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One went on when she probably should have stopped. The other stopped when she knew she couldn’t go on. In the 25 years in between, women’s gymnastics has tried to find its balance.
In 1996, 18-year-old Kerri Strug limped to the start of the vault runway in Atlanta, ignored her throbbing left ankle, dashed off on a sprint and vaulted her way into history. With the United States trying to break Russia’s stranglehold and simultaneously win its first gymnastics Olympic team gold medal, Béla Károlyi sent Strug off with words of encouragement spliced with an ominous tone. “You can do it,” he told her. “You better do it.”
That is how USA Gymnastics operated, the sequins and smiles masking a sport steeped in intimidation and abuse. The Larry Nassar investigation revealed gymnastics’ sinister side and prompted an uncomfortable but necessary reconciliation sportwide. Hundreds of victims came forward, forcing the ouster of coaches and administrators, the development of SafeSport and an overhaul in how the governing body conducted business. The wounds will take a long time to heal, if they ever do, and trust even longer to regain.
The Paris Games are being billed as a rebirth for gymnastics, the culmination of that long and painful process. The change, however, started even before this Olympic cycle. It began in Tokyo when Simone Biles said she couldn’t go on and no one told her she’d better go anyway.
Sports stars are our superheroes, meant to leap tall buildings without showing any sign of human frailty. Mere mortals quit. Athletes overcome; they persevere. Rub a little dirt on it and go on — that’s what it means to be exceptional.
Forty-five seconds before she launched herself into the American sport lexicon, Strug landed awkwardly and yelled to her coach that she couldn’t feel her foot. He told her to “shake it out.” Unsure if the U.S. had secured enough points to win the team gold medal, that’s exactly what Strug did. She stuck the landing, earning her left ankle and its two torn ligaments a place alongside Jack Youngblood’s broken tibia, Kirk Gibson’s shredded left hamstring, Willis Reed’s torn thigh muscle and Michael Jordan’s flu-ridden stomach on the list of body parts sacrificed for the athletic cause.
Bathed in the red, white and blue of the United States, there stood Strug, carried to the medal ceremony by her coach, a tiny but powerful American hero who helped vanquish the rival Russians. Suddenly Strug was everywhere — hanging with Demi Moore and Bruce Willis at Planet Hollywood, meeting President Bill Clinton. “America’s Cover Girl,” as one newspaper declared her, eventually appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated and, in the height of 1990s athletic fame, on the front of a Wheaties box.
Coach Béla Károlyi carries off Kerri Strug after Strug pulled off a gold medal-clinching vault for Team USA with an injured ankle at the 1996 Olympics. (Doug Pensinger / Getty Images)
After the numbers were crunched, revealing the United States would have won gold without Strug’s second vault, a few people questioned the sanity of allowing a clearly injured teenager to catapult herself into the sky and plant all her weight on an already compromised and damaged joint. But their concerns were drowned out by the wave of patriotism and pride that swelled around Strug. She, herself, dismissed the claim, arguing that as an 18-year-old, she made her own decision and the skepticism took a backseat to the euphoria, anyway.
As Karolyi told the “Today” show after Strug’s vault, “Well, that particular moment, there was not consideration about how serious the injury is. As long as she was standing on her feet.”
Only much later did anyone question that wisdom.
“We were all injured. We were all beaten down and battered,” Strug’s teammate Dominique Dawes says in “Simone Biles Rising,” a Netflix documentary. “She’s standing at the vault runway, visibly in physical pain, and emotional pain as well. Her coaches are telling her she can do that. Like, that would be nerve-wracking as an adult. These are young teenagers who have already given up their whole lives, and now 40,000 people are screaming for her to go because it’s for your country.”
And so Strug went.
Twenty-five years later, Simone Biles stood at the end of a vault runway in Tokyo. Team competition had just begun. The United States arrived as heavy favorites to repeat as gold medalists, the expectations for success based largely on Biles’ dominance. In the 2019 world championships before the Games, Biles won the all-around, vault, beam and floor, and the U.S. topped Russia by nearly 6 points. Four golds in Tokyo seemed plausible, five not even outlandish.
