14 ms·

Olympic medal-winning cyclist Rebecca Twigg is homeless in Seattle

235 points by danso 8y ago

magic_beans 8y ago
Rebecca Twigg obviously has a mental health problem that contributed to her path to homelessness. Why wasn't that discussed?
heedlessly3 8y ago
Andrew Yang will help her out
rmykhajliw 8y ago
I suppose there's something strange with sport at all. Her story isn't unique, just look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verona_van_de_Leur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verona_van_de_Leur Amount of people in sports are much lower than in army, that's why we may not hear their stories, but it remembers me a problem with veterans. The same issue - it's hard for people people to adapt for a new life without extreme load. I really don't know the right answer. Teach them since start life is not only fighting, cycling, trainings ? there're something else external life ? But it's hard when your couch pushes you to your limits& I don't know.
readhn 8y ago
mental health problem or not - it is ABSOLUTELY INSANE that a decorated olympic champion, best in her class at the time, that represented this country and won multiple medals has to now live on the streets. This is what is wrong with America - we cant even take care of the very best of our own (after they cant help themselves anymore) but are quick to point out at other's people's/countries/nationalities problems.
mothsonasloth 8y ago
Great read. I have a "free spirit" in my family, a really gifted man who just couldn't settle. He's now in his 60s and does mosaics for people all around the UK. He doesn't own a house and is constantly staying with friends and family. He tried working in construction jobs and other things, settling with a family and buying a house. However after his divorce and other things he is most happy with his campervan conversion and parking it on offroads from motorways. I asked him once, "Uncle, why can't you stay in once place". To which he replied, "Why do you have to stay in one place with brick walls?". Another famous Olympian, Eddie the Eagle spent a few years homeless traveling for winter qualifiers for the Olympics.
- caymanjim 8y ago
  I'm the "free spirit" in my family. I regularly take months or even years off between jobs, travel a lot, and I've never wanted to own a home. Usually, I'm fortunate to earn enough between travel stints to pay my own way, but I still end up camping out with family for a few months every few years, after relocating from another state or country. If I didn't have family to lean on once in a while, I'd be forced to stick with jobs longer than I can usually stand to. I'm really not that far off from a situation like Twigg's, except that I can tolerate the office work a little better.
  - DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
    same here. I had to run all my life (both literally doing marathons and several ultras every year as well as moving to a new country every 3-5 years ... probably rooted in having to move every 2 years on avg as a child). I'm very sensitive to people on the edge. Mstly because I feel very much part of this edge. Reading Orwell's "Down and out in Paris and London" made me rethink homelessness. There is a lot of stigma around it and most people I know think this would never happen to them. All it takes is a couple of falls in their life, or events that are hard enough to upset what is a fragile balance. I think anyone (no matter the intelligence) could be sitting in the street without a roof, it has nothing to do with education, friends, or their intelligence, once life has just kicked them hard or long enough. Where I live right now (a former war zone full of people with PTSD from the Yugoslav war horrors) there are many homeless and even more close to the edge of it. Thankfully we have the dream of a EU membership making everything better for the people here, but which unfortunately does nothing for this places (other than create a massive brain drain that makes the situation even more precarious for those off-grid or those not wanting to be part of the system).
  - Allower 8y ago
    As someone who routinely has family "lean on" me, I can tell you its an incredibly disrespectful and foolish thing to do. Your inability to see how you effect your family is disgraceful. You want to be a fuck off who cant support himself thats your choice, but running back to family whenever things get tough is nothing short of childish and parasitic. get a fucking life
doe88 8y ago
I'm feeling for her. Finding the right work is never easy but it seems reconversion after pro-sport can be really tricky, especially for these sports where it's hard to earn enough to make a living. From all the examples I read through the years I got the impression that the least disrupting kind of reconversion in these cases is have the luck to find a way to somehow stay in your sport, trainer, or work in the federation or something like that, but of course easier said than done, you're certainly not alone with this simple idea, and of course I think it's even more difficult when you're a woman.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  >and of course I think it's even more difficult when you're a woman. // Would you mind explaining why? I'd imagine how difficult it is to move to the coaching/administration level was more a function of the particular sport? Are you thinking just about differences in the level of funding?
  - stevenwoo 8y ago
    Only in the past year has it become mandatory for women at an elite level of cycling to be paid a salary and it's less than beginning male pros who are just starting out. Probably less than a dozen women make over five figures a year. 95% of the advertising money in cycling is generated from the men's Tour de France. The organization that runs the Tour de France and a few other races, these are mostly for men with sometimes a day or two set aside for women's races. All the money gets generated by the men's events, gets poured back into creating men's events. For a different type of story, we could look at women's tennis. The cigarette brand Virginia Slims became the sponsor, the sport was televised, and the women started earning ballpark what the men were at least in prize money back in the 70's. It helped that there were few women at the top of tennis and they organized together. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Slims_Circuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Slims_Circuit There are a few superstars in cycling but the farm system or whatever you want to call it is full of potential riders to replace the current ones so it's too easy to get strike breakers if cyclists tried to do the same thing.
  - doe88 8y ago
harias 8y ago
>It was a far cry from winning medals for Twigg, and beyond that, she said the solitary nature of programming troubled her. I would like to know what HN thinks about the 'solitary' nature of programming? Isn't programming more or less a group endeavor now?
