Athletes and sports governing bodies at all competitive levels are increasingly recognizing the ethical risks of Twitter and other social media platforms for athletes’ mental and emotional health. Against the backdrop of the global pandemic, numerous athletes from various sports disciplines have “walked off” or temporarily stepped away from the field of play to attend to their mental, physical, and emotional health—effectively prioritizing wellbeing above winning. Twitter has been a highly active platform for the general public to offer their opinions and reactions to these athletes’ decisions. Non-peer-reviewed analyses show Twitter conversations around athletes are both supportive and critical, but no systematic assessment has been conducted. Therefore, the goal of this analysis is to use a Twitter sentiment analysis to determine how the general public has responded to athletes from diverse sports who stepped off the field of play during the global pandemic; and to understand if the public differentially responds to male versus female elite athletes. Are Twitter conversations around the male athletes’ actions similarly supportive, or are they more critical?

As anticipated, among 90K+ discrete tweets male athletes received more negative, unsupportive, punitive, and judgmental responses than female athletes where responses were more positive and supportive. We argue that toxic masculinity and the myth of female athlete fragility play a role in these observations and that seeing athletes as more fully human—regardless of gender—is needed for optimal athlete mental health.