The Olympics are here in what seems like the blink of an eye. But for the athletes competing, waiting an extra year to peak at just the right moment, socially distancing and taking breaks from training, has seemed like an eternity.
The excitement of the Olympic Games always attracts people commonly referred to as four-year fans — people who watch these sports once every Olympic cycle and inject their opinions into sports that do not aid the general public’s understanding of the sport. There’s nothing wrong with taking an interest in sports that you don’t typically watch and asking questions about something you don’t know about, but oftentimes circulating misguided opinions as fact can have repercussions.
With the absence of fan favorites like Michael Phelps, Ryan Lochte, and Gabby Douglas from Team USA’s roster in 2021, America has largely chosen Rio 2016 breakout Olympic star Simone Biles to become the champion who would lead the Team USA to greatness. It’s common for a familiar face to become the face of such a grandiose event … matched with a set of incongruous expectations.
Coming off of a great medal haul (five of six available gold medals) at the 2019 world championships, Biles was lauded by the media as this unbreakable, unstoppable force — a gymnastics machine that was incapable of losing. But Simone Biles is not a machine, she’s a 24-year old girl who has been competing and dominating as a senior international elite gymnast for seven years. She is the first Black world all-around champion. She is the first woman to win every world and Olympic all-around title in a quadrennium. She poured her heart, soul and youth into a sport that has abused her in every way possible … nevertheless she persisted. Simone’s ultimate goal as an athlete was the 2016 Olympic Games, and she achieved it — she didn’t have to come back. She had more to give to the sport and made a stellar return to the competition floor in better shape than she was beforehand after taking a full year off, blowing away any expectations that anyone had of her. In this past quadrennium, she has racked up two more world all around and team titles and she has garnered a total of five eponymous skills. As of 2019, her medal count reached a total of 24 world championship medals, 19 of them gold — the most gold medals of any gymnast in history.
This is the kind of story that people will read about — a gymnast so dominant that the world truly has never seen anything like it before. As we’ve seen with many female celebrities before — the media loves to build someone up only to tear them down. It’s a tale as old as time and the higher you’re up, the harder you fall. We’ve seen it happen to greats like Meghan Markle, Britney Spears, Serena Williams, etc. — America’s sweethearts that the public loved until they didn’t anymore.
The number of times Simone has been discussed heading into this year was at an all-time high. Discourse circulated the internet about her being the GOAT (greatest of all time), about her never-been-done-before skills, and how she was being purposely targeted for being ‘too’ phenomenal. There’s a lot of nuance to these discussions, more so than the casual viewer cares to indulge in. Simone is a fantastic once-in-a-lifetime talent but she stands on the hands and shoulders of all the other GOAT’s before her, such as Nadia Comaneci, Olga Korbut, Shannon Miller, Dominique Dawes, Gabrielle Douglas, etc. Biles is an absolute legend in her own right with more accolades than many on this list, but gymnastics has developed so much as a sport due to improvements in equipment, changes in rules, changes in scoring, coaching technique improvements, medical advancements and physical therapy treatments, making it difficult to compare gymnasts from one quadrennium to the next, let alone different decades or generations.
Biles will undoubtedly pave the way for future gymnasts that will join her amongst the ranks of legend status, but the title greatest gymnast of our time might reflect her status better, as it accurately reflects how much of an impact she’s had on the sport while also alleviating some pressure and expectations that the world has put on her shoulders. Furthermore, as conversations flurried throughout the depths of the internet, people began to discuss the difficulty and intricacy of her skill selection. Somewhere along the way, it became a mainstream notion that she performs banned skills or that her excellent performances are being specifically targeted for being too good … This dialogue is neither helpful for gymnastics as a sport nor Simone as an athlete. There’s more nuance to these conversations, and misinformation contributes to the high standards set for one human being to live up to.
