Simone Biles is our hero
You don’t need more words and thoughts from me, a person who knows very little about gymnastics or even sports, about Simone Biles’s decision to withdraw from several Olympic events in order to protect her mental and physical health. But as a millennial, I’ve been thinking about how it compares to the defining Olympics moment of my childhood, Kerri Strug landing her second vault on a severely sprained ankle during the 1996 Games in Atlanta and supposedly clinching the gold for Team U-S-A. Luckily someone who does know about gymnastics, Rebecca Schuman, wrote for Slate about that event in light of Biles’s decision, and Biles’s decision in light of the US gymnastics tradition that Strug’s experience exemplifies.
I learned two things from this piece that shocked me:
1. The US team would have won the gold medal without Strug’s second vault.
2. Strug never competed again.
Here’s Schuman:
She became a legend, and Karyolyi’s decision—not hers—to have her vault injured became synonymous with the gymnastics ideal of white-knuckling through a high-stakes event, for your team and your country and the glory of sport—or at any rate, for sport’s TV ratings.
The thing is, as courageous and dramatic as that vault was, what it came to represent was, and remains to this day, bullshit.
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It’s almost beside the point that the 1996 team would have won without Strug’s vault. She still shouldn’t have had to do it. And that team—like this year’s—might have gotten a well-earned and magnificent Olympic silver medal. And that would have been enough.
Maybe you, like such stalwart gymnastics experts as Charlie Kirk and Matt Walsh, think that’s a weak-sauce American-participation-trophy way to think about it. But—if being allied with connoisseurs of their ilk isn’t enough disincentive—consider this: Trading bodily destruction for Olympic victory perpetuates an unhealthy culture, one whose notion of disposable bodies has wreaked havoc the sport for decades.
So to recap, Kerri Strug was forced by a literal cabal of abusers into doing something that ended her career, and could have killed her, on live television, for no reason at all. That’s what “heroism” looked like in 1996. That’s the cultural ideal of success and achievement you, like me, have probably spent most of your life tangled up in. Thank you to Simone Biles for showing us another way.