The Odd Anguish of the Silver Medallist

Why comparing ourselves unfavorably to others undermines the happiness we can find in our actual achievements.

It’s been an amazing year of sport. With the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo - and now the Winter Games in Beijing - we've been served up plenty of inspirational stories of skill, determination, and bravery.

And when I say “bravery”, I don’t just mean the physical courage required to launch yourself full speed down a ski slope or leap from the 10-meter diving board.

Many of the young athletes in these competitions have also bravely opened up about the emotional stresses and strains of competing in sports at the highest level in front of a global audience.

The gifted gymnast Simone Biles withdrew from a number of events, saying that her “body and mind are simply not in sync”. That decision was one of the most pivotal of her career, she would later write. She was proud of “having the courage to take care & put myself first. 16 yr old Simone would never.”

While few of us can hope to replicate the incredible physical feats of sports stars like Simone, I think we can all learn something from these amazing individuals about happiness. So I've written some articles on the theme.

In this newsletter I want to focus on the “Silver Medal” effect.

Olympians and Paralympians compete to see who is the best in their discipline in the entire world. Only the best in each country reach their national teams, and only the best of these make it through the heats to the finals. And we end up with the very best three competitors standing on a podium to receive their bronze, silver and gold medals in recognition of their achievement.

The odd thing is that in terms of relative happiness – it’s not as simple as the gold medallist being the most elated and the bronze medal holder being the saddest of the three. The silver medal winner – the person in the middle – is often visibly the least happy.

Weird, right? They just proved they were better at their chosen sport that virtually everyone on the planet… and yet they’re less pleased than the person they beat into third place.

There are lots of Olympic anecdotes to back this up. In 2012, Team USA gymnast McKayla Maroney pulled a face of utter disgust when a silver medal was hung around her neck. Her grimace of annoyance was so extreme that it was used in countless online memes.

Canadian hockey star Jocelyne Larocque was so upset with coming second at the 2018 Winter Olympics that she refused to wear her silver medal – despite the angry crowd chanting “put your medal on”.

“I was disappointed with the outcome of the game, and my emotions got the better of me,” she later said.

The great Olympic rower Katherine Grainger has perhaps most eloquently explained the anguish of coming second. In 2008, she sobbed on the podium after narrowly being beaten into second place. She said the experience was like a “bereavement” and considered leaving the sport altogether.

“It was a crushing disappointment, like suffering a massive personal loss. I had to go through a huge grieving process.”

Katherine stuck with rowing though and triumphed at the London Games of 2012 in front of her home crowd.

So if this misery is so acute for silver medallists, surely bronze medal winners have an even rougher time… well, no. Several scientific studies have compared the facial expressions of the winners and runners up in Olympic competitions – and the athletes in third place are visibly happier than the people who came second.

One of the most famous of these studies was carried out by Tom Gilovich, a professor of psychology at Cornell University. He thinks that silver medallists often fixate on how they narrowly missed out on gold… and regretfully ruminate on what they could have done differently to have achieved victory in this alternative reality.

Bronze medal winners, Tom thinks, aren’t so tempted to think about overall victory – a gold medal was a few steps away. And many feel lucky just to be on the podium… if things had gone slightly differently, they’d have had no medal at all. They’re in a mood to celebrate and enjoy their achievement.

What I take away from Tom’s research and the experiences of silver medallists is that we have to be super careful about how we frame our achievements and compare them to the achievements of those around us.

We all fall prey to reference points – we often look at our grades, our careers, our salaries, our vacations, and our social lives and compare them unfavorably with people we perceive as doing better than us. We are left feeling self-critical and wrongly assume that we can only be happy once we upgrade to a bigger apartment or a faster car.

We can forget the importance of being grateful for the things we have achieved – and overlook the fact that many, many people would be overjoyed to be in our shoes.

Stay safe,

Laurie