Olympics 2021: Simone Biles, so much weight on the shoulders
Forfeited for the individual all-around after withdrawing from the team event citing the need to preserve her mental health, American Simone Biles will not win five gold medals at the Tokyo Games as many had hoped. Her choice symbolizes the evolution of a champion victim of horror who has changed more as a human being than as a gymnast in recent months. And who has found his voice in every sense of the word.
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Two sentences to better understand. Announced star of gymnastics in Tokyo, Simone Biles withdrew from the final of the team competition – where her teammates ended up taking the silver – after a single horse jump far from her standards and dangerous for her physical integrity. She will also not participate in the individual all-around, where she has not been beaten since taking over the world in 2013, and doubts persist about her presence in her individual apparatus finals. The American will not become the first woman to win five gold medals in a single edition of the Games. She will not be the first woman to keep her Olympic all-around title since Soviet Larissa Latynina (1956-1960) and Czech Vera Caslavska (19654-1968)
She will not join Latynina and her nine gold medals at the Games after the four won in Rio in 2016 and will not be able to claim the status of the oldest gymnast titled in the Olympic all-around since 1968. But she will have been true to herself. and his feelings. To explain her withdrawal, the woman with thirty Olympic or world medals (nineteen planetary titles, a record for all sexes combined) pointed to her need to "(s) focus on (s) mental health": "We must protect our mind and body rather than doing what the world expects of us". All but a whim because of a small physical problem: not the kind of house for the one who had won a national championship with broken toes on both feet and Worlds with a kidney stone. "Physically, I feel good, I'm in good shape, she explained to NBC. Emotionally, however, it varies from moment to moment."
Margarita and Mexican restaurant
Biles, who had "never felt like this at the time of a competition", evokes "demons in the head", a metaphor for anxiety. "It's not easy to be considered the main star of these Games." Supported in her choice by many voices, she evokes "a long week, a long Olympic process, a long year..." She uses the word "stressed", a habit of the last few months, like her great nervousness when he had to travel to the national team camp in Indianapolis in March after a year without competition, when everyone was watching for a sign of waning dominance. Her failed "Amanar" jump, a first for her since she dominated the planet, proved that head and body no longer followed together. In these circumstances, continuing further would undoubtedly have penalized her teammates and above all would have put her at risk of serious injury.
The day before, after qualifying, the one who has had to manage for years an attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity – for which she is following treatment with amphetamines, a revelation made by the dissemination of sports TUEs by the Russian hackers Fancy Bears in 2016 – had taken up the pen on Instagram to evoke his feeling of having "the weight of the world on (his) shoulders". If no one could have foreseen his difficulties in Tokyo, the signs were not lacking. With two sentences, therefore, to better understand. The first is from the New York Times. Asked about the happiest moment of her career, her answer burst out: “Honestly, it was probably the moment when I took a break from my sport”. The second comes from the columns of Glamor magazine. Who asks her when she really feels like herself. "When I drink a margarita in a Mexican restaurant. That's me." Juliet Macur, the NYT journalist who wrote the article, summarizes: "She was waiting for the Games especially for their end. Her status has become too much to bear, in addition to what it does to her body."
Over the course of her numerous interviews in the American media in recent months, the star gymnast kept repeating that she would return to the Games "for (her)" and for this sport that she "loves so much". But not only. Victim of predator Larry Nassar, a former US national team doctor sentenced to 175 years in prison for the sexual abuse of more than 260 minors (he received another 60-year sentence for child pornography), Biles is the only victim of these abuse still in competition. So that no one forgets. So that the American federation, USA Gymnastics (USAG), which has long covered up the horrors of its doctor, hides nothing under the rug. And for all the victims beyond Nassar. “With everything that happened, I had to come back to the sport to be a voice, to allow there to be change, she explained to the microphone of NBC Today. The gym was not the only reason for I was supposed to come back. If there were no more survivors in our sport, they could have put that aside. But since I'm still here, and I have a big social media platform, they have to do Something."
