From literal duchesses and princes to multimillionaire athletes, society’s most privileged people have frequently cited mental health woes to garner sympathy superficially and cynically.
This is not one of those stories.
After narrowly qualifying for every gymnastics event at this year’s Olympic Games, Simone Biles balked during the team finals. After performing an uncharacteristically sloppy vault, the two-time Olympian made the shocking decision to take medical leave from the team finals.
Although critics were quick to pile on the gymnast’s decision, it is not true that Biles took the easy way out. Rather, this decision was a noble sacrifice for her team and her country, like every decision that brought her to an unusual second go at the Olympics.
By standing down, Biles likely saved the U.S. team’s chance at winning a medal. As noted by Yahoo Sports columnist Dan Wetzel, Biles’s vault scored an astonishingly low 13.766, giving Russia more than a one-point lead over the United States. Biles’s exit allowed the rest of the team to save face and ultimately earn a perfectly respectable silver medal.
But Biles’s sacrifice goes beyond a single day. For the last five years leading up to this moment, she has put her body and career on the line not just for her country but also for every future generation of girls who participate in gymnastics.
By the raw numbers, Simone Biles is the greatest gymnast in recorded history and one of the greatest athletes alive. With a record 25 World Championship medals, Biles has not lost an all-around competition since 2013. By the time she swept a staggering six medals at the 2016 Olympic Games — she was the first female gymnast in more than a quarter-century to medal in every event — Biles had already cemented her legacy.
Any other gymnast would have retired. Just three female gymnasts in this century have returned for a second Olympics, two of whom, Aly Raisman and Gabby Douglas, were considered exceptionally old for the 2016 games at ages 22 and 21, respectively. Thanks to the pandemic postponing the Olympics, Biles is now 24 years old, which is considered geriatric in the sport. Just three other female gymnasts in Olympic history have won the all-around gold at ages older than Biles’s today.
Instead of retiring on a high note, Biles pushed herself physically and emotionally for another half-decade — not for personal glory or enrichment but in service to her colleagues and her country.
To understand Biles’s sacrifice, you need to understand gymnastics history. Once upon a time, gymnastics coaches Bela and Marta Karolyi defected from communist Romania to the U.S.
The Karolyis had already proven their prowess in the sport, training Nadia Comăneci to earn the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics history. After the Karolyis set up a training camp in rural Texas and coached Americans to more Olympic wins, the Karolyi Ranch quickly became an epicenter for USA Gymnastics, which designated the site as the U.S. Women’s National Gymnastics Training Center.
The Karolyi’s Soviet-style training involved bullying and starving their girls into greatness with zero external adult oversight. The one person to provide any comfort or sneak food to the gymnasts was Dr. Larry Nassar, the convicted sex offender we now know was specifically gaining the trust, and then the silence, of the girls he went on to assault and molest.
After the incredible 2016 Olympic gymnastics win, we learned Biles was one of his victims.
First with a trickle and then a flood, hundreds of women came forward as survivors of Nassar, who now rots in prison for life. But beyond the first few former gymnasts who exposed Nassar, nobody held more power than Biles to force the U.S. Olympic Committee to fundamentally reform the system that enabled him in the first place.
Biles went on hiatus in 2017, and in a stunning and likely terrifying manipulation, used the potential of her second Olympics as leverage to force USA Gymnastics to sever ties with the Karolyi Ranch. She revealed that she, too, had been sexually assaulted by Nassar at the Texas compound.
“It is impossibly difficult to relive these experiences,” she wrote, “and it breaks my heart even more to think that as I work towards my dream of competing in Tokyo 2020, I will have to continually return to the same training facility where I was abused.”
Biles, America’s Sweetheart and the public face of USA Gymnastics, was the only person with the political and public clout to force permanent change in women’s gymnastics. She admitted as much when asked why she would subject herself to another five years of physical and emotional distress.
With the thinly veiled threat of choosing not to return for another go at the Olympics, Biles first forced USAG to cancel plans to formally buy the Karolyi Ranch and then persuaded the USOC to decertify USAG. Her last likely feat would be to prove that American gymnasts can still dominate, even without the brutal discipline of Karolyi-style coaching.
If you don’t know any of this, then it’s easy to view Biles’s withdrawal from the team finals through the simplistic narrative of “self-care” and mental health favored by the media. But really, it’s one of sacrifice — not for herself, but her team, her country, and the future.