- wolfgke 8y ago
  > Isn't programming more or less a group endeavor now? It is still more solitary than many other jobs. On the other hand, I hate that it becomes more and more a group endeavor - I would love if it stayed much more solitary as in former days.
  - mothsonasloth 8y ago
    Agreed, Pair Programming is over-hyped as well as this new "mobbing" concept. It affects productivity and makes people who prefer to work by themselves unhappy.
    - plausibilities 8y ago
      Pair programming and mobbing are tools which may be appropriate for some situations. Unfortunately when tool use is mandated without applying critical thinking, it often results in a great deal of waste. Mandated collaboration is also very susceptible to abuse as it typically provides an additional layer of obfuscation to shield low performing leechers. High school group projects dialed up to 11.
    - tapland 8y ago
      Doesn't have to be pair programming. Just having two employees next to eachother working on different parts of the same project can make it a social workplace. If you aren't into it the other person will probably get the hint and not talk too much. I guess this is the overtraining hampering growth I've heard about as a kid. Being an olympic level athlete makes a lot of hormones to whack.
  - raverbashing 8y ago
jplayer01 8y ago
She sounds like a great person and I hope things work out for her. It's hard to find the right context for her without painting her in a bad light. Some people are eager to call her (or people like her) lazy, conveniently ignoring the fact that nobody really wants to live this way. Society as it is designed now doesn't know what to do with people like her, so they're either ignored or just given shelters and... That's it? Seems like a societal failing on some level.
- FakeComments 8y ago
  Can you point to a solution besides giving them shelter and just sort of tolerating it? I mean, there’s different mechanisms for shelter — family, public housing, NGOs, etc, and we can talk about how to tweak those knobs as a culture — but I can’t think of what else cultures have done, besides various levels of housing people who just want to float.
  - jplayer01 8y ago
    My comment implied that I'm not sure what else could be done or what should be done. I do feel it should be talked about. What are the root causes? What do these people actually need? What are they lacking? Who are they in the first place? Why are they where they are?
  - pnutjam 8y ago
    What about some sort of credit people could claim for housing a transient? Even if it's family, it takes a toll and relieves strain on the system.
- fulafel 8y ago
  Lazy people of course deserve housing too.
  - will_brown 8y ago
    You aren’t wrong. But I doubt the multi time world champion and multi time Olympic medalist is lazy.
tw1010 8y ago
"She took a break at age 26, and that year she grew an entire inch" What's that again? I've never heard of anyone growing after the age of 18.
- magic_beans 8y ago
  > I've never heard of anyone growing after the age of 18. Just because you haven't heard of something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
- emiliobumachar 8y ago
  That surprised me too, but, on second thought, elite athletic training is all about passing limits that apply to everyone else. It's not that weird that some of the unintended consequences are also unheard of in the general population.
- tapland 8y ago
  You can grow into your early twenties or so. Unlikely to grow after that even if administered extra HGH (human growth hormone). At age 26 it seems very weird!
- caymanjim 8y ago
  They make it sound like it was because she was burning fewer calories and had some left over to grow, but I don't think it works that way. My uneducated guess is that it's a posture thing; he spine probably stretched or relaxed in some way after she stopped spending her entire waking life hunched over pedaling.
  - alexsb92 8y ago
    While I'm not sure about this specific case, delayed growth due to intense exercising is a thing for gymnasts. https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(00)70094-1/fulltext https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(00)70094-1/fulltext
- DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
  it might just be coincidence since some kids still have a final push of growth with that age. But children pushed into extreme sports (or "voluntarily pushing themselves") often fail to grow. You can see this with ballet dancers who start too early or gymnasts starting too early.
majani 8y ago
"Olympic medal winner" is like a golden ticket in the fitness trainer industry. There's a lot of rich people who would be willing to pay over the odds to be trained by her.
- trabant00 8y ago
  She sounds like a person who would have a hard time fooling herself into taking the money. There's little if any good a professional athlete can do for regular person who wants to get/stay fit. She's good at taking health compromises to the extreme in exchange for performance. The exact opposite of what a regular person needs.
  - notahacker 8y ago
    The value of the personal trainer for the average person looking to get into slightly better-than-average shape is dispensing advice along pretty well-understood guidelines and helping them overcome their self-discipline issues, which is where speaking with the authority of an Olympian adds value even though the training regimes aren't going to be remotely similar. Of course, she might want to stay well away from her past career for other reasons, whether it's boredom, self-consciousness, frustration or a strong desire to draw a line under it (FWIW I know an Olympic medallist who made plenty of money from endorsements and speaking engagements and could probably have had a media career but had absolutely no desire to do that or become a trainer/ambassador after his retirement, choosing to became a builder's apprentice instead, because he liked the idea of building stuff rather than because he needed the money)
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      I knew a world class track athlete who also left the sport completely. To her it was something that parents and coaches had forced on her so she got out as soon as she could despite all the success.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    In general I agree with you but there are plenty of people who will pay big money to be trained by a gold medalist not because it makes sense but just for the title. The gold medalist then has to give the same advice every other trainer would give.
thrwoawer234af 8y ago
This is very interesting. I've always wondered about how tech jobs require endless preening and showing-off for what are often not exactly jobs that require a lot of intellectual ability. "You want a job in ML ? Yes, learn these absurd frameworks, publish a few papers in so-and-so conferences. Then we'll let you do some clickrate optimization for our website. " No wonder, tech in the US has a diversity problem. Not everyone wants to be this way.
