Team USA celebrating their team gold medal win at the 2024 Olympics in Paris Source: Dan Mullan / Getty
Simone Biles former Olympic teammate, gymnast MyKayla Skinner, stepped into a world of self-inflicted hurt back in June when she offered a public, loud, mean-spirited and demonstrably wrong opinion about the 2024 class of female Olympic gymnasts not having the “work ethic” necessary to be great in the sport.
“Besides Simone, I feel like the talent and the depth just isn’t like what it used to be. Just notice like, I mean, obviously a lot of girls don’t work as hard. The girls just don’t have the work ethic,” Skinner said in a since-deleted YouTube video.
“And it’s hard too because of SafeSport,” she continued. “Like, coaches can’t get on athletes and they have to be really careful what they say. Which, in some ways, is really good, but at the same time, to get to where you need to be in gymnastics you do have to be, I feel like, a little aggressive and a little intense.” (I’m going to circle back to this part of her remark later.)
“I sincerely hoped that this topic wouldn’t need to be revisited but unfortunately things have really gotten out of hand lately. And it’s one thing to disagree with me regarding something I have said or a point I was trying to make, but it’s something else entirely when that turns into cyberbullying or even worse. Watching people cheer on the bullying — which has led to threats of physical harm to me my husband and our daughter — is disgusting. So please at this point, I’m just asking for it to stop for the sake of my family because enough is enough.
If Simone truly believes that I called our team lazy and lacking talent and if that’s really how she feels, I am really heartbroken over it. But not just heartbroken because it isn’t what I feel or even how I previously said, but because Simone’s latest post and others that followed it fueled another wave of hateful comments, DMs, articles and emails. Hate that includes death threats to me my family and even my agent. My family and my friends don’t deserve to be caught in the crossfire here. They’ve done nothing.
To Simone, I am asking you directly and publicly to please put a stop to this. Please ask your followers to stop. You have been an incredible champion for mental health awareness and a lot of people need your help now. We’ve been attacked in ways that I’m certain you never intended. Your performance, the team’s performance and the Olympics in general should be a time that we support one another.”
Skinner is not only out here publicly tasking Simone Biles with cleaning up the mess that Skinner herself made, but also as though Biles somehow has control over the whole of the internet. It’s her literally blaming a Black woman, Biles, for what a white woman choose to do. (Sound familiar?)
What Skinner describes as a new wave of attacks on her and her family is certainly not because Simone Biles, the 2024 USA Women’s Gymnastics Team Lead, did what team leads are supposed to do: support her teammates, Suni Lee, Jade Carey, Jordan Chiles and Hezly Rivera, when they’re wrongly and nastily attacked—and especially when that attack is completely inconsistent with the fact: they won gold.
Here’s Biles response to Skinner, which echoed Skinner’s own words:
“Lack of talent, lazy, Olympic champions.”
Skinner missed the Olympic champion part though.
So I have to go ahead and note the optics of a white woman demanding the labor of a Black woman on a very public forum as if the white woman is unaware of the scrutiny and misogynoir Black woman athletes already face in the world of sports. (Ask Venus and Serena. Ask Angel Reese. Ask Sha’Carri Richardson. Ask Brittney Griner. Ask Naomi Osaka. Hell, ask Simone Biles.)
This is Simone Biles–and Jordan Chiles–we’ve all come to know: women of sportsmanship and grace:
Silver and bronze medalists in individual floor, Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles, bow in praise to the history-making gold medal winner in the competition, Rebeca Andrade Source: Elsa / Getty
Honestly, Skinner should just count herself lucky that more attention hasn’t been drawn to the second part of her initial remarks I referenced earlier. They appeared to criticize SafeSport—a nonprofit organization that was literally put in place in response to the “reports of sexual abuse in amateur sport (that) made headlines in the 2010s,” according to the organization’s website.
Those reports included Biles’ own revelation that she, like many other young female gymnasts, was sexually assaulted by Team USA gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. Skinner is fortunate more people aren’t pointing out that, knowing that history, she passively criticized SafeSport because coaches don’t always get to be quite as mean as they used to be.
In fact, in another one of Skinner’s apologies, which the 27-year-old posted to Instagram, she explains that her comments “perhaps” resulted from the “emotional and verbal abuse” she “endured” while training under coach Marta Karolyi—the very type of treatment SafeSport is designed to protect athletes from.
Incidentally, Biles defended her clap back at Skinner on Tuesday, telling People it was “important” for her to speak up for her teammates “because you have to teach them to use their voices.”
“I just felt like it was right in that moment to stand up for them, because they’re so young and they haven’t fully stood in their power yet,” Biles said.
At the end of the day, Biles is not responsible for what Skinner did to herself no matter what the Olympic GOAT posted to social media, and Skinner is still failing to truly take full responsibility for the shitstorm she created for herself and her family if she’s putting the onus on Biles to call of dogs she did not let loose.
It’s a Karen-esque show of white privilege, and if Skinner doesn’t want to continue getting dragged online, she would do well to just let it go, wait for the storm to blow over, and, most of all, just keep any remaining comments she might have about Biles and Team USA in the drafts.
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