After Naomi Osaka exited Wimbledon on Friday losing in the third round to Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, the 27-year-old tennis star took a familiar seat behind the podium, answering tough questions about the circumstances of her loss.
Osaka has made her aversion to post-match press conferences quite clear throughout her career, being incredibly candid about her struggles with mental health and the toll answering questions in such a public forum takes on her emotionally. She displayed that candidness once again after her loss on Friday.
“I’m just going to be a negative human being today,” Osaka shared. “I’m so sorry, like, I have nothing positive to say about myself which is something I’m working on. I think, yeah, I mean, it was my daughter’s birthday, so I was happy about that this week. But other than that, it’s just today I’m just constantly replaying the match now.”
In a moment of professional disappointment, Osaka told everyone exactly how she was feeling. It’s the type of answer that humanizes pro athletes and allows fans sitting at home to empathize with what they’re going through. It’s the type of answer that has helped Osaka become such a popular and beloved figure in women’s tennis.
But she has grown upset with how the media is portraying her. In her view, outlets like ESPN cherry pick these moments to amplify to their wider audience. And now, that wider audience only sees her as sad and upset because ESPN fails to share her moments of positivity and joy.
“Bro why is it every time I do a press conference after a loss the espns and blogs gotta clip it and put it up. Wtf, why don’t they clip my press conferences after I win? Like why push the narrative that I’m always sad?” Osaka wrote on social media shortly after her press conference clip went viral. “Sure I was disappointed a couple hours ago, now I’m motivated to do better. That’s human emotions. The way they clip me I feel like I should be fake happy all the time,” she wrote in a subsequent post.
Osaka is probably right. Outlets could likely do a better job of showing all sides of an athlete, not just the side that already fits with the prevailing narrative surrounding that athlete. Surely most sports media outlets are guilty of this.
But it’s also difficult to fault ESPN for sharing a heartfelt answer a famous athlete gave at a press conference. If that answer wasn’t something Osaka wanted to share with the world, she shouldn’t have said it in front of the press.
So while her frustration is understandable, it’s easy to see why outlets chose to amplify Osaka’s remarks. They were raw. Sports fans love raw emotion, and it’s not something that all athletes give. But if Osaka perceives the media only highlighting her lowest moments and ignoring her during times of success, that’s a recipe for her to withdraw and become less open with the press. In that case, no one ends up a winner.