- equalarrow 8y ago
  How is that a 'diversity' problem??
deleted 8y ago
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angel_j 8y ago
Homelessness is the tip of the housing iceberg. Right behind the homeless are those who are a paycheck, or emergency, from losing everything. Behind them are millions of paying out there earnings in high rent, forced to share apartments to live where the job pays. Fronting it all are upper-middle class people, foreign investors, and venture capital, buying up properties to rent out. The cause is not a lack of "affordable housing", it's a lack of housing, period. What's not affordable are regulations and competing with real estate capital. What's not affordable is spending most of your income on rent, and this is hardly a choice for most people right now. People will stare, and think, gosh this homeless situation is sad, inhumane, drugs/mental, w/e, but meanwhile, the shortage of housing and the affordability to create more is going to make it worse for everybody, especially those who are stuck in the middle with increasing rents and stagnant wages.
- readhn 8y ago
  The term "landlord" has to go away. We are not in mid-evil times anymore: 1. It should be made financially speaking prohibitively expensive to be a residential landlord. I.e. buy a house and charge others rent to live in it. Tax it at 100%. Done! 2. Change zoning/building codes to allow modern and more efficient construction, allow people to get easy financing to build more HIGH QUALITY and affordable housing. 3. Change mortgage laws to make it possible for more financially responsible families to build and own homes.
- equalarrow 8y ago
  "What's not affordable is spending most of your income on rent, and this is hardly a choice for most people right now." Not a choice? Don't you enter into a rental agreement via choice? I've never met anyone who's said they were forced to rent some place. I don't necessarily disagree with the housing shortage, but there's reasons for that. Look at state, local laws and nimby's that pass and influence local zoning restrictions. San Francisco is a perfect example of that process gone awry. Want affordable rent? Then you can still choose not to live in one of the areas that is anti-housing.
  - unethical_ban 8y ago
aladinator 8y ago
Great story. I kind of agree with many others here that it sounds like a mental health issue. But I also think that the story is more complicated than that. We shouldn't neglect the impact on the brain a professional sports career has. I've seen it many times. The amount of sacrifice and energy put into something like this leads to a very unbalanced lifestyle, which is usually encouraged from all sides (parents, coaches, friends). Most often, the only positive emotion athletes experience is that joy of achieving a goal, and this quickly starts becoming an addiction. Especially in sports where not a lot of money is involved, passion and perseverance play a huge role in personal motivation and these sports usually attract athletes that put everything on hold in their life for their minute in the spotlight. Unfortunately, only a minor fraction of athletes ends their career by choice. Usually, lack of success or injuries tend to force people to retire with unfinished business. This hits the "addicted" athlete very hard, and in an environment where it is generally not advisable to show weakness, can lead to severe mental health issues quickly. Speaking from personal experience, life is pretty dull after being forced to retire. I fell into a deep existential crisis, mostly because the thing that was responsible for most of the joy in my life wasn't even remotely fun anymore, even as a simple hobby. The fact that I knew I wasn't on top of my game anymore, and I am not investing 100% of my energy into improving made it a pretty dull experience. On top of that, most of my social environment was still connected to that sport, so I wasn't really able to walk away and focus entirely on something different. And even worse, everything else I tried felt meaningless, I felt like it wasn't worth it if I didn't invest 100% of my energy into something I was passionate about. For me, nothing compares to the joy of pursuing a passion and putting everything I have into it. Source: myself and plenty of my friends and competitors. And yes, I got some help and things are much better now.
- rograndom 8y ago
  A big part of it is not so much the joy of achieving a goal by winning, but instead it's more of relief that you didn't fail. The positive feelings from winning do not come close to offsetting the negative feelings from not winning, even if it's second place.
- leroy_masochist 8y ago
  > We shouldn't neglect the impact on the brain a professional sports career has. I think this is true in the abstract, but in this particular story, there's a lot more going on. She was a homeless teenager when she was discovered as a rider, and the article strongly implies that the only stable life she's ever known is racing. This isn't a Ryan Leaf-type story, where a talented athlete was pushed too hard by their parents, coaches, and teammates and ended up breaking under the pressure. I think Rebecca's circumstances are way more poignantly tragic. My heart goes out to her and I hope she gets the stability and peace she seems to be searching for.
mtw 8y ago
She won a medal which puts her at the top 1% but most athletes who go to Olympics or international championships don't win any medals but nevertheless have to through the same training and invest the same commitment. If she can't make it, it makes you wonder what happens to the rest who also saw their golden years pass by but without any medals or achievements to show off.
- tasuki 8y ago
  Well, if you worked hard, yet never won an Olympic medal, settling for a "boring" job might actually be easier.
  - heedlessly3 8y ago
    It just seems like if you can push yourself mentally and physically to be a world champion, then a mediocre office job is exponentially easier.
    - projektir 8y ago
      Idk, I don't think these things are so linear. I'm not sure what exactly is a "mediocre office job", but normal jobs require a different set of skills and priorities. Athletics benefit from a very singular focus, it's clear what you need to do and largely how to do it. If you're not good enough, it's generally made very clear pretty fast. There's often a huge network around you and lots of emotional reinforcement. Normal living and normal jobs are not so. The big difference being that your priorities are scattered and there's no clear item to focus on. Very easy to miss things and make a mistake. Jobs are full off odd negotiations and office politics and proving something is hard. It's not very clear where you are.
kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
> Twigg got an associate degree in computer science and became a programmer for a seaweed-products company in San Diego. She must be more experienced than most bootcamp grads. There must be jobs she can do in Seattle.
jawns 8y ago
Former editor here. This is a really interesting story, but if I were Greenstone's editor I would feel really conflicted about running it. There's the elephant in the room -- mental health. What did the reporter get on record? "She did not want to discuss mental health but feels it should be treated more seriously in Washington." Then there's her family. What did the reporter get on record? "Her immediate family in the Seattle area, including her 18-year-old daughter, declined interviews for this story." So now you have to weave a tale while dancing around the fact that she's likely got mental health issues that she won't talk about, and you've got important people in her life who also don't want to talk. I'm not saying the story is bad as-is. It's fascinating. But it feels like there's a lot missing.
- mindgam3 8y ago
  The elephant in the room isn’t “mental health” - it’s severe developmental trauma. As described in the article: “Twigg was still a child when she became homeless. A prodigy in academics and athletics, she started at UW at the age of 14... At this time, she was living in Seattle in a basement with her mother and sister. Twigg’s sister says their mom kicked Twigg out; Twigg remembers being offered the option to leave and taking it. She was a few months from turning 16.” I’m sorry, I don’t need to “weave a tale” about anything other than the fact that this person has been subject to abuse since childhood. And yeah, of course her family doesn’t want to talk. Nobody wants to talk about abuse in the family. If anything is missing, it’s our collective blind spot where we can read a story like this and make it about “mental health”. Until we get better as a society about recognizing clear signs of abuse, we won’t make a dent in these kinds of problems.
  - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    This! Anyone who has had any trauma informed care training would have zeroed in on this instantly.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  The article does detail a history of a head injury that required stitches. Most homeless people have either medical or mental health issues. The older I get, the more convinced I am that those two things are not so neatly separated.
exabrial 8y ago
> “Once you’ve done something that feels like you’re born to do it, it’s hard to find anything that’s that good of a fit,” Twigg says today. “Anything else that feels that way.” If she has a mental health issue, she should seek care. But if you take the above quote at face value (and likely out of context), then I would give her this advice to start building her life: "Flipping Burgers in not beneath your dignity" - Charles J. Sykes An entire generation has been romanticized that if you "do what you love" you'll end up a billionaire. The complete opposite is true. It requires doing thing you dislike, discipline, financial management, and focus on the correct things.
- jniedrauer 8y ago
  > An entire generation has been romanticized that if you "do what you love" you'll end up a billionaire. The complete opposite is true. The implication that flipping burgers will make you a billionaire is patently absurd. You should never feel ashamed about your work, but menial work in $current_year actually leads to poverty and hunger because it doesn't pay a living wage. An "entire generation" doesn't have illusions about how the world works. The 2008 recession was more than sufficient to dispel that. They just want food and shelter.
  - exabrial 8y ago
    That's a ridiculous exaggeration of my words. Flipping burgers will put a roof over your head, buy you some food, and give you a small amount of savings. From there you move up. Better education, better job, more savings.
    - jniedrauer 8y ago
      You said (paraphrased) "doing what you love will not make you a billionaire. The opposite is true. You should go flip burgers." This can either mean "doing what you love will make you poor. And also you should flip burgers" or "doing things you don't like will make you a billionaire." It's possible I misunderstood what you were saying, but whichever point you were trying to make, it's a patronizing extension of the typical boomer "millennials are entitled" refrain. > Flipping burgers will put a roof over your head, buy you some food, and give you a small amount of savings. None of these are true. I'm not sure when the last time you worked an entry level job like this was, but they haven't paid anything close to a living wage in a very long time.
koonsolo 8y ago
As a European, it always baffles me how normal it is in US to be homeless. Seems like it can happen to anyone during their life. A bit of bad luck and you're on the street. In Europe, there are so many safety nets that nobody should end up homeless. Some still do, but it's really a tiny minority compared to US. This is also one of the most surprising things I saw, the first time I went to the US: so many homeless people, everywhere. Even in small towns.
- stevenwoo 8y ago
  I do not know for certain, but it may be that homeless are easier to see in the USA (I have seen people living in tents/on sidewalk in sleeping bags on/under the onramp to the freeway in San Francisco/San Jose/San Diego which is still shocking), but the stats don't make the USA much worse than the UK/France/Germany/Netherlands from a quick sampling of western European nations. Of course how it's defined and how the stats were gathered are all important, but I've seen UK homelessness/rough sleeping discussed on the front page of the UK edition of The Guardian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_...
- xtracto 8y ago
  Even reading the comments in here sheds very interesting light: People discussing about why is the person homeless: Is it because of mental issues? is it because of laziness? is it because of bad luck? It doesn't matter! it should not matter. People should not be homeless, and the different safety nets should be agnostic of the reasons (otherwise you are catering only for the mental health issues, and you still have homeless drug addicts, or homeless bad-luck people).
pnathan 8y ago
Seattle is a rough place to try to jump into independent living. The entry level to normal housing is pretty high. I don't think there's a lot of onramps to doing that that don't involve years of training. Ms. Twigg is a very sad story, and I feel for her. Her story highlights the complexity of US homelessness: not drug addiction, not simple job loss, not simple mental health issues. Athletes in general have an issue exiting the athletic world, I've noticed. Where do you go when you leave the field and the lights are on for someone else? I hope Ms. Twigg gets the help she needs.

