Simone Biles is out of Control: Or a Proposal for a New Gymnastics Scoring System

Simone Biles is credited with doing so much for the progression of women's gymnastics. She has competed many skills that many gymnasts would never even attempt in practice. But she also really doesn't stick these skills that much. Simone Biles plays it smart (at least in one way). She has realized she can do skills that have a high enough difficulty that it doesn't matter if she sticks it; it doesn't matter if she falls. In fact, as commentators are so fond of pointing out, she often has enough cushion that she could fall several times in a routine and still come out on top. And that does speak to Simone's impressive skills as a gymnast. But it also exposes a big problem.

The truth is, Simone is rarely truly in control of her tricks. She does everything with so much power, she often stumbles, steps, or in extreme cases flies right of the floor backwards. And this is dangerous. What is even more dangerous is that I think Simone might have finally started to realize it, which is possibly what is giving her "the twisties" in the first place. 

There was a lot of controversy surrounding the decision to award a lower than expected difficultly to certain skills that Simone can do that no other woman can, ostensibly because gymnastics officials are trying to keep the scores closer together. And perhaps it is just a conspiracy against Biles to keep things a little more interesting. 

But another possible reason for assigning a lower difficulty is that is reduces the incentive to do the skill. These skills are indeed insane and, more to the point, dangerous. But they are thrilling to watch; Biles has accomplished something by doing them and they are not so dangerous that it really makes sense to ban them outright. But just assigning a lower score does seem to punish excellence, which leads me to my proposal.

Instead of holding back on the difficulty, scale the deductions with the increase in difficultly (and danger). For example, instead of a fall being a .5 deduction, make it a certain amount for every point of difficultly. Or perhaps assign it to each skill individually depending on how likely you would break your neck if you mess up. This will encourage gymnasts to make sure they truly can control the skills they are competing by reducing the incentive to compete tricks you can't always land. Simone Biles and anyone else will be able to get her higher degree of difficultly; they just have to weigh the higher risks of not making it. 

Nothing Simone Biles did at this Olympics was Heroic

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.