Exercise One: How Competitive Are You, Really?

If I asked you how competitive you are, I bet you’d have an answer. Like always or never procrastinating and thriving or crumbling under pressure, it’s one of many characteristics that people often consider a defining personality trait, whether ingrained or innate.

Personally, I like to think that I’m not a competitive person. I announced as much in the introduction, and I don’t think I’m kidding myself—much. Sure, this is a second book project that draws from my own engagement with figure skating competition. But I can explain that away as competing for research or, with Anna, as part of our project to contribute to systemic change in our sport. Besides, my long quest to move up a level in solo skating actually represents a path to competitive disadvantage since I never even place well at my current level. I just want the extra twenty seconds of music I would get, from 1:50 to 2:10, for choreography between the jumps and spins.

All true, but hardly the whole story. I hate coming in last, and I’m as cranky as the next person when I perceive a competitor to be sandbagging, that is, amping up their chances to win by competing below their level. Seriously, adults do that. Also, those alluring twenty seconds would give me more time for what I’m best at. I can only do the simplest jumps and spins permitted at my level and often botch those tricks under pressure. Footwork and flow, grooving to the music: besides being my pleasure, they are also my competitive advantage. It doesn’t serve me too well, given the primacy placed on jumps, even for adults, but it matters. Back when my competition events still used what is called the “old 6.0 judging system”—which gave one mark each for technical ability and artistry instead of scoring elements one-by-one—I often found that a rogue judge had placed me, say, fifth when I wound up coming in fourteenth out of sixteen. I’m sure that’s what they cared about. Maybe liking what I’m good at does not prove competitiveness. Yet it must be significant that I remember approximately how I scored fifteen years ago and experience competing as being under pressure.

Besides, I now have daily visceral evidence that my disinterest in competition is inconsistent and far from pure: Wordle, the popular game, now owned by the New York Times, in which you have six tries to reveal a five-letter word, using each guess to hone down the options through a combination of luck, strategy, and pleasure seeking. Some players begin differently every day. I always start with “skate.” The relative infrequency of “K” suggests pleasure over strategy, although “skate” does contain three of Wheel of Fortune’s top six: R, S, T, L, N, and E. More telling, I’m hooked on Wordlebot, an AI performance evaluator, and experience a visceral thrill when Wordlebot tells me I’ve solved the puzzle faster than most—even when it attributes my triumph to a hefty portion of luck, and even though I recognize that I have a bit of sketchy competitive advantage. This includes access to Wordlebot itself, which requires a Times subscription that I’m not proud to have. A cheap, educator rate lured me past dissatisfaction with their editorial stances, and I stayed on despite both rate hikes and signing a letter in 2023, along with 35,000 others, protesting the paper’s antitrans bigotry (Oladipo 2023).

Wordlebot also hones my skill by periodically flagging, but cagily not explaining, how Wordle’s human bosses limit its permissible solutions, a practice publicized when the Times bought the game from its inventor and pulled out words considered obscene, bigoted, or arcane. While I hate the first criterion (really, who’s too delicate for “pussy”?) and appreciate the second, I learn the most from Wordlebot’s assessments regarding the last:

PLOTZ? Impressive vocabulary! Your guess eliminated one of the two remaining words, but, despite being a valid guess, PLOTZ isn’t one of the words I think will be a solution based on what I’ve learned from playing Wordle. (July 31, 2022)

Apparently, while Yiddishisms may count as eligible guesses, they do not rise to the status of so-called standard English, which makes subordinated outliers of many racialized and ethnic vernaculars—and, in the process, of people who speak them. Don’t try “kente” either, I learned later (October 12, 2023). Wordlebot continues to school me in the white-dominated vernacular that my education trained me to uphold. Standard English is not a level playing field.

I write more about winning in the next section. But first, here’s an exercise to help you think, and then think again, about how competitive you are. I include it partly because outcries about trans inclusion generally circle around athletes winning competition (Barnes 2023, 136) and also because, after dwelling in my own bundle of contradictions around the topic, I came to think that we might all be better prepared to participate in the conversation if we reflect more on what we bring to it.