Simone Biles withdrew from Olympic competition earlier this week. Unfortunately, she was already at the Olympics.
I have to admit, at first I was on team “Stop Being a Whiny Little Baby”. I thought she should’ve just sucked it up and done her job.
Then I thought some more.
First, there’s the issue of funding. People seem to have the mistaken impression that the Olympians are funded by taxes. They’re not.
Team USA fundraising is done by the US Olympic and Paralympic Foundation. It’s a non-profit organization that makes money by receiving donations and for selling endorsement deals. So unless you donated money to the US Olympic Charity, or you happen to be Nike, Coke or NBC, you have no claim on her abilities.
Since they’re not funded by the government, Team USA doesn’t technically represent the USA. They represent the USOC and their sponsors. They might have the US flag on their uniforms, but Team USA should really be called “Team Whoever is Paying to Have Their Logo Displayed”.
Now, if there was an Illegal Alien Olympics, and Simonita Bilesalez withdrew from the border fence jumping competition, then you could bitch. Because that would certainly be funded with taxpayer dollars.
But there isn’t. So you can’t.
I’ve read that Simone has the “twisties”. The “twisties” are essentially when a gymnast, in this case Simone, loses her sense of where she is in the air. I may be someone who’s challenged gymnastically by a merely doing summersault, but even I know having that is pretty important.
She left the competition after failing to land a vault she’s been successfully performing for years. She’s done her routines thousands of times. Her body knows what to do. It just won’t do it. It’s like the yips in golf. The difference is that in golf, slicing the ball a few times is just going to add some strokes to your score. If Simone catastrophically fails a vault, she could literally break her neck.
Gymnastics, particularly vaulting, is a dangerous activity. In fact, unless they’ve recently introduced the “javelin catch”, it might just be the most dangerous event in the summer Olympics.
You might think that Simone should have just powered through and did what she went there to do. I’m sure someone is going to point to Michael Jordan playing with the flu, or Kurt Shilling’s bloody sock, and say that she should have performed anyway. Sure, she could have tried harder. She could have failed worse. And she could have died.
Playing through adversity is all well and good if you’re running track, swimming, or throwing a shotput. If you fail doing any of those things you can just walk away. But, if you’re a gymnast and your timing is off by even a few milliseconds, you may never walk again.
Tell me, what would be more traumatic for a young fan of Simone, seeing her walk away from a competition or seeing her live the rest of her life in a wheelchair? Which one of those two is more likely to make someone want to follow in her footsteps? Assuming she still had footsteps.
If she had bowed out of competition as a form of protest against “racial injustice” or some other Liberal bescumberance, I’d be right there with you complaining about her. But she didn’t. She left the competition for what’s fundamentally a medical reason. No one should complain about that.
At the end of the day, Simone Biles doesn’t really need an excuse for not competing. The only people she’s beholden to are the people who donated to the USOC and the corporations who paid to have their name associated with hers. For the rest of us, the only reason she needed to give was simply “I don’t want to”.
After really thinking this through, I went from someone who believed she should have just sucked it up, to someone who believes she made the right decision.
So, if you still think you’re on the “Stop Being a Whiny Little Baby” bandwagon. Perhaps you should think again.
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