Like Strug, Biles sprinted down the runway and launched herself. She was meant to do an Amanar, an incredibly difficult vault that requires 2 1/2 rotations. A month earlier at the U.S. Olympic trials, she nailed it and scored a 15.466. But this time she completed only 1 1/2 twists and landed with a huge step forward. Because this was Biles, who routinely makes the impossible look easy, it became clear something wasn’t right. On the broadcast, announcers speculated about an injury as Biles convened with team doctors.
No one else knew Biles had been experiencing a sense of disorientation in practice. Gymnasts call it “the twisties,” a sort of vertigo in which they get lost in the air. After meeting with the medical staff, Biles left the competition floor, only to return in her warmups. She was done for the night, leaving her teammates to go on without her.
Simone Biles talks with coach Cécile Canqueteau-Landi after the vault that led her to withdraw from the team all-around at the Tokyo Olympics. She returned days later and won bronze on the beam. (Robert Deutsch / USA Today)
Eventually, everyone learned what had happened to Biles. But because there was no shattered ankle, no injured knee, no splint, cast or crutches, her decision left room for speculation, if not downright criticism. Some likened it to a case of the yips, failing to recognize the potentially catastrophic consequences had Biles chosen to continue. Gymnasts are expected to launch into the air and tumble, flip and twist, or swing on a bar and let go, flip, or twist before catching the bar again. Not knowing where you’re going is like asking a pilot to do a barrel roll with his eyes closed or a skydiver to land without a parachute.
Biles knew to compete was to risk serious injury. She also knew not to compete was to risk her team’s medal chances. “It’s not worth getting hurt over something so silly, even though it’s so big,” she said after withdrawing from team competition and eventually the individual all-around. “It’s the Olympic Games. But at the end of the day, it’s like, we want to walk out of here, not be dragged out of here on a stretcher. So I’ve got to do what’s best for me.”
The U.S. won silver, second to the Russian Olympic Committee by 3 points, a gap Biles’ participation likely would have closed.
This time, though, no one told Biles she had better go on. In the Netflix documentary, Biles considered her decision versus the choice not given to Strug. She acknowledged that her initial reaction to Strug’s vault was like everyone else’s.
“Total badass. You go, girl,” she said. “Now, though, I think about it a little differently.”
Simone the quitter. GOATs don’t quit on teammates.
Please don’t quit on your team again this Olympics.
Are they really letting Simone Biles try out for the Olympics? What if she gets a tummy ache? Or just isn’t feeling it again?
Trolls die hard. Though Biles heads to Paris with the respect of many for calling attention to the importance of mental health, many still question the legitimacy of her struggles. The White House thought enough of Biles’ combination of success and advocacy that it awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That didn’t stop detractors.
A medal for backing out of the last Olympics, but she still went to watch and took a spot from someone else?
Maybe once it would have preyed on Biles’ insecurities, the ones fed by a culture that valued success over self and even safety. But post-Tokyo, she took a full year off from competition. She met with a therapist and considered what she wanted, not what was expected of her.
Eventually, Biles realized she still wanted gymnastics. And so, at age 27, a veritable old lady by the sport’s standards, she heads to her third Olympic Games. On her terms. By her choice.
“My ‘why’ is nobody is forcing me to do it,” she said. “I wake up every morning and choose to grind in the gym and come out to perform for myself.”
“My ‘why’ is nobody is forcing me to do it,” Simone Biles says of her latest Olympic effort. “I wake up every morning and choose to grind in the gym and come out to perform for myself.” (Elsa / Getty Images)
That isn’t to say her expectations are any less. Her below (by her standards) effort on the beam at trials left her visibly — and audibly — frustrated. But she competes with lightness and joy, shifting from a game face before her routines to easy smiles after. At trials, she waved to her family, blew kisses to the crowd and hugged a 106-year-old veteran who said she was his favorite gymnast.
There is an easy trope that Biles’ return is also silencing the naysayers. She was asked about that at trials.
“Yeah, but it doesn’t even matter if I do it,” she said. “They’ll still just say, ‘Oh my gosh, are you going to quit again?’ And if I did, what are you going to do about it? Tweet me some more? I’ve already dealt with it for three years.”
Her tone was more defiant than dismissive. Come at me. Give it what you got.
Because no one is telling Biles, or anyone, what to do anymore.
GO DEEPER
Team USA’s Olympics gymnastics leotards revealed: A look at the eight designs for Paris
(Top illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photo of Simone Biles: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