When she learned of the one-year postponement of the Games via a family text message on March 24, 2020, a period when she felt in "exceptional shape" and ready to win everything in Japan after her five 2019 Worlds titles, the queen de Rio collapsed in tears in the locker room of the World Champions Center, the training room opened by her parents in 2015 in Spring (Texas). Before turning to Jordan Chiles, his training partner also a member of the US team in Tokyo: "I don't know if I can do this for another year". Convinced not to let go by her coach Cécile Canqueteau-Landi because she had "worked too much for that" and had "not gone so far to stop so close", Biles was not only talking about the additional months of submitting her body on the gym diet, a grim prospect when you've been doing it for so long that you admit with a smile that you have to "stretch before you stretch" and in a sport where her teammates don't hesitate to lay her down on her on the "old" side ("When I tell them that I have been doing this for seventeen years, some laugh and tell me that they are not even seventeen").
She also spoke, above all, of the weight of having to represent USA Gymnastics for one more year, this entity for which she gave everything but which betrayed her like all the other victims. "That was the hardest part," she admits. And to continue: "I go to Tokyo to represent the United States, my training room and women of color throughout the planet. But I do not represent USA Gymnastics. (…) If I let them govern me, they win." In the eye of critics, with several sponsors who have packed up, the USAG – which had to declare bankruptcy to protect itself in 2018 – needs Biles more than the reverse. "They have to tolerate everything she does because their best hope of bouncing back after the Nassar affair is called Biles, points out Bill Malon, Olympic historian. She is their saving grace, whether they admit it or not. If she had retired, I don't know how they would have managed to still be around."
When two gymnasts reveal to the Indianapolis Star the sexual abuse of Nassar, less than a month after the Rio Games, Biles is not yet ready to join the movement. In her head, she minimizes the abuse because "he had done worse to others". But the testimonies in shambles that will follow will make her accept the truth: she was indeed a victim of the doctor. But she forbids her family to discuss it. When her mother asks her about the matter, she denies it and leaves the room. "It was so hard to talk about it, she remembered in front of the cameras of the CBS channel and the 60 Minutes show. It hurt me a lot and I knew it would hurt my parents too and I didn't want to not that they feel that pain because it was really a dark moment for me."
The changeover takes place in January 2018. In tears, she surrenders to her mother. Who understood everything before she even opened her mouth. "She didn't say anything, says her mom. She just cried. Because I knew." The day before the hearing where Nassar must learn his pain, Biles confides in the world via social networks "to give power back to the victims": "It is so difficult, almost impossible, to relive these experiences. But the more I try to turn off the voice in my head, the louder it screams. And it breaks my heart to think that in my work approaching Tokyo, I'm going to have to continually come back to the training center where I've been abused." Biles recalls The Ranch, the national training center run by authoritarian coaches Bela and Martha Karolyi – for example, they forbade clapping to encourage others, to develop a competitive spirit, and food was rationed – where some of the Nassar's sexual abuse took place. Three days after its release, USA Gymnastics announces that it is ending its ties with The Ranch and the Karolyi.
The gym star spoke up and the consequences were quick to come. "After years of pleasing everyone, she finally spoke for herself and quickly discovered the weight that her words could have," says journalist Stephanie Apstein, who met her in recent weeks for Sports Illustrated. The sequel will be in tune. In August 2018, she criticized the new USAG president, Kerry Perry, for her silence in the Nassar case (whose lawyer he had hired in a high position). Three weeks later, Perry is pressured to resign. When Mary Bono replaces her, a photo of her coloring in the Nike logo to criticize the equipment manufacturer's support for Colin Kaepernick - the NFL quarterback who first took his knee during the national anthem to protest the violence police – starts circulating.
Biden, Capitol and Black Lives Matter
Biles takes to Twitter: "Don't worry, it's not like we need a smarter USAG president or sponsors or things like that." Four days later, Bono is also on her way out. Eventually, her teammates even ended up having fun: some asked her to claim an all-expenses-paid vacation to the Caribbean for the national team. Biles, who calls again and again for a "truly" independent investigation into the Nassar affair to "know the whole truth", no longer hides to think and express himself. On March 14, 2020, the day of his twenty-threeth birthday, the USAG Twitter account wishes him a "happy birthday": "We know that you will continue to amaze us and write history". His response slams like a long-line winning backhand: "How about you in turn amaze me by doing the right thing... launching an independent investigation?"