This quad has been very difficult for Simone for a variety of reasons. From 2013 to 2015, Simone was not very well-known outside the gymnastics community. Nobody really knew what to expect for her as far as Olympic achievements so although they heard she was great and they were rooting for her, she was a 20-year old girl with older girls to look up to and a support system in the form of peers and a live audience. After 2016, a lot of these girls had chosen to either retire, move on from the sport, or went on to compete in college gymnastics. So when Simone returns she’s a 21-year-old woman predominantly surrounded by new teenagers with a new coach and a new national team coordinator, all while she is reconciling the trauma she has endured in the past. To say that this was a shockingly different experience for her would be an understatement. Suddenly she was the veteran competitor with experience and medals galore. People and her teammates were looking up to her, but who can she turn to?
With the virus postponing the Olympics, Simone is thrust back into the limelight and her first major competition in over a year is Tokyo 2021. She showed great routines in training, but stumbled a bit when it came to the qualifications. Even when she faltered, though, she qualified first into the all around final and into each of the four event finals. A shockwave was sent through the gymnastics world, however, when it had been determined that the U.S.A. qualified in second to the Russian Federation — the first time the U.S. had been beaten in senior international team competition since 2010, even if it was unofficially. The media narrative was put on Simone — she had an off day and that’s why Russia pulled ahead. Biles now has personal expectations, world expectations, and gymnastics dynasty expectations looming over her head going into the team final. Though there has been no official report on it, something happened in the two-day interim to Simone — the pressure led to her developing a case of ‘the twisties,’ a term coined for gymnasts who develop a mental block that manifests physically as a loss of body awareness in the air as well as a loss of muscle memory. Twisties can occur if a gymnast feels a great deal of pressure, balks on a skill, or has a dangerous experience in practice with a skill.
The rules dictate that once a gymnast competes in the qualifying round, an alternate athlete may not be subbed in. Biles tried to compete through her mental block, but when she balked her vault in team finals, she knew she had to pull out for the sake of herself and for the sake of her team. You don’t have to look any further than the look of fear on her face after she completed her (incorrect) vault in the team final to understand the danger of her competing. The team ultimately won silver, and after being built up so high, people needed someone to blame. Biles became a target for people because people thought she quit when she thought she wasn’t going to win, people thought she quit on her team, people thought she selfishly took someone else’s spot on the team, people thought she spent the last four years training for the world’s most prestigious athletic event and just didn’t want to do it anymore.
You could look at a variety of factors to account for such utter outrages of disdain toward a young Black woman, such as entitlement, racism, misogyny or ethnocentrism. Simone has competed through bad performances, foot injuries and even through a kidney stone hospitalization in 2018. She doesn’t go down without a fight. These were unforeseen circumstances. You could’ve put anyone in her place and this could’ve happened to them as well, it just happened to be her.
This mental block happened to come at a very inopportune time, but Simone knows herself and her body better than anyone else and she said that she would’ve been a detriment to the team. In pushing through what some people wanted her to do, she very well could’ve fallen on other events or perhaps even hurt herself. During her time in Tokyo, Biles gave the world a behind-the-scenes look at a training session she had via Instagram story. Simone showed herself working through the mental block as her body would churn out a skill unintentionally as opposed to the skills she’s been performing for years.
But of course the knife cuts both ways because the people criticizing her would’ve just as easily criticized her for delivering a bleak performance. There isn’t a single gymnast, active or retired, that has criticized Simone’s decision, and many have expressed their sympathy to her because each of her competitors, domestic and international, understands the gravity of the situation.
If you are a fan that wants to celebrate and bask in her victories, then you should be prepared to support her when she’s at her lows. These athletes do not exist solely for the public’s entertainment — they are people that work hard every day of their lives and experience highs and lows as you and I do. Show her the love you want from your loved ones on your worst days. She does not owe us, USA Gymnastics or Team USA anything at all. It’s OK to be disappointed that you didn’t have a chance to see the greatest gymnasts of our time perform her very best, but there’s a 10/10 chance that Simone wishes her Olympic experience had gone differently.