thelesterlee
Simone Biles is one of the most decorated athletes in American sports history. She has achieved more than any other Olympian in our lifetimes.
This week she announced she was withdrawing from Thursday’s All-Around competition due to mental health concerns and the internet exploded as guys like Charlie Kirk and Clay Travis—two men who have significantly less gold medals than Simone—jumped off the top rope to question her mental toughness and blah blah competition blah blah America blah blah.
Most people’s fake internet outrage comes from the fact that she left Wednesday’s competition leaving her team to perform without her. She is being labeled as ‘selfish’ for focusing on her own mental health instead of helping her teammates and her country win gold medals.
The Olympics are a sacred tradition and how dare Simone Biles turn her back on the opportunity to do flips and shit for the same Olympics that hosted the games in 1936 Nazi, Germany despite all of the, ya know, fucking Nazis.
We saw this same reactionary lame discourse when Naomi Osaka decided to opt-out of playing in the French Open because of her anxiety. People whose entire consumption of sports takes place on their phones for 4 months out of the year checking their fantasy football scores have suddenly become the gatekeepers of what defines an athlete.
According to these weirdos, a true athlete is defined by their ability to overcome obstacles and we are supposed to watch sports in order to witness athletes fight through pressure.
But if you’re not attempting to get Twitter engagement from a poorly thought out hot take and you actually took a moment to think to yourself why it is you like sports, I promise you that you enjoy watching guys dunk and hit home runs and you are not ever once ever thinking about the pressure they are overcoming.
Simone Biles has achieved everything that can be achieved in gymnastics. If she chooses to leave because of her mental health and if you really care about the Olympics, for some reason, then you should simply root for the other girls doing flips with USA on their windbreakers.
We don’t have to compare every athlete to Michael Jordan. It’s 2021. MJ didn’t play with bots in his Twitter and Instagram DMs calling him a baggy denim’d bum 24/7.
Oh, and he also wasn’t sexually assaulted by his trainer like Simone Biles was. They let Larry Nassar diddle girl after girl after girl and you want Simone to put her mental health to the side in order to win a gold medal for this very same organization that quite literally fucked her?
But it’s equally important for me to point out that as much as we should leave Simone alone because she’s a complete stranger, we should not hold her up as some revolutionary force who is changing the way the world sees mental health because again, she’s a complete stranger.
The way people point at celebrities like ‘wow, they’re just like me’ is absurd. She has the pressure of an entire country on her shoulders and you’re sitting here reading Deadseriousness.com. You are not the same.
Oh, she can also show up in a Burger King commercial tomorrow and receive a check with a number that you can’t even count to. Yes, she is ‘courageous’ for choosing her mental health but she also has the clout and financial net to quit the Olympics so she’s not reallyyyyyy that courageous at all.
Simone Biles isn’t some traitor because she won’t do handstands for us. She’s not a superhero who was put on this Earth to raise mental health awareness or whatever. She’s just a girl who had some PTO left and wanted to use her sick days before they run out at the end of the year and that’s totally fine.
Stop pretending like the Olympics are important. Most of the events are just rich kids making horses jump hurdles. Who cares?