235 points by danso 8y ago

Rebecca Twigg obviously has a mental health problem that contributed to her path to homelessness. Why wasn't that discussed?

heedlessly3 8y ago

Andrew Yang will help her out

rmykhajliw 8y ago

I suppose there's something strange with sport at all. Her story isn't unique, just look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verona_van_de_Leur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verona_van_de_Leur Amount of people in sports are much lower than in army, that's why we may not hear their stories, but it remembers me a problem with veterans. The same issue - it's hard for people people to adapt for a new life without extreme load. I really don't know the right answer. Teach them since start life is not only fighting, cycling, trainings ? there're something else external life ? But it's hard when your couch pushes you to your limits& I don't know.

readhn 8y ago

mental health problem or not - it is ABSOLUTELY INSANE that a decorated olympic champion, best in her class at the time, that represented this country and won multiple medals has to now live on the streets. This is what is wrong with America - we cant even take care of the very best of our own (after they cant help themselves anymore) but are quick to point out at other's people's/countries/nationalities problems.

mothsonasloth 8y ago

Great read. I have a "free spirit" in my family, a really gifted man who just couldn't settle. He's now in his 60s and does mosaics for people all around the UK. He doesn't own a house and is constantly staying with friends and family. He tried working in construction jobs and other things, settling with a family and buying a house. However after his divorce and other things he is most happy with his campervan conversion and parking it on offroads from motorways. I asked him once, "Uncle, why can't you stay in once place". To which he replied, "Why do you have to stay in one place with brick walls?". Another famous Olympian, Eddie the Eagle spent a few years homeless traveling for winter qualifiers for the Olympics.

caymanjim 8y ago
I'm the "free spirit" in my family. I regularly take months or even years off between jobs, travel a lot, and I've never wanted to own a home. Usually, I'm fortunate to earn enough between travel stints to pay my own way, but I still end up camping out with family for a few months every few years, after relocating from another state or country. If I didn't have family to lean on once in a while, I'd be forced to stick with jobs longer than I can usually stand to. I'm really not that far off from a situation like Twigg's, except that I can tolerate the office work a little better.
- DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
  same here. I had to run all my life (both literally doing marathons and several ultras every year as well as moving to a new country every 3-5 years ... probably rooted in having to move every 2 years on avg as a child). I'm very sensitive to people on the edge. Mstly because I feel very much part of this edge. Reading Orwell's "Down and out in Paris and London" made me rethink homelessness. There is a lot of stigma around it and most people I know think this would never happen to them. All it takes is a couple of falls in their life, or events that are hard enough to upset what is a fragile balance. I think anyone (no matter the intelligence) could be sitting in the street without a roof, it has nothing to do with education, friends, or their intelligence, once life has just kicked them hard or long enough. Where I live right now (a former war zone full of people with PTSD from the Yugoslav war horrors) there are many homeless and even more close to the edge of it. Thankfully we have the dream of a EU membership making everything better for the people here, but which unfortunately does nothing for this places (other than create a massive brain drain that makes the situation even more precarious for those off-grid or those not wanting to be part of the system).
- Allower 8y ago
  As someone who routinely has family "lean on" me, I can tell you its an incredibly disrespectful and foolish thing to do. Your inability to see how you effect your family is disgraceful. You want to be a fuck off who cant support himself thats your choice, but running back to family whenever things get tough is nothing short of childish and parasitic. get a fucking life

doe88 8y ago

I'm feeling for her. Finding the right work is never easy but it seems reconversion after pro-sport can be really tricky, especially for these sports where it's hard to earn enough to make a living. From all the examples I read through the years I got the impression that the least disrupting kind of reconversion in these cases is have the luck to find a way to somehow stay in your sport, trainer, or work in the federation or something like that, but of course easier said than done, you're certainly not alone with this simple idea, and of course I think it's even more difficult when you're a woman.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
>and of course I think it's even more difficult when you're a woman. // Would you mind explaining why? I'd imagine how difficult it is to move to the coaching/administration level was more a function of the particular sport? Are you thinking just about differences in the level of funding?
- stevenwoo 8y ago
  Only in the past year has it become mandatory for women at an elite level of cycling to be paid a salary and it's less than beginning male pros who are just starting out. Probably less than a dozen women make over five figures a year. 95% of the advertising money in cycling is generated from the men's Tour de France. The organization that runs the Tour de France and a few other races, these are mostly for men with sometimes a day or two set aside for women's races. All the money gets generated by the men's events, gets poured back into creating men's events. For a different type of story, we could look at women's tennis. The cigarette brand Virginia Slims became the sponsor, the sport was televised, and the women started earning ballpark what the men were at least in prize money back in the 70's. It helped that there were few women at the top of tennis and they organized together. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Slims_Circuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Slims_Circuit There are a few superstars in cycling but the farm system or whatever you want to call it is full of potential riders to replace the current ones so it's too easy to get strike breakers if cyclists tried to do the same thing.
- doe88 8y ago

harias 8y ago

>It was a far cry from winning medals for Twigg, and beyond that, she said the solitary nature of programming troubled her. I would like to know what HN thinks about the 'solitary' nature of programming? Isn't programming more or less a group endeavor now?

