Follow our Olympic Games coverage in the run-up to the Paris Olympics.
One kept going when she probably should have stopped. The other stopped when she knew she couldn’t go on. In the 25 years between, women’s gymnastics has tried to find its balance.
In 1996, 18-year-old Kerri Strug limped to the starting line of the Atlanta show jumping track, ignored her throbbing left ankle, sprinted away, and leapt into history. As the United States tried to break Russia’s stranglehold and win its first Olympic gymnastics gold medal, Béla Károlyi sent Strug off with words of encouragement mixed with a menacing tone. “You can do it,” he told her. “You have to do it.”
That was how USA Gymnastics operated, the sequins and smiles masking a sport riddled with intimidation and abuse. Larry Nassar’s investigation exposed the sinister side of gymnastics and led to an uncomfortable but necessary reconciliation across the sport. Hundreds of victims came forward, leading to the firing of coaches and administrators, the creation of SafeSport, and an overhaul of the way the governing body did business. The wounds will take a long time to heal, if they ever do, and the trust will take even longer to rebuild.
The Paris Games are being heralded as a rebirth for gymnastics, the culmination of that long and painful process. But the change began before this Olympic cycle. It began in Tokyo when Simone Biles said she couldn’t go on and no one told her she had better go.
Sports stars are our superheroes, who must leap tall buildings without showing any sign of human frailty. Ordinary mortals give up. Athletes overcome; they persevere. Rub a little dirt on it and keep going — that’s what it means to be exceptional.
Forty-five seconds before she launched herself into American sports jargon, Strug landed awkwardly and yelled at her coach that she couldn’t feel her foot. He told her to “shake it out.” Unsure whether the U.S. had enough points to win the team gold medal, Strug did just that. She landed properly, putting her left ankle and its two torn ligaments alongside Jack Youngblood’s broken tibia, Kirk Gibson’s torn left hamstring, Willis Reed’s torn femoral muscle, and Michael Jordan’s flu-ridden stomach on the list of body parts sacrificed for the sporting cause.
Bathed in the red, white and blue of the United States, Strug stood there, carried to the medal ceremony by her coach, a small but mighty American heroine who helped defeat the rival Russians. Suddenly, Strug was everywhere — hanging out with Demi Moore and Bruce Willis at Planet Hollywood, meeting President Bill Clinton. “America’s Cover Girl,” as one newspaper dubbed her, eventually appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated and, at the height of athletic fame in the 1990s, on the front of a Wheaties box.
Coach Béla Károlyi carries Kerri Strug off the court after Strug played with an injured ankle to win a gold medal for Team USA at the 1996 Olympics. (Doug Pensinger/Getty Images)
After the numbers were crunched and it turned out that the United States had won gold without Strug’s second jump, a few people questioned the wisdom of letting an obviously injured teenager catapult herself into the air and put all her weight on an already bruised and damaged joint. But their concerns were drowned out by the wave of patriotism and pride that surrounded Strug. She herself dismissed the claim, arguing that she had made her own decision as an 18-year-old and that the skepticism was secondary to the euphoria anyway.
As Karolyi told the “Today” show after Strug’s jump, “Well, at that particular moment, there was no thought about how serious the injury was. As long as she was on her feet.”
Only much later did people begin to question that wisdom.
“We were all hurt. We were all beaten up and abused,” Strug’s teammate Dominique Dawes says in “Simone Biles Rising,” a Netflix documentary. “She’s standing on the gangplank, visibly in physical pain and emotional pain. Her coaches are telling her she can do it. That would be nerve-wracking as an adult. These are young teenagers who have given up their whole lives, and now there are 40,000 people screaming at her to go because it’s for your country.”
And so went Strug.
Twenty-five years later, Simone Biles stood at the end of a vault in Tokyo. The team competition had just begun. The United States came in as heavy favorites to win gold again, and expectations for success were largely based on Biles’ dominance. At the 2019 World Championships before the Games, Biles had won the all-around, vault, beam, and floor, with the U.S. beating Russia by nearly 6 points. Four gold medals in Tokyo seemed plausible; five even not outrageous.
