Simone Biles is now the most decorated U.S. gymnast in the history of the republic.
The Paris Games have solidified the diminutive 27-year-old as an Olympic legend.
But, I’m worried: Is America’s Golden Girl at risk of becoming a Mean Girl?
Hours after Biles’s Team USA squad won the all-around final last week, she shared a picture of herself with her flag-draped teammates to Instagram.
Beaming in the flash of the cameras, they were radiant. They were America’s champions.
But, bizarrely, Biles captioned the post: ‘lack of talent, lazy, Olympic champions’.
Die-hard gymnastics fans like me and my daughters (who spent years training and competing 20 hours a week in their childhoods) immediately knew what she meant — and who she was taking aim at.
In June, soon after the Team USA roster was announced ahead of the summer games, Biles’s former teammate, silver-medalist MyKayla Skinner, blabbed in a since-deleted YouTube video about the current tumbling crop.
Here’s the first half if you care (I don’t 😁) pic.twitter.com/wDpZLLxobv
— SUNI LEE 2X OLYMPIC CHAMPION (@jordynsleftbrow) August 6, 2024
‘Besides Simone, I feel like the talent and the depth just isn’t what it used to be. The girls just don’t have the work ethic,’ Skinner bitched.
It was an obviously disprovable hot take. And when our gleaming girls stood proudly atop the podium, Skinner’s envious clout-chasing was exposed.
She even publicly apologized for the lame comments, which she moaned had been ‘taken out of context’. And that’s where it should’ve ended.
But Biles couldn’t let sleeping goats lie.
In post-competition interviews, she doubled down on the Insta revenge.
‘I just felt like it was right in that moment to stand up for [my teammates] because they’re so young and they haven’t fully stood in their power yet,’ she told People magazine.
Then it was Skinner’s turn to take to social, dramatically pleading with Biles in a series of posts this week to call off the attack dogs, even claiming that she and her family were receiving ‘death threats’ from cyber bullies.
Behind the rhinestones and spandex, Skinner well knows the fierce cut-throatery required to make it in elite gymnastics.
But Simone Biles is also Simone Biles. The self-styled Greatest Of All Time, with 12 million Instagram followers to Skinner’s 400,000, her own clothing line and enough muscle to take on Donald Trump.
As the saying doesn’t go: with seven golds comes responsibility.
Now, to be clear, my sympathies are with Simone.
She has inspired my girls and countless others by overcoming overwhelming odds.
Her fans know all about her incredible journey through the foster care system as a child, as well as her brave 2018 testimony against sex offender and ex-USA gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, who abused Biles and at least 130 other young girls.
Many of Biles’s teammates, including Gabby Douglas, McKayla Maroney and Aly Raisman, were among the victims.
Maybe that’s why Skinner’s comments cut so deep, violating an unspoken pact among these women that they will always have each other’s backs.
And then there was Biles’s own collapse.
On the heels of Nassar’s sentencing, she was expected to dominate the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. When the moment came, she stumbled on the world stage and withdrew halfway through the competition, citing mental health struggles.
She even flirted with retirement before recommitting herself to the sport, marrying NFL star Jonathan Owens, and pulling off one of the greatest comeback stories in athletic history.
She is a nearly unparalleled, inspirational firework.
So why choose to become a lightning rod?
America’s children today are forced to grow up in a toxic, destructive quagmire of social media negativity.
Simone — I beg you — rise above all this, instead of punching down at an irrelevant has-been.
Accept Skinner’s apology. End this unnecessary online bullying from your fans, call out the cyber threats – and be the shining example in your public life that you are on the Olympic podium.
A woman who has overcome so much can surely conquer this petty childishness.
