Category Archives: simon biles

No comparison

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Now that all the Olympic gymnastics drama is over, maybe people will stop speaking for Kerri Strug. Whatever there is to consider regarding Simone Biles’ untimely onset of competitive insecurity—risk vs. reward, outside expectations vs. individual awareness, the so-called culture of “winning at all costs” vs. various interpretations of “courage”—to compare her situation to Strug’s 25 years ago at the Atlanta Games is a leap. With a high degree of difficulty.

Mostly, the juxtaposition of those two Olympic moments amounts to nothing more than Twitter conjecture mixed with sermonizing.

One ill-informed post declared that Strug “is rolling over in her grave now” because “she finished the Olympics (and brought home the gold) on a broken leg. [While] Simone Biles just quit on her team.”

Strug, it should be noted, is not rolling over in her grave because she is not—thank God—in her grave. She is a healthy 43-year-old mother of two, veteran of several marathons, author of a children’s book and autobiography, with a master’s degree and a resume that includes work in the Treasury and Justice departments.

She also did not, as the “grave” tweet claimed, execute that 1996 vault on a broken leg. She had damaged two ligaments in her ankle on her first of two vault attempts and went ahead with a second try, which at first was believed to be necessary for the Americans to sew up a team gold medal. (Later calculations revealed that her score wasn’t necessary for the victory, but Strug’s final jump was captivating sports theater.)

Anyway, to segue from that to concluding that Biles “quit on her team” in Tokyo not only is blatant Monday-morning quarterbacking but unrelated to Strug’s situation. Strug was carrying on in spite of physical pain; Biles was unsettled by a dangerous case of the “twisties,” a sudden sense that, in the air, she “couldn’t tell up from down.”

Just as speculative was a headline on Slate.com making the case that Biles’ no-mas resolution somehow proved that “Kerry Strug shouldn’t have been forced to do that vault” a quarter-century earlier. NBC’s website went the next step by claiming Strug “praises Simon Biles’ decision,” offering as evidence nothing more than a Strug tweet that simply said she was “sending love to you @Simon Biles.”

There was no direct contact with Strug to substantiate that, by “sending love,” she meant to “praise” Biles’ choice to withdraw.

A writer for something called Bustle.com claimed the personal recollection that Strug, in 1996, “rocketed down the vault runway….just 18 years old, only 4-9 and muscular, blonde….” But, in fact, Strug—though she in fact was 18 at the time—was 4-foot-7 and had close-cropped brown hair.

OK, that’s a quibble. But context matters, and it’s important to report that, immediately after Strug’s instantly famous vault, there was outrage with the assumption that Strug—a girl!—had been bullied into soldiering on by coach Bela Karolyi. The bearish, intimidating Karolyi indeed believed wholeheartedly in gymnastics’ Darwinian survival ethic. But more to the point was the fact that an 18-year-old boy, in a similar situation, could have counted on lavish praise for “playing hurt” and “taking one for the team.”

It also was clear that Strug typified a gymnastics truth that, at 18, she had not yet reached puberty and wouldn’t until she retired from the sport, which typically requires a training regimen so physically demanding that girls in their late teens often have not gained enough body weight to attain sexual maturity. Strug at the time looked and, with her canary voice, sounded like a 12-year-old.

Still. That day she said her final vault was her call. “I’m 18. I can make my own choices.”

Was it a smart move? Was it right? “The public wants to see us as dainty little girls,” Strug said during a lengthy phone interview in 2000, four years after the fact. “We are strong young individuals who have to make a lot of tough decisions. We’re away from home, on a strict diet, not going to regular schools, and if a child doesn’t want to do all of that, you can’t force them to.”

At the time, she found it a “little perplexing” that there still was a big fuss over her vault. “To me,” she said, “the injury thing was just another little sacrifice toward achieving my goals. And why should my goals be any different from a boy’s?”

In the end, could it be that Strug—like Biles 25 years later, and under entirely different circumstances not to be compared—had used the muscles in her head? In each case: Her call.

Horns of a dilemma

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There is nothing wrong with the acronym G.O.A.T.—a label being thrown around incessantly by commentators, sportswriters and athletes themselves—except that it’s pretentious, grandiose, sanctimonious. And a cliché.

It stands for Greatest of All Time, an assertion that can’t possibly be substantiated. How is it reasonable to compare a 21st Century performer to someone from, say, 1921, who functioned in an era of prehistoric nutrition, training methods and equipment?

There certainly are great modern-day champions, folks of unprecedented accomplishment, running around loose these days. And it is simple enough to quantify their specific successes. But this braying of singular majesty, often self-congratulatory and regularly perpetuated by the subject of the claim, not only invites the wrath of vicious social-media trolls on the rare occasions of a stumble, but also recalls an earlier sportsworld term that meant just the opposite.

For decades, the “goat” was the player who goofed up—spectacularly—by dropping the potential winning pass, running the wrong way, surrendering the decisive home run, failing to touch base, calling a timeout that didn’t exist, signing an inaccurate scorecard. The last thing any jock wanted to be called was a goat.

But here we are. Tom Brady has been declared the G.O.A.T. And Michael Jordan. LeBron James. Tiger Woods. Serena Williams. But if one of them is indeed the Greatest of All Time—by definition, unequalled by any other from the past, present or future—how can there be so many of them?

This isn’t just about the extraordinary Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and her agonizing realization that she couldn’t continue at the Tokyo Games while “fighting with [my] own head.” But the question has been raised in some precincts whether the relentless promotion of Biles as the G.O.A.T of these Olympics—the one-to-watch among 11,000 athletes—likely contributed to wearing her down.

She in fact has cited the weight of expectations.

To Slate.com’s Justin Peters, NBC especially “turned the Tokyo Games into the Simone Biles Games…It is a bit rich for NBC to report on the psychological pressures faced by Biles without also reflecting on ways in which its choice to make Tokyo the Simone Games surely intensified those pressures. It’d be sort of like if your boss announced to an auditorium filled with your co-workers that the fate of the company was riding on your work output, and then took you aside to sympathetically observe that you looked stressed and that the key to happiness was a healthy work-life balance.”

Plenty of reports from former sports journalism colleagues likewise hung Biles out there as something of a G.O.A.T. pinata, a challenge to be knocked off, accentuating her skills with prose filled with twists and rolls and handsprings and somersaults and roundouts.

Biles herself had begun showing up two years ago in a competition leotard with the sequined outline of a goat’s head, just as G.O.A.T. tattoos have been sported by several athletes of recent vintage. This week Robert Andrews, a sports performance consultant who counseled Biles before the 2016 Olympics, told Yahoo Life, “I don’t like it. I think it’s misplaced. I think it’s misused and I think it puts a big target on athletes’ backs.”

There’s this hyperbole: While Biles has dominated her sport for most of the past decade and set new standards in the sport—and has won more world gymnastic championship gold medals (19) than anyone in history—she is not the most celebrated Olympian in her sport.

Now in her second Olympics, Biles so far has collected six medals—four gold, a silver and a bronze. Brilliant work. But Larisa Latynina, competing for the Soviet Union, remains the all-time leader in that department—18 medals (nine gold, five silver, four bronze) over three Olympics from the mid-1950s to mid-‘60s. (Plus 14 world championship medals.) Old tapes verify that Latynina’s skills were pedestrian compared to the airborne gyrations all elite gymnasts can do now, but that’s not the point.

In her day, Latynina was the best. Since the early 2010s, Biles has been the best. And a head-to-head challenge might not be fair. Biles is struggling with her confidence. But Latynina is 86 years old.