wolfgke 8y ago
> Isn't programming more or less a group endeavor now? It is still more solitary than many other jobs. On the other hand, I hate that it becomes more and more a group endeavor - I would love if it stayed much more solitary as in former days.
- mothsonasloth 8y ago
  Agreed, Pair Programming is over-hyped as well as this new "mobbing" concept. It affects productivity and makes people who prefer to work by themselves unhappy.
  - plausibilities 8y ago
    Pair programming and mobbing are tools which may be appropriate for some situations. Unfortunately when tool use is mandated without applying critical thinking, it often results in a great deal of waste. Mandated collaboration is also very susceptible to abuse as it typically provides an additional layer of obfuscation to shield low performing leechers. High school group projects dialed up to 11.
  - tapland 8y ago
    Doesn't have to be pair programming. Just having two employees next to eachother working on different parts of the same project can make it a social workplace. If you aren't into it the other person will probably get the hint and not talk too much. I guess this is the overtraining hampering growth I've heard about as a kid. Being an olympic level athlete makes a lot of hormones to whack.
- raverbashing 8y ago

jplayer01 8y ago

She sounds like a great person and I hope things work out for her. It's hard to find the right context for her without painting her in a bad light. Some people are eager to call her (or people like her) lazy, conveniently ignoring the fact that nobody really wants to live this way. Society as it is designed now doesn't know what to do with people like her, so they're either ignored or just given shelters and... That's it? Seems like a societal failing on some level.

FakeComments 8y ago
Can you point to a solution besides giving them shelter and just sort of tolerating it? I mean, there’s different mechanisms for shelter — family, public housing, NGOs, etc, and we can talk about how to tweak those knobs as a culture — but I can’t think of what else cultures have done, besides various levels of housing people who just want to float.
- jplayer01 8y ago
  My comment implied that I'm not sure what else could be done or what should be done. I do feel it should be talked about. What are the root causes? What do these people actually need? What are they lacking? Who are they in the first place? Why are they where they are?
- pnutjam 8y ago
  What about some sort of credit people could claim for housing a transient? Even if it's family, it takes a toll and relieves strain on the system.
fulafel 8y ago
Lazy people of course deserve housing too.
- will_brown 8y ago
  You aren’t wrong. But I doubt the multi time world champion and multi time Olympic medalist is lazy.

tw1010 8y ago

"She took a break at age 26, and that year she grew an entire inch" What's that again? I've never heard of anyone growing after the age of 18.

magic_beans 8y ago
> I've never heard of anyone growing after the age of 18. Just because you haven't heard of something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
emiliobumachar 8y ago
That surprised me too, but, on second thought, elite athletic training is all about passing limits that apply to everyone else. It's not that weird that some of the unintended consequences are also unheard of in the general population.
tapland 8y ago
You can grow into your early twenties or so. Unlikely to grow after that even if administered extra HGH (human growth hormone). At age 26 it seems very weird!
caymanjim 8y ago
They make it sound like it was because she was burning fewer calories and had some left over to grow, but I don't think it works that way. My uneducated guess is that it's a posture thing; he spine probably stretched or relaxed in some way after she stopped spending her entire waking life hunched over pedaling.
- alexsb92 8y ago
  While I'm not sure about this specific case, delayed growth due to intense exercising is a thing for gymnasts. https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(00)70094-1/fulltext https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(00)70094-1/fulltext
DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
it might just be coincidence since some kids still have a final push of growth with that age. But children pushed into extreme sports (or "voluntarily pushing themselves") often fail to grow. You can see this with ballet dancers who start too early or gymnasts starting too early.

majani 8y ago

"Olympic medal winner" is like a golden ticket in the fitness trainer industry. There's a lot of rich people who would be willing to pay over the odds to be trained by her.

trabant00 8y ago
She sounds like a person who would have a hard time fooling herself into taking the money. There's little if any good a professional athlete can do for regular person who wants to get/stay fit. She's good at taking health compromises to the extreme in exchange for performance. The exact opposite of what a regular person needs.
- notahacker 8y ago
  The value of the personal trainer for the average person looking to get into slightly better-than-average shape is dispensing advice along pretty well-understood guidelines and helping them overcome their self-discipline issues, which is where speaking with the authority of an Olympian adds value even though the training regimes aren't going to be remotely similar. Of course, she might want to stay well away from her past career for other reasons, whether it's boredom, self-consciousness, frustration or a strong desire to draw a line under it (FWIW I know an Olympic medallist who made plenty of money from endorsements and speaking engagements and could probably have had a media career but had absolutely no desire to do that or become a trainer/ambassador after his retirement, choosing to became a builder's apprentice instead, because he liked the idea of building stuff rather than because he needed the money)
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    I knew a world class track athlete who also left the sport completely. To her it was something that parents and coaches had forced on her so she got out as soon as she could despite all the success.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  In general I agree with you but there are plenty of people who will pay big money to be trained by a gold medalist not because it makes sense but just for the title. The gold medalist then has to give the same advice every other trainer would give.

thrwoawer234af 8y ago

This is very interesting. I've always wondered about how tech jobs require endless preening and showing-off for what are often not exactly jobs that require a lot of intellectual ability. "You want a job in ML ? Yes, learn these absurd frameworks, publish a few papers in so-and-so conferences. Then we'll let you do some clickrate optimization for our website. " No wonder, tech in the US has a diversity problem. Not everyone wants to be this way.

