Simone Biles views the asymmetrical barriers in the World Cup of Amberes in 2023. Anders Riishede/Shutterstock
by Eva Espasa Borras, Montserrat Martin,
American athlete Simone Biles, who revolutionized the world of women’s artistic gymnastics (WAG), has become an essential icon of Olympic sport – she has just won team gold at the Paris Olympic Games, and is aiming for more medals before the end of the competition.
But beyond her athletic achievements, Biles is also in competition with gymnastics itself, its representatives, its institutions, its international standards, and even the media.
To understand his trajectory, it is therefore appropriate to observe not only his gymnastic and sporting performance, but also his actions and their repercussions outside the world of gymnastics and in the media environment.
From a feminist theoretical perspective, her trajectory as a gymnast highlights the relationship between the process of emancipation of an athlete and the docility conditioned by the laws of patriarchy.
The best of the world
Since her international debut in 2013, Biles has been the world’s top gymnast (GOAT), having not lost a single national or international competition until the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and remains the most decorated gymnast in history.
Now 27, she has performed stunts that no one else has been able to do (like the double back tuck with triple twist on the floor, the Biles II (FX)) and some that no one has even attempted . But, in one Olympic cycle, the woman who had reached the top step of the podium in Rio de Janeiro, in 2016, by becoming the second African-American to win a gold medal in the all-around WAG competition , four years after Gabby Douglas in London, was forced to abandon the competition in the middle of the team finals at the Tokyo 2020 games due to mental health issues.
During this period, GAF promoters and the media wrote the history of the gymnast from a patriarchal and capitalist perspective.
In 2018, she revealed that she was one of the many survivors of sexual predator Larry Nassar , a former doctor for the U.S. women’s team who was convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault and abuse against more than 100 gymnasts.
The great expectations
Despite this, when the Tokyo Games (held in 2021 with heavy restrictions, following the Covid-19 pandemic) opened, huge expectations were placed on her: everyone hoped she would sweep all the gold medals and lead the United States team.
She was the only one to participate in events coordinated by the organizations involved in the scandal, which had allowed Larry Nassar to commit his assaults without being worried. By the time of the Tokyo Olympics, she was one of several gymnasts who had filed a complaint to have USA Gymnastics recognized as responsible for the sexual assaults perpetrated by Nassar.
During the preliminary stages of the Games in June 2021, she wrote on her Instagram account : “Sometimes I really feel like I’m carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders.”
By withdrawing, she revealed the fatigue and mental exhaustion generated by the patriarchal and potentially racist oppressions she was experiencing , and defied all odds. From a feminist perspective, her act can be seen as an attempt to challenge the sporting norms and discourses that have always reified gymnasts, in a discipline that still struggles with the legacy of decades of abuse.
In responding in this way, Simone Biles has pushed women’s gymnastics to reinvent itself .
Her return to the international stage at the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Antwerp in the fall of 2023 marked a new milestone in her career. She demonstrated not only her technical mastery in each acrobatics, but also her ability to develop a discourse based on her personal experience.
Simone Biles wants to show that she is worth more than any sporting achievement, by asserting her will in the face of the dehumanization of the representatives of the WAG. She thus challenges, in small touches, the dominant discourses and the power structures that have tried to control her since 2013.
A return on his own terms
It must be acknowledged that, although she has mastered her acrobatic figures, her sporting performances have always been subject to external control. So much so that on several occasions, during her career, she has had to opt for less risky exercises rather than expressing her maximum abilities, her efforts not being rewarded .
At the World Championships in Antwerp, she successfully performed a Yurchenko double pike vault, a first for women in an international gymnastics competition, after which the move was renamed “Biles II”. However, the International Gymnastics Federation deducted 0.5 points for a technical reason, as her coach had held the mat with her foot to ensure the gymnast’s safety.
At Paris 2024, Simone Biles performed a Yurchenko double pike last Sunday during qualifying. This is the first time an athlete has achieved this feat at the Olympic Games. During the all-around qualifying, it was the first time he competed without the help and supervision of his coach. The jury therefore did not penalize him and awarded him 15,800 points out of a possible 16,400.
Each of her movements is examined from every angle and earns her constant criticism and value judgments ( like her physical appearance, her body being described by some as “too muscular” ). Aware of these media pressures on her physique, she responds with firm statements : “Without this body, I would not have won all these medals. There are different types of beauty. You can be beautiful while being muscular.”
In February 2020, she posted a letter on Twitter in which she wrote :
Let’s talk about competition. And especially the one I never signed up for, and which I feel has almost become a daily challenge for me. I don’t think I’m the only one.
In gymnastics, as in many other professions, there is an ever-increasing competition that has nothing to do with the performance itself. I am talking about plastic beauty. For some reason, some people seem to want to define someone’s beauty according to their own criteria.
[…] Today, I say stop to the competition in beauty standards, and to the toxic culture of those who troll you when they feel like their expectations haven’t been met. No one gets to tell you, or me, what is beautiful or not.
This stance challenges traditional gender and ethnic stereotypes, showing that strength and muscularity can go hand in hand with a femininity understood as multiple and no longer as the simple negative of masculinity. Simone Biles calls for the advent of a more mature, more diverse and more daring gymnastics, by combining the artistic and acrobatic aspects, by inspiring new generations of gymnasts, and by making gymnastics for itself, as she declared after the state trials of her country, in May 2024
The 2024 Olympic Games
As she says in the new Netflix documentary about her, Simone Biles: Rising , she doesn’t accept being told what to do.
She returns at 27, an advanced age for a gymnast, with a personal and professional life independent of gymnastics. “People put you on a pedestal. I just want to be seen as a human being,” she explains. For the Paris Olympics, she has limited her interaction with the media and social networks, including disabling comments on her Instagram and restricting her X account.
Her trainer, Cécile Landi, says in the documentary: “I thank the press for their interest in Simone, but you have to leave her alone and not put pressure on her. It’s counterproductive. Let her do it and enjoy the show.”
By returning to compete in the Olympics, she not only challenges the boundaries of sport and gymnastics, but also what is said about her.
If Simone Biles is a champion, it is not only because of her athletic achievements, but also because of the courage she shows in showing that she is human in a world that demands perfection at the expense of well-being. Her case invites us to reconsider the way we understand athletes, and to prioritize their overall well-being over the mere accumulation of medals.
Eva Espasa Borras, Catedrática de traducción, Universitat de Vic –Montserrat Martin, Senior lecturer, Universitat de Vic –
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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