I guess it is good for her sake that Ms. Sey received the letters of support she has. I can not add to them. The attitude of You haven't been there so you can't possibly understand" has some merit but it is limited. I suspect we all look for ways to identify with the athletes. I participate in TaeKwonDo tournaments. Local ones, nothing of the caliber seen in the Olympics. But it does give me some insight to watching an Olympic match the average person doesn't have. And I'm sure the same goes for former gymnasts, high-school basketball players and so on. The vast majority of us realize that there is a huge talent gap between us and the those we are now watching that no amount of practice time can ever bridge. Even at our own lowly level we've seen what appear to be "naturals" compared to ourselves.

Many of us have had that moment, the concert solo, the catch/goal/hit that determines the game, the presentation that makes or breaks the deal; something where the pressure is on, all eyes are on you and a mistake is devastating. And whatever it is, at that moment it is the most important thing if your life.

Is it the same as being in the Olympics? No. But only by magnitude. the emotions are the same. That we know something of what they are going though and are aware of that difference in magnitude just makes us more impressed.

It is that identification, however small in Ms Sey's eyes, that keeps the Olympics, and possibly all professional sports from being nothing more than a freak show.

So while Ms. Sey is good at calling herself unpleasant names, she still seems equally adept at justifying her behavior. I hope for her sake, that changes.

She describes a woman telling her daughter that in high school she swam the same event that they were watching.

Ms. Sey dismisses such a notion as preposterous, since no who competed in high school could have possibly understood what it was to truly compete.

This is an act of extreme hubris, as Ms. Sey has no idea what this woman's level of accomplishment was. It is akin to Ms. Sey going up to one of the young women who just took a silver and saying "hey I competed in gymnastics when I was your age too" and being dismissed because the girl has no idea who this woman is.

We can forgive the child because she is young and probably is just ill informed about who this old woman is in front of her. Adults however are held to a higher standard.

Ms. Sey says she wrote a book in her article. The people she derides say they competed in a sport. Neither makes a statement that they were any good at it, but Ms. Sey in her hubris decides they must not have been any good, after all she had never heard of them.

As I had previously pointed out, Ms. Sey has no idea if these women were in fact promising young athletes whose careers were cut short by a bit of bad luck, as her own was. She just takes her limited understanding and tears down others, likely because she still feels bad about herself and is still looking for the same love that was denied her when she starved herself to be an "elite" athlete.

As I have also stated, she could have just made her point about people not understanding how hard it is to be an athlete, and how we should respect the hard work of all our Olympians because most of us (herself included one could point out) aren't nearly good enough to make it to the Olympics. But instead, her article is about how she was an "elite" athlete, and only she understands how hard it is to be an athlete. This is text book narcissism. The sense that others are inferior, the need to explain to people why you yourself is great, and of course the need to bring every topic right back to you.

The derision people proffer to her about her writing skills is not intended to say she didn't write a book, she clearly did, and has garnered a bit more success at it then many of us (we haven't been asked to blog for Salon recently) the point is that the same argument she makes can be used to tear her down, as she tears others down. This makes her a hypocrite.

If she had asked one of these women what their skill levels were, gave them the opportunity to say oh I dabbled or I broke every record I came across before I decided playing a child's game for a living was a waste of my time. Then she could make a real assessment of whether or not they were athletes. It's fine to say there are elite and non elite athletes. I doubt anyone would claim they were an elite athlete unless they really were. It is something quite different to dismiss people without even being interested in what their story is.

Ms. Sey is judging people with no knowledge of who they are; many here are just turning that mirror back on her so as to highlight her own hypocrisy.

Seriously Jennifer,

Do you and the rest of your supporters in the letters section not understand the fundamentals of human interaction? Perhaps this is a result of all that time you spend training to be better than the amateurs you so flippantly disparage. (Who by the way, make your abilities actually worth notice. Ever stop to think about the fact that if all those enthusiastic amatuers realized that they were nothing like you, no one would care what you've done?)

When people tell you that they swam, or they run, or they visited the same country you lived in, they are trying to establish a connection with you. They are identifying something that they think you both have in common and pointing it out. By doing this, they are saying, "I want to relate to you." You people, being the narcissistic, self-absorbed jerks that you are, don't want to take the offering and run with it (perhaps by finding some other way to relate), but rather want to complain that if someone lacks the talent, time, resources and enthusiasm to do what you have, that they are not worthy or trying to relate to you. (Which is certainly ironic given that the the real premise of writing is to relate to the reader.)

The Beast you refer to is not something to be proud of, it is something to be tamed. Your flippant discourse about the the "bad person" inside doesn't read like an internal struggle; it reads like an opportunity to tell your readers why you are different and better than them. That, for a writer and marketer, constitutes a monumental failure.