I haven’t been watching much of the tennis. This is because I hide in my bedroom and play Triple Town all day.
But Victoria Azarenka has been watching it. Playing it, too, and now she’s going to be in the women’s Australian Open singles final. Because she is a cheat.
She basically panicked, she was choking, so basically she was just buying some time to clear her head.
Here are some important things to note: Azarenka did not refer to her experience as a ‘panic attack’. In fact, later on she came out and said that a “locked rib” had caused her pain and breathlessness. The ‘panic attack’ bit came from moronic tennis elite who, and this is the important part, chose to use ‘panic attack’ to describe what happened to Azarenka. One can only assume that they did this because a ‘panic attack’ is a widely known synonym for ‘illness fallacy’.
“LOL you guys let’s say she had a ‘panic attack’, everyone will know what we mean then, you know, that she’s pretending.”
Silly Azarenka. She should know that panic attacks are imaginary and that the only reason anyone would ever fake having one is to get out of doing something they can’t be bothered doing anymore, like playing tennis in front of millions of people.
These are some of my favourite quotes from the article:
No mention of a health issue that was anything but mental.
Unfortunately for Victoria, she made the mistake of thinking that a mental issue, however minor, is a health issue. It’s a brain issue, you guys! Your brain isn’t part of your body that can be injured! Only real illnesses count in tennis! You can’t take time out of a match unless there is something actually wrong with you, like your arm has fallen off or aliens have abducted you.
Still, American commentator Pam Shriver was among those to claim that Azarenka had acted outside the rules of the game. “You can’t just leave the court for 10 minutes because you’re having a panic attack”.
The rules of the game require you to stay on court until you can’t see, breathe or hear anymore because your senses have been overthrown by the feeling that you are going to die. Alternatively, you can choose to retire sick, but only if you don’t claim that it’s because of a legitimate illness.
Would she be bothered if it was nerves, rather a tweaked ankle or sore knee, and thus strategic rather than legitimiate?
Everyone knows that ‘nerves’, as panic attacks are often dismissed as being by idiots, are actually just a strategic approach to cheating someone else out of that which they rightly deserve. Panic attack on the train? Strategic approach to getting a seat. Panic attack at work? Strategic approach to taking five minutes in the toilet that no one else gets to take. Panic attack at home? Strategic approach to watching chick flicks instead of Terminator Salvation.
Tellingly her opponent, Sloane Stephens, who has in all ways proved herself to be a fair and reasonable competitor in Melbourne, didn’t speculate on the legitimacy of Azarenka’s ‘pretend condition’. This may be because a) she is not a sensationalist journalist, b) she realises that not all illnesses are visible on the outside, or c) she is just not a fuckwit who demands that a panic sufferer justify their decision to sit down and breathe through something that “feels like a heart attack.”
Mental illness stigma is alive and well in the world of tennis.
