From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Simone Biles Just Demonstrated a True Champion Mind-Set
Date July 29, 2021 6:35 AM
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[ Biles joins a growing number of younger athletes, including her
fellow Olympian tennis star Naomi Osaka, who are pushing against the
traditional American narrative of gold at all costs, including the
expense of their own mental or physical health.]
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SIMONE BILES JUST DEMONSTRATED A TRUE CHAMPION MIND-SET  
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Lindsay Crouse
July 27, 2021
The New York Times
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_ Biles joins a growing number of younger athletes, including her
fellow Olympian tennis star Naomi Osaka, who are pushing against the
traditional American narrative of gold at all costs, including the
expense of their own mental or physical health. _

, Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Gregory
Bull/Associated Press

 

What kind of champion withdraws at the Olympics?

One who can recognize her limits and stop before she crashes into
them. And so in dropping out of the team gymnastics competition at the
Tokyo Olympics, Simone Biles, the best gymnast America has ever
produced, issued a statement as powerful as anything she’s done in
competition: She said “enough.”

After an unusual underperformance at the preliminaries — by her own
high standards — Biles realized she could not execute her planned
vault in the team finals. After some deliberation, she bowed out
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“At the end of the day, we’re human, too, so we have to protect
our mind and our body rather than just go out there and do what the
world wants us to do,” she told
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after the competition, in which her team earned Olympic silver medals.

Biles joins a growing number of younger athletes
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including her fellow Olympian the tennis star Naomi Osaka, who are
pushing against the traditional American narrative of gold at all
costs, including the expense of their own mental or physical health.

There was, predictably, plenty of pushback. Critics on Twitter
lamented that
[[link removed]] quitting
is the new winning, casting it as weak and lazy Generation Z behavior.
But in a social-media-driven world, young elite athletes have a new
power
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too: They have more control of their own careers, and the narratives
around them.

Obviously, everyone wants to win. So it’s exciting that many of
these stars are also recognizing that being the greatest means knowing
your own variable limits and when to push through the pain — and
when not to force it. How many Olympians have we seen push, persevere
and then crumble when the Games are over? Some compared Biles
unfavorably against Kerri Strug, the teenage gymnast who landed a
vault on a torn ankle
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the 1996 Olympics. (It later turned out that this heroic performance
was unnecessary; America already had enough points to win.)

In fact, that’s a worthy comparison, but not in the way Biles’s
critics contend. While it was roundly applauded at the time, and it
still is often held up as a moment of Olympic glory, what Strug went
through was horrific — hurting herself while America cheered. She
never competed professionally again.

This is what change looks like: choice.

Biles has spent her entire career defining her own boundaries 
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usually by pushing them. She won the national championships with
broken toes and the world championships with a kidney stone. She
survived sexual assault at the hands of her own team doctor, Larry
Nassar — and instead of running away, she stayed and leveraged her
fame to push for progress. Her desire to be a symbol for change is
part of why Biles has stuck around to compete in these Games at
all, she has said
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So Biles knows how to be tough. But, of course, the burden of that
toughness gets heavy. This week, she posted on her Facebook page, “I
truly do feel that I have the weight of the world on my shoulders at
times.”

The pressure on athletes
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be more intense now than it’s ever been. It’s a time when any
armchair sports analyst can dissect your form, question your
commitment or remind you that the goblins sowing doubt in your mind
may be right.

Biles said that she dropped out for mental health reasons, in addition
to physical ones. But they’re not so different — especially when
you’re performing moves as difficult as those Biles has wowed crowds
with lately. (Some of these moves were so potentially dangerous
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judges scored them lower to discourage other, less-skilled, gymnasts
from attempting them.)

And sometimes the best thing an athlete can do for her performance is
to take a break. Especially when you’re in a rut, quitting to
regroup can be the fastest way to refresh and re-energize. After two
disappointing performances in a row, Biles was wise to stop and
refresh, said Steve Magness, [[link removed]] a
performance coach for Olympians and the author of a forthcoming book,
“Real Toughness.”

“We have a fundamental misconception of what it means to be
tough,” Mr. Magness told me. “It’s not gritting our teeth
through everything; it’s having the space to make the right choice
despite pressure, stress and fatigue.”

It’s impossible for most of us to understand the kind of pressure
that elite athletes face, Mr. Magness said. And in her decision to
stand down, Biles offered a master class in how to deal with that
pressure. If anything, she probably only helped her team by ignoring
ego and staying out when she recognized she wasn’t capable of
performing at her high standard.

“Performance is all about self-awareness,” said Mr. Magness.
“You are trying to match your skills on that day with the demand of
the event. So Simone is aware when to go for broke and pull out the
big difficulty tasks, but she also knows when she is slightly off and
needs to scale it down slightly.”

It’s worth remembering: Simone Biles is not a viral gif flipping
through your phone. She may be wearing a U.S.A. leotard, but she
doesn’t work for us. No matter what hopes and dreams we invested in
her, she earned her place, and she gets to decide. Athletes, and their
physical and mental health, are not commodities. Biles knows that —
and is not willing to be disposable. Rather, she is investing in her
longevity.

Despite all the hullabaloo and recriminations against Biles for not
competing, the American team performed brilliantly and took silver.
Biles still has the opportunity to perform in the individual
competition. Rather than sulking, she cheered for her teammates from
the stands, hugged the gold-medal-winning gymnasts from Russia and
proudly posted a picture of her teammates smiling with their medals on
her Instagram feed.

 

Ultimately, this is just sports. As Biles herself said after the
competition
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“there’s more to life than gymnastics.” These young women and
men have extraordinary talent and perform under incredible pressure,
but they are not superhuman. We have no right to expect them to be.

 

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