletes felt secure in their value around this coach; they could talk to him and knew they would be taken seriously. He included them in decision-making, and they felt seen and heard. Ultimately, the head coach became jealous of his relationship with the team, believing it undermined his authority, and moved him to another group.

Here’s the thing: There are coaches out there who value and respect athletes as full human beings (and not as mere instruments). They are able to see athletes as complex persons and (if the athletes are still quite young) as autonomous individuals in the making. The first sign of such a coach? They collaborate with athletes, and they do it in such a way that cultivates the development of the athletes’ own thoughts, values, goals, character traits, effort, voice, choice, and creativity—all of which they prioritize above winning. Putting these coaches in leadership positions can go a long way toward humanizing sports and preparing athletes to be secure in their own value and their choices.