From the height of her meter forty-two, she had already taken out the sulfateuse before the American championships in 2019, when it was launched on the fact that the USAG had caused more victims by hiding things: "You had not only one thing to do and you failed to protect us". "They let me down, yes, 100%, she says today. We bring back medals, we do our part and you can't do yours in return. It makes me sick…" Au point that she would refuse to put her future daughter in the gym in the current state of things: "They did not take responsibility enough for their actions and they did not assure us that it would never happen again". His commitment to changing mentalities in his sport is multiple. In the family room, where the diversity of athletes changes from a predominantly white environment, the training mat is surrounded by glass walls to allow parents to always see the sessions and not worry about the treatment received by their children.
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His desire to change the world does not stop at the gym. She encouraged her followers to vote Joe Biden in the presidential election. After the invasion of the Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump last January, she declared herself "embarrassed but not surprised, disgusted but not surprised, sad but not surprised, angry but not surprised, speechless but not surprised". She spoke out in support of the Black Lives Matter movement following the death of George Floyd. Last June, after her seventh national title, she had four words tattooed on her collarbone from a poem by Maya Angelou about self-confidence and black pride in the face of oppression: "and still I rise" ( "and yet I get up").
She has championed the LGBTQ cause and urged people to "not care about race, gender, or sexual orientation," such as when Christian group One Million Moms accused her of "pushing the LGBTQ agenda on people." families" last year for appearing in an Uber Eats ad with Jonathan Van Nass of the show Queer Eye while both wearing tights: "I accept everyone. there are people who are less open than me on this level. She denounced racist violence against Asian Americans. She demanded drinking water and electricity for all. She got engaged, what. "I feel like I've found my voice a bit more. I'm helping people who need it and that's why I'm doing this."
Biles doesn't mince words anymore. Aware, too, of her new responsibilities: "I realized this power after telling my story and it was a little scary. I have to be careful what I say." The one who wanted to please the greatest world - "In Rio, I had the feeling that what I was doing did not matter as long as I satisfied the people around me" - now accepts to displease some in the name of social justice. "The older I get, the more I research and realize what's important to me and what I want to speak out about, she told Texas Monthly. When I see things that shouldn't happen, I will speak my mind because I can tell right from wrong. For a long time, athletes were silenced or punished for speaking out what they believed in. But now we are being watched and expected: 'What's Simone going to say? Are LeBron and Serena going to say anything?'"
After words, there are actions. The usual USAG post-Olympic tour? Unthinkable in his eyes. Simone preferred to launch her own tour, The Gold America Tour (or GOAT, US abbreviation for "greatest of all time"), which should take place after Tokyo. "After everything that happened, I wanted it to be completely different, on my own terms. It's very powerful to do that." This show will be 100% female, choice claimed: "It's to highlight the emancipation of women. This last year has been great for freeing women's voices and I think it's good to continue in this direction with women who feel happy and find their love and passion for the gym back I know the men were really pissed off about this, some even contacted me to tell me about it but this is my tour and I do what I want. (…) It's not up to me to make sure they make money but up to them and their agent."
When her contract with Nike ended in May, she left the equipment manufacturer criticized for the way it treats its female athletes (especially when they are pregnant) to join a less powerful but 100% female brand, Athleta, which will sponsor its tour and where she intends to design her own line. The choice is quickly explained: "Athleta is aligned with my values". “She has taken on the costume of her new power as an independent black woman who knows what she is worth and who is accountable to no one, notes Juliet Macur. She joined black athletes like Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams to make an impact on sport and society." The parallel with Osaka, who had a lot of talk for his choice to skip press conferences at the last Roland Garros for his mental health before withdrawing from the tournament, is obvious. And the portrait painted has everything to do with the news of the last few hours.
