Simone Biles is not a villain. I don't wish to heavily criticize anything she did. But Simone is no hero either.
What Simone did at this Olympics was selfish. This isn't something I am going to debate with anyone; she fully admits this herself. She left in the middle of the team event because, she says, “At the end of the day, I have to do what was right for me.” It isn't always wrong to be selfish. I even will go so far as to say it was probably reasonable for Simone specifically in this specific situation.
But . . .
Being selfish, even when it was reasonable for the specific situation, does not make you a hero. Perhaps standing up for herself was brave. I admit there was tremendous pressure on Simone to preform and it is hard to disappoint people when they are putting so much on you. But by her own admission this was an act of self-preservation more than an act of standing up for something. And by her own admission, she has been struggling with this for a long time; she should have stood up for herself before she took the Olympic dream away from another girl by not being honest about her lack of competition-ready mental state. The truth is if an athlete hid a physical injury from everyone because she was feeling tremendous pressure to preform and then decided after it was too late to put in an alternate that she could not go on without risking more injury, no one would call her a hero. And that is essentially what Simone did. It doesn't make her a villain--but it doesn't make her a hero either.
As for doing the beam in the end: I am glad she had the opportunity to compete one last time and she hurt no one else by doing it. But there wasn't really anything that inspired me in that either. She just did the event that she qualified for and placed lower than she was originally expected to. That is simply an outcome, not a heroic act.
Truly, I wish Simone Biles all the best, though I hope for her sake that best is away from gymnastics. But that is a topic for another post.
No comments:
Post a Comment