#Simone biles a quitter full
#Simone biles a quitter professional

The script says you must do what you are told no matter what. The script says that once you decide to pursue a career in sport, the sport owns you. And that’s what’s infuriated so many: the fact that she didn’t follow the script.īut the script is nonsense, and it always has been. Because Biles has performed one of the most terrifying feats a sportsperson can perform: she’s refused to conform to expectations. If you think there’s anything gutless about what Simone Biles has done, then you just haven’t thought it through. Simone Biles competes (Photo by Carmen Mandato/Getty Images) Hell, it takes courage just to step out on a field, eyes of the world upon you, knowing you might fail in front of them all.īut make no mistake, there are few things more courageous than being the most famous exponent of your sport in the world, carrying the expectations of millions on your shoulders, standing under the scorching glare of the global spotlight in the very spot that you’ve pushed your body past all reasonable limits for years to get to…and then saying “no.” It takes courage to leap from a high-diving board, or to run without stopping for the length of a marathon even after you know you can’t win, or to step into a ring with someone determined to beat your brains in. It takes guts galore for an AFL player, muscles screaming and lungs burning, to summon the will to run another hundred metres to get to the right position to save the team.

#Simone biles a quitter full

It takes massive courage for a rugby player to look up at 300-plus kilos of rock-hard muscle waiting to crush him, and charge at full pace straight into it.

#Simone biles a quitter professional

Anyone who questions her bravery is talking out of the wrong orifice.īut then, professional sportspeople are pretty much all courageous. She spends her life launching herself into the air, knowing that a slight miscalculation can result in broken bones or even permanent disability. She simply said her head was not right, and that competing when her head was not right would not be safe, and would not be fair to her team. There have been plenty of times when I’ve made up a lie to get out of a commitment, claiming I’ve come down with something, or there’s an emergency at home, rather than admitting that I’m mentally shattered. And I know what it’s like to feel the hot shame of that. I know what it’s like to simply not be able to carry on. The only tiny, tenuous, probably-completely-spurious connection I can lay claim to is that I know what it’s like to have your brain turn on you, and I know what it’s like to look at what’s in front of you and feel simply overwhelmed with fear and panic. I certainly don’t know what it’s like to be an Olympic athlete. I could never hope to know exactly what Biles was feeling that made her feel it would be a bad idea to continue in the competition. So why, after all that, would she drop out of competition in this year’s Olympics? Selfishness? Mental softness? Cowardice? She’s been accused of all of these, which just goes to show there’s no winning with some people: if Simone Biles can’t convince you that she’s not a wuss, nobody will. If nobody becomes an Olympic athlete without pain and sacrifice and single-minded commitment, it’s sure as hell true that Simone Biles has already demonstrated more guts, determination and relentless focus on her goals than most of us could imagine. She’s done all this, incidentally, in a brutal sport that is notorious for physically and mentally destroying young girls, and after suffering years of vile abuse at the hands of her coach. She is so good that the sport’s judges have struggled to find appropriate ways to even assess how good she is, and she has already achieved more, at the age of 24, than 99.99 per cent of humanity could hope to achieve if they lived their life twice over. She is one of that special handful of sportspeople who can lay claim to the title of GOAT without brooking a lot of argument.