In Rio, Biles might have preferred to keep quiet and continue, even if it means completely failing and putting her physical integrity at stake. But in Tokyo, when the young woman has given way to the adult, there is no longer any question of not listen to the one who knows her best: herself. "If you don't put your mental health first, you're not going to enjoy your sport and you're not going to be as successful as you would like, she recalls. Sometimes it's OK not to participate in sports. big competitions to focus on yourself because it shows how strong a competitor and a strong person you are, rather than struggling to get through it." Her attitude after her withdrawal, to encourage her own, and the support of her teammates are all signs of changing mentalities. Gymnasts who assume to no longer say yes to everything for glory, starting with their figurehead.
"I don't need to be there"
To find his voice, Biles will have known an unlikely ally. The containment. Deprived of training for seven weeks due to the Covid pandemic, alone at home with no one to distract her except her French bulldogs Lilo and Rambo, the gymnast experienced a face-to-face with her thoughts. Above all, she was able to accept them without having to justify herself. "I let myself go with my emotions, she says. Sad, mad, angry, very angry, hysterical, I went through all these phases. It was the first time in my life that I could feel the emotions rather than having someone come up to me and say, 'Hey, it'll be fine'." The one who has often cried out her desire to retire when she missed a movement in training in recent months – it only lasted a few seconds before changing her mind – has now accepted the possibility of the opposite.
In the weeks and months following the revelation of the abuse suffered at the hands of Nassar, Biles fell into a deep depression and slept a lot. "It was the closest thing to death without hurting me," she told Vogue. "She felt like she let her fans down because America wanted her to be perfect," said Juliet Macur. Therapy will help him get his head above water. To find the balance between the abused but adored champion and the young woman who seeks to know who she really is. "I learned that it's good to ask for help if you need it," she insists. However, she was initially reluctant. "During one of the first sessions, I didn't speak at all. I was like, 'I'm not crazy, I don't need to be here'." Her therapist will convince her of the benefits of this space for free speech: "I thought I could understand everything on my own, but sometimes that's not the case. And you shouldn't feel guilty or ashamed because of that. Once I got past that, I really enjoyed the therapy and couldn't wait to go back. It's a safe place." She continues to go there and take painkillers to manage the trauma.
The sport that made her queen could have destroyed her. The trauma is one more, to add to those of childhood, taken away from her drug-addicted mother when she was a baby, taken in charge by social services with her brother and two sisters and placed in a foster family where she had explained that we fed "the cats before (her) and Adria" her little sister. The eldest, Ashley and Tevin, will end up being taken in by a great-aunt from Ohio while Simone and Adria are welcomed by Ron, their maternal grandfather, and his second wife Nellie who adopt them when the future champion is six. years. Very family, the gymnast has necessarily also been affected in recent years by the legal battle experienced by Tevin, her three-year eldest who protected her when she was very young, accused of a triple murder by bullets during a New Year's Eve party. year (moving to 2019) in Cleveland for which he was acquitted in June.
Since Rio, the superstar who has four tricks to his name (because he was the first to have done them in major international competition) and was hoping to add a fifth in Tokyo with his impressive double pike Yurchenko on vault (passed in May during the US Classic ) evolved less on mats and gym equipment than in life in general. "Before, I only focused on the gym and working out. But being happy outside the gym is as important as being inside." Her return to post-lockdown training was done "on (her) own terms": "I am no longer a little girl. It all depends on me. Nobody is forcing me." Biles grew up in a rush and bought her own house, "dressed" with an interior designer friend in a modern style unlike that of her parents' home. She ended her three-year relationship with former gymnast Stacey Ervin Jr to get in a relationship with Jonathan Owens, Houston Texans (NFL) player contacted via a private message on Instagram and who knew nothing about her.
"It was also a choice, analyzes Stephanie Epstein. She wanted to open her world beyond gymnastics. She ended up with someone who is still learning the difference between two basic movements in the gym. Sometimes they argue nicely to find out which sport is the most difficult. The pandemic has given her the opportunity to make her own choices and she has realized that she likes it." In February, when a family trip to Belize where her mother Nellie was born (Simone has dual nationality) falls through for a positive Covid test from her mother, who was vaccinated, she decides to leave anyway with Owens. Cocktails on the beach, jet-skiing and swimming with sharks are on the program. For the first time, especially, she is not chaperoned by her family or her coaches. The first real adult vacation of his life.
"Who will I become?"
