When Brazilian gymnast Rebeca Andrade won the floor gold medal at the Olympics, the camera panned to the Olympic champion with her arms raised, waving to the stadium and clenching her fists as she walked onto the podium with a victorious smile.
On either side of Andrade, arms in blue sleeves rise and move, though it’s hard to make out what’s happening. When the shot pans out, we realise they’re the arms of US gymnasts Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles, who took home the silver and bronze medals respectively, bowing to one of the greatest athletes the continent has ever seen.
No fan of women’s artistic gymnastics would have thought that this gold medal would hang on anyone’s neck other than Biles, the most decorated gymnast in U.S. history. Biles, however, has no problem acknowledging the great feat her South American teammate has accomplished, especially as the three of them created a historic podium in Olympic gymnastics, with three black medalists for the first time in women’s artistic gymnastics.
At that point, Biles, Chiles, and by extension the U.S. gymnastics team, decided to set the record straight about who they are today, nearly a decade after not only uncovering the systematic child abuse crimes of then-medical coordinator Larry Nassar but also accepting that legendary coaches Béla and Márta Károly, who built the U.S. into a world power, did so by breaking athletes — mostly teenagers — physically, mentally and emotionally. In gymnastics, eternal puberty was sought in body and reason.
Simone Biles, 27, is the team’s most veteran gymnast. She had already competed in the 2016 Rio Olympics and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. It was at the latter that Biles also had a chance to show us what kind of athlete she is. And in doing so, she broke with the paradigm that plagued American gymnastics almost from the beginning: that suffering is an indispensable condition for success.
Three years ago, during the vault in the team final, Biles was supposed to do an Amanar, which consists of a Yurchenko entry—an entry onto the horse from behind, after a side pirouette—and two and a half twists in the air. But she was only able to complete one and a half before landing in a near-squat with a worried expression on her face. The gymnast had become lost in the air due to a condition called twistiesin which a mental block cuts off the connection with the body, and the athlete loses the ability to do movements that she had already mastered. And it was not the first time that this happened in competition. Biles decided to withdraw, and for a moment it was not known if she would return for any of the other finals for which she had qualified.
Many commentators took advantage of the moment to talk about the fragility of an entire generation. Others dedicated themselves to categorizing the best gymnast in history as someone who gave in to pressure, and who made the decision to leave her team.
Trying to understand what goes on in Biles’s head before she enters a competition is nearly impossible because no one, not even other elite gymnasts, does what Simone Biles does. It’s strange to think about what these opinions revealed, other than a certain lack of context and understanding of the sport. The alternative to Biles’ decision would have been to risk injury, paralysis, or worse. In most other Olympic sports, a mental block can cost you a match or a medal. In gymnastics, it could cost you your life.
And the historical reality is that other American gymnasts, like those in other parts of the world, have not had the opportunity to decide their own limits.
Many people then contrasted Biles’ situation with that of her compatriot, Kerri Strug, 25 years earlier. During the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Strug, who had arrived at the Olympics with an undiagnosed pain in her left ankle, suffered a fall. She had torn two ligaments in her left ankle, and walked parallel to the catwalk, limping and looking for her coaches with a look of fear, much like Biles’ in Tokyo. But Strug can’t decide whether to continue competing or not. Béla, her personal trainer, yells at Strug the now famous Shake it off! You can do it! (Forget about falling! You can do it!). Strug completes the second jump and immediately lifts her ankle and falls to the floor in pain. The United States wins its first team gold medal, and on that day, every fan of gymnastics, of the sport, agreed that a gold medal was worth the pain, the future and the sacrifice of a teenage athlete. Carrying her to the awards ceremony, Béla is heard telling his pupil: “Enjoy it very much, you deserve it.”
Deserving medals, trophies and fan adoration for physical and mental sacrifice exists in the collective imagination as a fundamental basis of professional sport. We want to think that the Olympic athlete is morally obliged to suffer. Some time after her withdrawal from the 2021 Olympics, as Simone Biles herself recounts in a documentary that was released this year, she would understand that what she suffered in Tokyo was a response to trauma, that she had not adequately processed the fact that she had been a victim of child sexual abuse at the hands of Nassar and under the tyranny of the Károlys.
Béla and Márta Károly, who came to the United States from Romania in the 1980s after launching Nadia Comaneci to stardom, proudly spoke of having “created” a new style of gymnast: small and very thin, able to lift her own weight easily, and having no autonomy over her own body. Athletes from Romania and the United States alike have testified to what life was like under the Karolys’ control: If you have an injury, you won’t be believed; if you eat what a teenage body should eat to develop, you’re fat; if you don’t strive for perfection at the expense of your own health, you don’t deserve to be an athlete.
This was the stage where Larry Nassar became the team doctor for the women’s gymnastics team, and eventually the medical coordinator for USA Gymnastics. This was the environment in which Simone Biles developed. And as the only woman on Team USA to have competed as an elite gymnast before and after the Károly-Nassar era — and the greatest gymnast of all time — it has fallen to her to not only decide, but also to demonstrate, what gymnastics can be in a federation like USA, which for 30 years turned a blind eye to rumors and evidence of abuse because those in charge were convinced that total control of gymnasts was the most effective recipe for winning medals. Today, American gymnastics can be the starting point for a new perspective on the sport: that enjoying competition and being the best are not incompatible.
The Simone Biles we saw in Paris is a grown woman, a survivor of childhood abuse and the leader of a team where she is the veteran, the only victim of Nassar and the Karoly toxicity that endures and leads her teammates with the empathy that USA Gymnastics never had for her.
“We should be out here having fun,” Biles said at the news conference after the team final in Tokyo. “But sometimes that’s not the case.” Even Olympic historian Carl Diem, who coordinated the controversial 1936 Berlin Olympics, has called play a “purposeless activity,” with playing being its only goal.
At Tokyo 2020, we saw an Olympic Games without fans in the stadiums, without celebratory hugs or chants. And the world used that moment to tell Simone Biles who she should be. On August 5 in Paris, Biles showed that she knows better than any of us who she is and what is best for her sport. In that moment, when Andrade received her unexpected gold medal on floor, Biles decided to celebrate and reject the idea that she had somehow lost. In reality, it was our expectations that lost. She won. She won a silver medal, after having won three gold medals. The Olympic spirit won, the idea that gymnasts have power over their sport, over what they do better than anyone else.
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