Sacrifice

I feel sorry for gymnast Simone Biles, although she won't ever know it and certainly doesn't need it. One of the comments she's made in recent weeks is that she feels like she has the "weight of the world on her shoulders." It's easy to see why. She is clearly the most powerful and gifted women's gymnast of her generation. She has the strength and speed to succeed at moves so far beyond her competitors that her sport's international governing body will refuse to award the difficulty points they merit just to keep the score close.

Competitors accept as justified the pressure of being No. 1 and having everyone gunning for you, Many thrive on it. But our culture has laid much more on Ms. Biles. So many different interest groups make her their hero because of the many roadblocks she had to overcome in her life -- foster care, abuse by USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nasser, the treacherous cover-up of that abuse by the adults running the federation that was supposed to look out and care for her and so on. She was expected to be a voice for persons of color during tumultuous racial times because she was a public figure who was African-American. And sports media's ridiculous obsession with hanging the albatross of GOAT (Greatest of All Time) on certain athletes, blathered (and cared) about mostly by people who only watch the competitions. All of this and more while she is, at 24, simultaneously very very young to handle this load but also approaching that cutoff point for her peak skills. And while she is in a weird Olympics without spectators and staged a year late because of a pandemic.

I feel sorry for Ms. Biles mostly because she may have thought stepping back from competing because all of these different pressures had finally unbalanced her superhuman focus would somehow relieve her of them. She anticipated, I am sure, those who would label her a "quitter," but just as one expects a toddler to make a mess in his or her diaper, one might expect such people to make that judgment.

What she probably didn't anticipate that she would gain an entirely new expectation she didn't ask for: Champion of mental health awareness. Instead of easing out from under the pressure of being the Slay! Queen! of gymnastics she is now also the new avatar of self-care. Everything that has ever happened in the sport will now be re-evaluated in light of the new most courageous person who has ever lived. Rather than value individuals as such, we will now have her as our new paradigm that will let us look with a little bit of sadness and a whole lot of pity on those who may have made different choices at their own crisis points of competition.

I've already seen the first Facebook post that compares her to Kerri Strug, whose vault while injured during the 1996 Atlanta Games has been considered an example of competitive courage. Rather than value each woman for the choice she made when she made it, the post compares Biles' wise decision with Strug's risky one. It blames the tyrannical Bela Karolyi, Strug's coach, for coercing her to make what turned out to be an unneeded vault so the poster can skirt around making a direct judgment of Biles over Strug, but that's certainly the hint the reader is desired to take. Does Simone Biles, born the year after Strug's vault, think of her decision in that way? Who knows? Who cares? We think of it that way, and we will control this narrative too, thank you very much.

I feel sorry for Ms. Biles because with her decision, she may have thought she escaped what everyone else wanted from her and moved into a place where she could do what she wanted when, how and as she wanted. Nope, sorry. This is the 21st century, and when we put someone on the altar of popular culture to sacrifice them to our expectations, we decide when they can get off. Not them.