Like Strug, Biles sprinted down the runway and launched herself. She had to do an Amanar, an incredibly difficult jump that requires 2 1/2 rotations. A month earlier, at the U.S. Olympic Trials, she had nailed it, scoring a 15.466. But this time, she completed only 1 1/2 twists and landed with a giant leap forward. Because this was Biles, who routinely makes the impossible look easy, it was clear that something was amiss. During the broadcast, announcers speculated about an injury as Biles met with team doctors.
No one else knew that Biles was experiencing a feeling of disorientation during practice. Gymnasts call it “the twisties,” a kind of dizziness where they get lost in the air. After meeting with the medical staff, Biles left the competition floor, only to return to her warm-up. She was done for the night, leaving her teammates without her.
Simone Biles talks to coach Cécile Canqueteau-Landi after the vault that caused her to withdraw from the all-around team at the Tokyo Olympics. She returned a few days later and won bronze on the beam. (Robert Deutsch / USA Today)
Eventually, everyone found out what had happened to Biles. But with no broken ankle, injured knee, splint, cast or crutches, her decision left room for speculation, if not outright criticism. Some likened it to a case of the yips, failing to recognize the potentially catastrophic consequences if Biles had decided to continue. Gymnasts are expected to leap into the air and tumble, flip and spin, or swing from a bar and let go, flip or spin before grabbing 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 that competing meant risking serious injury. She also knew that not competing meant risking her team’s medal chances. “It’s not worth getting injured for something so stupid, no matter how big it is,” she said after withdrawing from the team competition and ultimately the individual all-around. “It’s the Olympics. But at the end of the day, we want to walk out of here, not be dragged out on a stretcher. So I have to do what’s best for me.”
The US won silver, finishing three points behind the Russian Olympic Committee, a gap Biles likely could have closed by his participation.
This time, no one told Biles she should move on. In the Netflix documentary, Biles weighed her decision versus the choice Strug wasn’t given. She acknowledged that her initial reaction to Strug’s locker was the same as everyone else’s.
“Totally badass. Go ahead, girl,” she said. “But now I feel a little differently about it.”
Simone the quitter. GOATs don’t give up on their teammates.
Please don’t give up your team again at the Olympics.
Are they really going to let Simone Biles compete in the Olympics? What if she gets a stomach ache? Or just doesn’t feel it anymore?
Trolls are persistent. While Biles is coming to Paris with the respect of many to raise awareness for the importance of mental health, many still question the legitimacy of her struggles. The White House was pleased with Biles’ combination of success and advocacy to award her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That hasn’t stopped her detractors.
A medal for canceling the previous Olympics, but she went to watch anyway and took someone else’s spot?
Perhaps it had once benefited from Biles’ insecurities, fueled by a culture that valued success over self and even safety. But after Tokyo, she took a year off from competing. She met with a therapist and focused on what she wanted, not what was expected of her.
Eventually, Biles realized she still wanted to do gymnastics. And so, at 27, a true old lady by the sport’s standards, she went to her third Olympics. On her terms. Of her choosing.
“My ‘why’ is that no one is forcing me to do it,” she said. “I wake up every morning and choose to work out in the gym and perform for myself.”
“My ‘why’ is that no one is forcing me to do it,” Simone Biles says of her latest Olympic effort. “I wake up every morning and choose to train in the gym and perform for myself.” (Elsa/Getty Images)
That’s not to say her expectations are any less. Her (by her standards) subpar effort on the beam at the trials left her visibly — and audibly — frustrated. But she competes with lightness and joy, going from a competitive face before her routines to an easy smile afterward. At the trials, she waved to her family, blew kisses to the crowd, and hugged a 106-year-old veteran who told her she was his favorite gymnast.
There’s an easy trope that Biles’ return will silence the naysayers. She was asked about that during the trials.
“Yeah, but it doesn’t even matter if I do it,” she said. “They’re still going to be like, ‘Oh my god, are you going to stop again?’ And if I did, what are you going to do about it? Tweet again? I’ve been dealing with it for three years.”
Her tone was more challenging than dismissive. Come on. Give what you have.
Because no one tells Biles, or anyone else, what to do anymore.
GO DEEPER
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(Top image: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletics; photo of Simone Biles: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