equalarrow 8y ago
How is that a 'diversity' problem??

deleted 8y ago

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angel_j 8y ago

Homelessness is the tip of the housing iceberg. Right behind the homeless are those who are a paycheck, or emergency, from losing everything. Behind them are millions of paying out there earnings in high rent, forced to share apartments to live where the job pays. Fronting it all are upper-middle class people, foreign investors, and venture capital, buying up properties to rent out. The cause is not a lack of "affordable housing", it's a lack of housing, period. What's not affordable are regulations and competing with real estate capital. What's not affordable is spending most of your income on rent, and this is hardly a choice for most people right now. People will stare, and think, gosh this homeless situation is sad, inhumane, drugs/mental, w/e, but meanwhile, the shortage of housing and the affordability to create more is going to make it worse for everybody, especially those who are stuck in the middle with increasing rents and stagnant wages.

readhn 8y ago
The term "landlord" has to go away. We are not in mid-evil times anymore: 1. It should be made financially speaking prohibitively expensive to be a residential landlord. I.e. buy a house and charge others rent to live in it. Tax it at 100%. Done! 2. Change zoning/building codes to allow modern and more efficient construction, allow people to get easy financing to build more HIGH QUALITY and affordable housing. 3. Change mortgage laws to make it possible for more financially responsible families to build and own homes.
equalarrow 8y ago
"What's not affordable is spending most of your income on rent, and this is hardly a choice for most people right now." Not a choice? Don't you enter into a rental agreement via choice? I've never met anyone who's said they were forced to rent some place. I don't necessarily disagree with the housing shortage, but there's reasons for that. Look at state, local laws and nimby's that pass and influence local zoning restrictions. San Francisco is a perfect example of that process gone awry. Want affordable rent? Then you can still choose not to live in one of the areas that is anti-housing.
- unethical_ban 8y ago

aladinator 8y ago

Great story. I kind of agree with many others here that it sounds like a mental health issue. But I also think that the story is more complicated than that. We shouldn't neglect the impact on the brain a professional sports career has. I've seen it many times. The amount of sacrifice and energy put into something like this leads to a very unbalanced lifestyle, which is usually encouraged from all sides (parents, coaches, friends). Most often, the only positive emotion athletes experience is that joy of achieving a goal, and this quickly starts becoming an addiction. Especially in sports where not a lot of money is involved, passion and perseverance play a huge role in personal motivation and these sports usually attract athletes that put everything on hold in their life for their minute in the spotlight. Unfortunately, only a minor fraction of athletes ends their career by choice. Usually, lack of success or injuries tend to force people to retire with unfinished business. This hits the "addicted" athlete very hard, and in an environment where it is generally not advisable to show weakness, can lead to severe mental health issues quickly. Speaking from personal experience, life is pretty dull after being forced to retire. I fell into a deep existential crisis, mostly because the thing that was responsible for most of the joy in my life wasn't even remotely fun anymore, even as a simple hobby. The fact that I knew I wasn't on top of my game anymore, and I am not investing 100% of my energy into improving made it a pretty dull experience. On top of that, most of my social environment was still connected to that sport, so I wasn't really able to walk away and focus entirely on something different. And even worse, everything else I tried felt meaningless, I felt like it wasn't worth it if I didn't invest 100% of my energy into something I was passionate about. For me, nothing compares to the joy of pursuing a passion and putting everything I have into it. Source: myself and plenty of my friends and competitors. And yes, I got some help and things are much better now.

rograndom 8y ago
A big part of it is not so much the joy of achieving a goal by winning, but instead it's more of relief that you didn't fail. The positive feelings from winning do not come close to offsetting the negative feelings from not winning, even if it's second place.
leroy_masochist 8y ago
> We shouldn't neglect the impact on the brain a professional sports career has. I think this is true in the abstract, but in this particular story, there's a lot more going on. She was a homeless teenager when she was discovered as a rider, and the article strongly implies that the only stable life she's ever known is racing. This isn't a Ryan Leaf-type story, where a talented athlete was pushed too hard by their parents, coaches, and teammates and ended up breaking under the pressure. I think Rebecca's circumstances are way more poignantly tragic. My heart goes out to her and I hope she gets the stability and peace she seems to be searching for.

mtw 8y ago

She won a medal which puts her at the top 1% but most athletes who go to Olympics or international championships don't win any medals but nevertheless have to through the same training and invest the same commitment. If she can't make it, it makes you wonder what happens to the rest who also saw their golden years pass by but without any medals or achievements to show off.

tasuki 8y ago
Well, if you worked hard, yet never won an Olympic medal, settling for a "boring" job might actually be easier.
- heedlessly3 8y ago
  It just seems like if you can push yourself mentally and physically to be a world champion, then a mediocre office job is exponentially easier.
  - projektir 8y ago
    Idk, I don't think these things are so linear. I'm not sure what exactly is a "mediocre office job", but normal jobs require a different set of skills and priorities. Athletics benefit from a very singular focus, it's clear what you need to do and largely how to do it. If you're not good enough, it's generally made very clear pretty fast. There's often a huge network around you and lots of emotional reinforcement. Normal living and normal jobs are not so. The big difference being that your priorities are scattered and there's no clear item to focus on. Very easy to miss things and make a mistake. Jobs are full off odd negotiations and office politics and proving something is hard. It's not very clear where you are.