Emancipated from the family cocoon and the toxic side of the USAG, Biles (re)discovers herself. But something is missing, no doubt, with all the pressure she can take on her shoulders. "I don't know if it's a question of age but I'm a little more nervous when I do my sport, she admitted in recent hours. I feel like I don't take as much pleasure as before. ." Yet she has made it a creed, the legacy she wants to leave: a world where women and young girls can shape their identity with joy and confidence. "If you're not having fun doing it, it's not worth it." In a sport where obedience and the absence of good humor have long been the only standards in training because the only path seen towards excellence, the Karolyi method, the American has upset habits. "Before Simone, no one had proven that you could be great by being happy," confirms Valorie Kondos Field, legendary coach of the women's gym team at UCLA, a Californian university for which Biles wanted to compete before choosing to turn pro.
With all that she has been through lately, and this painful past that she will never really be able to get rid of between people who "constantly mention (her)" on social networks at the slightest information on the Nassar affair and the reminders of the news like the suicide of John Geddert (coach of the American women's team in 2012 who worked with the doctor) after being charged with "sexual assault" last March, difficult to find a smile as the only horizon. In his, more than medals or titles, there is first of all life. The one who waits for him afterwards. If she hinted that she could afford a return to Paris 2024 on the jump for a nod to her French coaches Laurent Landi and Cécile Canqueteau-Landi, the gymnast who forced the judges to minimize her scoring for not inciting the competition to reproduce its figures which defy the laws of physics and imagination will probably never return. Nevermind.
Its sporting heritage, that of the best in history for many specialists, does not need it. And the main thing is elsewhere: the woman is ready for the future, even if she is still looking for herself. Simone has to call her father to use his alarm and has only learned how to use a dishwasher in the last few months. But she's also the friend who makes sure everyone gets home safely. The big sister who reproaches Adria, twenty-two, for sending her messages with abbreviations. “She is like everyone her age, straddling youth and adulthood,” says Stephanie Apstein. "I try not to be too hard on myself because I'm like, 'If I had been in school and just graduated, I'd be fighting with them trying to find a job, trying to figure out who I am." It eases my mind. We're all struggling to figure out who we are and what we're good at rather than letting society tell us what we need to do."
Biles has "no idea" what she will be doing after her gym career. At ease in front of the cameras, she dreams of having her own TV show. She would also like to work with foster children, as she has been. She has the whole future ahead of her and doors will open. She will just have to decide which one to enter. "She is excited about this next chapter but it also scares her," says Juliet Macur. "You want the sporting retirement to come but at the same time you don't want it to end, explains the person concerned. I am a great athlete, but who am I really? When we remove this mask, who will I become ? I'm still trying to find out." And to complete: "It sucks to reach your peak at twenty-three or twenty-four. Because from there, it's just a downward slope. It's a huge task to accomplish: making sure it keeps going up from now on. (…) I'm very excited to see what else is out there for me in this world."
“She was able to learn to love herself more”
“Her life's work is not to become the greatest gymnast of all time but everything that comes after it, supports Stephanie Epstein. With the pandemic, stuck alone with herself, she found answers to her questions. Why is she doing this? For her, finally. And who is she? She's powerful. And she's in control." “If everything had gone as planned and she had launched herself into the world last summer after the Games, I have no idea where she would be, assures her big brother Adam, one of the two natural sons of Ron and Nellie, who tried to instill confidence in Simone and Adria when he walked them to school by asking them to repeat while shouting "I'm black and I'm proud of it!" to assert himself in their upscale, predominantly white neighborhood in suburban Houston. A year later, maturity really came. She grew as a person. She got to learn to love herself more."
To listen, too. Until he can retire from the biggest athletic scene in the world to save himself. There was the pressure to "always try to be better than last time", the one implied in the title of the documentary Simone vs Herself broadcast on Facebook and of which she was executive producer. There was everything else. The American will never again be Olympic champion in the individual all-around. But if she can become a champion of life, she will happily be content with it. Being Simone Biles hasn't been easy the past few years. It should be easier in the following.
https://twitter.com/LexaB Alexandre Herbinet Journalist RMC SportTo read also
