Young Gymnasts Are Taught That Their Bodies Are Not Their Own. Simone Biles Refused to Accept That

Simone Biles shocked the world when she pulled out of the gymnastics team finals at the Olympics on Tuesday. But if you have been listening to Simone—or following the sport of gymnastics—her decision wasn’t all that shocking. Just the other day she posted that she feels like she has the weight of the world on her shoulders. And she does. She’s been in the public eye since she was 14, and she hasn’t lost a competition since 2013. Everyone expects history-making performances and for her to carry home a victory for America.

On Tuesday, you could sense that something was wrong. You could feel it through the screen after her first vault. Simone was obviously shaken up. She wasn’t her typical bubbly self. And if you could feel it through the screen, imagine standing next to her as her teammate. Imagine being her. Unlike event qualifications, in which four people compete but only the top three scores are used, every single score counts in event finals. Margins of error count. You don’t want to be second-guessing yourself during those times. Not only is it physically dangerous, but it can erode the confidence of those around you. The smartest thing to do was for Simone to step back and ask, what is the best thing I can do from here?

That’s not always a question that athletes have felt comfortable asking. In the last day, a lot of commentators have brought up Kerri Strug, who won gold at the 1996 Olympics for performing the vault despite injuring her ankle. As athletes, we’re told to tough it out. It’s toxic masculinity at work, this idea that we should ignore our emotions and what our body needs. We call what she did heroic. But if you think about it, it’s pretty abusive to support a win-at-all-costs environment for athletes where they feel they have no other option but to risk serious bodily harm to perform.

Simone, the greatest of all time and just 24 years old, is an icon in a sport that sacrifices bodies, minds and lives for perfection. You are literally judged on how close to perfection you come. Your identity comes to be built around it. But what happens when an athlete realizes they are human? That they are inherently imperfect?

Many people spent the last year in quarantine reflecting on their lives. That’s true too for Olympic athletes, who probably have never had the downtime to sit and think about their own mental health since they started the sport. For a gymnast, that starts at around 3, and for Simone around 6. For almost 20 years she hasn’t gotten a break to think about everything she’s gone through and process it.

Major athletes like Naomi Osaka and Michael Phelps talking about mental health has had a massive impact on the cultural conversation. That no doubt helped create space for Simone’s decision. It is the year of reckoning around mental health in sports, and when Simone withdrew from the individual all-around competition a day later to focus on her mental health, USA Gymnastics issued a statement saying they applauded her bravery.

That was progress.

I think that it would have been completely disastrous for any institution that didn’t stand 100% behind Simone’s decision. But there is no way she would have gotten the same support in 2016. USAG has historically prioritized generating medals over athlete well-being. Simone has been really open about her struggles with mental health and her feelings towards USAG, and her experiences in these past few years have no doubt helped her to find her voice. But we have to respect her struggle and the things that perhaps she has not said out loud because, frankly, it’s not her job or obligation to explain to anyone what she’s going through. Despite the media environment we live in, we are not in fact entitled to this information. It is her body, her mind, her journey and her sport.

This is the inevitable and necessary next step in the conversation the gymnastics community has been having for the last couple of years. There is abuse in every sport, particularly at the elite levels. But exposing that abuse in gymnastics was particularly crucial. We start so young, and we have no autonomy over our bodies. It’s not just about the physical and sexual abuse that many suffered. You’re told to put your body on the line every single second, to risk your safety, to embrace eating disorders, to stunt your growth and puberty. Look at the outfits that we wear. We are told to wear leotards that go up our butts, that can expose our privates, and we can’t even pick a wedgie without getting a deduction. This year the women competing for Germany are wearing suits to their ankles, and that’s somehow controversial. Times have evolved, but the ideologies of gymnastics are lagging.

Simone’s decision will echo throughout sports history as a moment when an athlete who had given everything to everyone else decided to stand up for herself. The system is set up to make you feel as if your body isn’t your own, your selfhood isn’t your own. And what we’re seeing now is a manifestation of athletes taking back their autonomy and redefining what winning is.

For Simone, perhaps after setting all the records there are to set and inspiring us all to fall back in love with gymnastics, owning that definition and claiming her power on the world stage will be what sticks with us all the most.

—As told to Eliana Dockterman

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