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago

> Twigg got an associate degree in computer science and became a programmer for a seaweed-products company in San Diego. She must be more experienced than most bootcamp grads. There must be jobs she can do in Seattle.

jawns 8y ago

Former editor here. This is a really interesting story, but if I were Greenstone's editor I would feel really conflicted about running it. There's the elephant in the room -- mental health. What did the reporter get on record? "She did not want to discuss mental health but feels it should be treated more seriously in Washington." Then there's her family. What did the reporter get on record? "Her immediate family in the Seattle area, including her 18-year-old daughter, declined interviews for this story." So now you have to weave a tale while dancing around the fact that she's likely got mental health issues that she won't talk about, and you've got important people in her life who also don't want to talk. I'm not saying the story is bad as-is. It's fascinating. But it feels like there's a lot missing.

mindgam3 8y ago
The elephant in the room isn’t “mental health” - it’s severe developmental trauma. As described in the article: “Twigg was still a child when she became homeless. A prodigy in academics and athletics, she started at UW at the age of 14... At this time, she was living in Seattle in a basement with her mother and sister. Twigg’s sister says their mom kicked Twigg out; Twigg remembers being offered the option to leave and taking it. She was a few months from turning 16.” I’m sorry, I don’t need to “weave a tale” about anything other than the fact that this person has been subject to abuse since childhood. And yeah, of course her family doesn’t want to talk. Nobody wants to talk about abuse in the family. If anything is missing, it’s our collective blind spot where we can read a story like this and make it about “mental health”. Until we get better as a society about recognizing clear signs of abuse, we won’t make a dent in these kinds of problems.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  This! Anyone who has had any trauma informed care training would have zeroed in on this instantly.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
The article does detail a history of a head injury that required stitches. Most homeless people have either medical or mental health issues. The older I get, the more convinced I am that those two things are not so neatly separated.

exabrial 8y ago

> “Once you’ve done something that feels like you’re born to do it, it’s hard to find anything that’s that good of a fit,” Twigg says today. “Anything else that feels that way.” If she has a mental health issue, she should seek care. But if you take the above quote at face value (and likely out of context), then I would give her this advice to start building her life: "Flipping Burgers in not beneath your dignity" - Charles J. Sykes An entire generation has been romanticized that if you "do what you love" you'll end up a billionaire. The complete opposite is true. It requires doing thing you dislike, discipline, financial management, and focus on the correct things.

jniedrauer 8y ago
> An entire generation has been romanticized that if you "do what you love" you'll end up a billionaire. The complete opposite is true. The implication that flipping burgers will make you a billionaire is patently absurd. You should never feel ashamed about your work, but menial work in $current_year actually leads to poverty and hunger because it doesn't pay a living wage. An "entire generation" doesn't have illusions about how the world works. The 2008 recession was more than sufficient to dispel that. They just want food and shelter.
- exabrial 8y ago
  That's a ridiculous exaggeration of my words. Flipping burgers will put a roof over your head, buy you some food, and give you a small amount of savings. From there you move up. Better education, better job, more savings.
  - jniedrauer 8y ago
    You said (paraphrased) "doing what you love will not make you a billionaire. The opposite is true. You should go flip burgers." This can either mean "doing what you love will make you poor. And also you should flip burgers" or "doing things you don't like will make you a billionaire." It's possible I misunderstood what you were saying, but whichever point you were trying to make, it's a patronizing extension of the typical boomer "millennials are entitled" refrain. > Flipping burgers will put a roof over your head, buy you some food, and give you a small amount of savings. None of these are true. I'm not sure when the last time you worked an entry level job like this was, but they haven't paid anything close to a living wage in a very long time.

koonsolo 8y ago

As a European, it always baffles me how normal it is in US to be homeless. Seems like it can happen to anyone during their life. A bit of bad luck and you're on the street. In Europe, there are so many safety nets that nobody should end up homeless. Some still do, but it's really a tiny minority compared to US. This is also one of the most surprising things I saw, the first time I went to the US: so many homeless people, everywhere. Even in small towns.

stevenwoo 8y ago
I do not know for certain, but it may be that homeless are easier to see in the USA (I have seen people living in tents/on sidewalk in sleeping bags on/under the onramp to the freeway in San Francisco/San Jose/San Diego which is still shocking), but the stats don't make the USA much worse than the UK/France/Germany/Netherlands from a quick sampling of western European nations. Of course how it's defined and how the stats were gathered are all important, but I've seen UK homelessness/rough sleeping discussed on the front page of the UK edition of The Guardian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_...
xtracto 8y ago
Even reading the comments in here sheds very interesting light: People discussing about why is the person homeless: Is it because of mental issues? is it because of laziness? is it because of bad luck? It doesn't matter! it should not matter. People should not be homeless, and the different safety nets should be agnostic of the reasons (otherwise you are catering only for the mental health issues, and you still have homeless drug addicts, or homeless bad-luck people).

pnathan 8y ago

Seattle is a rough place to try to jump into independent living. The entry level to normal housing is pretty high. I don't think there's a lot of onramps to doing that that don't involve years of training. Ms. Twigg is a very sad story, and I feel for her. Her story highlights the complexity of US homelessness: not drug addiction, not simple job loss, not simple mental health issues. Athletes in general have an issue exiting the athletic world, I've noticed. Where do you go when you leave the field and the lights are on for someone else? I hope Ms. Twigg gets the help she needs.