Chumpy Illustration by Christopher Nielsen.

Bernard Tomic wasn’t fussed after crashing 6-0, 6-1 to Jarkko Nieminen in Miami in record time: 28 minutes 20 seconds. “I’m not disappointed,” declared Bernie, who did an ace imitation of the stiff in Weekend At Bernie’s.

“I just have to keep working hard to improve my game.” With time taken out for towelling-off, that’s $9165 for 20 minutes of tennis. Nice, ah, “work” if you can get it.

Sure, it was Tomic’s first match back from hip surgery, Nieminen is no mug, yada yada. But nobody expected Tomic to win. Just to maybe, like, care.

Is it a Gen Y thing? Sloane Stephens, hailed as the new Serena after beating the real one at the 2013 Australian Open, is another who flicks losses like lint. Like, who can be bothered? At the same Miami tournament, Stephens took one game from Caroline Wozniacki. “Yeah. Wasn’t my night,” said the 20-year-old. “Not really anything I’m going to cry too much over.” Hitting the practice court, then? Ah, no. Sloane was first hitting the shops. “I never went shopping for my birthday.”

Back at the Sochi Olympics, Alex “Chumpy” Pullen was less than devastated at exiting in the quarter-finals of the snowboard cross. Yes, Channel Ten hyped “Chumpy Tuesday” to death, conditions were substandard and all it takes is one slip and there goes your medal. But as the world number-one and Australia’s leading gold medal prospect (not to mention the most lavishly funded), we expected a bit more crushed feeling than: “It’s all positive.”

Well, yeah. It’s too bloody positive. In this “It’s All Good era”, losing no longer sucks. It doesn’t even have to hurt. Losing is just another opportunity to improve.

The obsession with “taking something positive” from every loss is mocked even by those doing it. “That was a decent loss tonight, if you can say that,” Essendon coach Mark Thompson cringingly told the media after his side’s narrow loss to Hawthorn. “Can’t believe I’m saying it.”

Athletes insulate themselves from the pain of defeat (and deflect from their own mental mistakes) with rote post-match talk of “learning from losses” and “moving on”. Indifference as anaesthetic. “Athletes will protect their ego as much as they can,” says Jeff Bond, a sport psychology leader who has worked with elite athletes for 35 years. “They don’t want to admit they lost interest, became overwhelmed, distracted or despondent. So they blow it off by saying they don’t care about losing.”

At the Sochi Games, notes Bond, “the snowboarding community was all ‘lovey dovey’ rather than admit they made a stupid mistake and were really pissed off with themselves. So they hugged their opposition, smiled and blew kisses! What the ... ”

It’s enough to make you crave the bad old 1980s, when everyone was a capitalised Winner or Loser, hold the BS. The pain of defeat has a purpose. Sometimes, the best thing to take from a walloping is nothing but the mission to avoid feeling that desolation again. Winners accept the pain and use it.

Stan Wawrinka, in tears after an epic fail against Novak Djokovic at the 2013 Australian Open, was holding up the trophy a year later. Serena Williams, stricken by her only first-round loss in a major at Paris 2012, went on a career-best tear in the next 18 months, winning 110 of 115 matches.

Hawthorn’s redemption 2013 premiership was built on the ashes of its 2012 grand final loss to Sydney. “There’s no doubt it [the grand final loss] was always there,” said stalwart Brad Sewell. “That feeling is still pretty vivid for a lot of the guys and we weren’t prepared to go through that again.”

We all love to win. But the greats are defined by how much they hate to lose. Ivan Lendl related that bad losses had him mulling retirement. “But that was on a good day. On a bad day I thought about killing myself.”

Not every defeat calls for self-flagellation. But today’s relentless positive spin and galling, growing indifference to losing cheapens the hard-earned victory of the winner, and denigrates the contest itself. If athletes don’t care too much about losing, why should we?