The most dramatic image at the Tokyo Olympics thus far wasn’t the spectacle of the opening ceremonies or a photo finish in the pool. Rather, it was the crooked line of Simone Biles’s tightly sealed lips as she walked to the sidelines after a disappointing vault performance in the gymnastics team all-around competition.
On Tuesday, Biles withdrew from that contest and has not yet decided whether she will proceed with other events. It’s a development that upends one of the biggest stories of the Games.
The idea that the Olympics pit the best against the best has always been more dream than reality, whether it’s geopolitical competition, a pandemic or simple bad luck that keeps some athletes out of competition. But every blow against that ideal of a perfect meritocracy is heartbreaking — both for the athletes who are excluded or eliminated, and for those of us rooting for them.
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Yet if anything good can come out of Biles’s withdrawal and Naomi Osaka’s early elimination from the women’s tennis competition, it would be this: Maybe we fans can learn to embrace more expansive definitions of excellence and courage.
Follow this authorAlyssa Rosenberg's opinionsRooting for Biles to dominate the Tokyo Olympics has long been about more than the United States’ medal count. Her greatness has redefined the very contours of her sport. She has mastered skills so difficult that judges seem determined to dissuade less-gifted athletes from attempting them. And in addition to her athletic excellence, Biles has hoisted heavy symbolic burdens onto her 4-foot-8-inch frame.
Biles has been a role model for Black girls in a predominantly White sport. Her excellence has also served as a rebuke to USA Gymnastics, which failed to protect her and her teammates from the predations of Larry Nassar. She moved from Nike to Athleta in search of a sponsor that would help her fund an independent exhibition tour, so she and other athletes would be less reliant on that organization.
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As Juliet Macur put it in the New York Times, despite the betrayals she has experienced and the exhaustion and pain she feels, Biles “has managed to set aside those feelings and harness the newfound power of an independent Black woman who knows her worth and answers to no one.”
Osaka has assumed a similar role in women’s tennis, representative of both a new generation of Black female tennis stars and a more diverse vision of Japan. Osaka’s decision in May not to participate in the French Open’s news conferences, and then the tournament as a whole, made her a symbol of new ideas about mental health care and old fights against sexism in sports media. Seeing Osaka triumph in Tokyo would have been a powerful demonstration that mental health care is a key element of athletic training, rather than a sign of weakness.
Of course, it didn’t work out that way. As Osaka herself acknowledged, “the scale of everything is a bit hard because of the break that I took.”
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Osaka’s experience illustrates why mental health may never fit comfortably into our conventional narratives about the obstacles athletes overcome on the road to greatness.
Cheering for athletes to triumph over mental barriers means asking even more of competitors than their sports normally demand of them: that they defy not merely gravity, but the weight of their own humanity.
Sometimes, those requests for transcendence are just too much. In a sport like gymnastics where small misjudgments can result in catastrophic injuries, it’s grotesque to ask an athlete to sideline her own mental health for the sake of some heartwarming, overcoming-every-obstacle story.
“I’ll admit to briefly thinking maybe she could have just tried because even her worst day is really good,” Slate columnist Jenee Desmond-Harris remarked after Biles withdrew. “But then I remembered that if you mess up in gymnastics you can break your neck.”
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Maybe not everyone will recognize it in the wellness and sports cliches that Biles invoked when she explained her decision — among them a plan to “work on my mindfulness” and “take it a day at a time” — but it should be clear that her choice to set limits involves tremendous courage. This was not weakness. It may even be a spark of a very different revolution than the ones she has already taken upon herself to effectuate.
Sports may strike blows against ills like racism, and individuals can deliver biting reprimands to institutions. But athletes can’t do the painful work of social change alone. And their only tools aren’t perfectly executed vaults or dominant tennis sets. There can be greatness, too, in saying no.
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