A Word in Edgewise: Never Give Up! …Really?

With the Paris Olympics on the horizon, high stakes balancing in the winds of glory, “never” is a word many hold as gospel. Never is sometimes necessary–saving a child from a burning building–and sometimes fatal–simply entertaining others. 

Consider Simone Biles during the Tokyo 2020 (2021) Olympics: she pulled out of the women’s team final and four subsequent individual finals explaining, it was “to focus on my well-being. There is more to life than just gymnastics.” Not a diva move; she had suffered a disturbing case of what gymnasts call the “twisties,” a situation when air-borne of losing the mind-body synchronization necessary to determine up from down; a loss of “air awareness.”

Never mind the “twisties” is literally life-or-death, with death holding trumps, and her bowing-out was, to use layman’s terms, sane, there were those who felt she’d “failed us,” was a “coward” who had betrayed the expectations of Them, watching at home from sofas and recliners with cold brews in hand.

Some pointed to young Kerri Strug in 1996 as a true (therefore satisfactory) hero. After she bobbled one vault, badly injuring her ankle, when exhorted by her coach Béla Károli (who feared a Russian victory) to take her second shot, she did, eyes wide with terror, nailing the landing on one foot before crumpling to the ground in tears, to be carried off in Károli’s arms. And ending her career as gymnast. (The US would have won without her sacrifice by an­–admittedly slim–0.305 points)

Biles didn’t withdraw and slink away, she stayed and attended each event, cheering on her teammates. On the final day of competition, having practiced behind the scenes and removed the twists from her balance beam routine, Biles won bronze despite the routine’s lowered difficulty level. 

At first disdaining the bronze medal, she began to realize what it took to claim it. She realized she’d been competing for other people (including, along with many other former teammates, sexual abuse of former US team doctor Larry Nasser) in an atmosphere of “corrosive gymnastics.”

Biles was given what Strug lost: time. Strug’s potential as a gymnast was cut short, while Biles is set to enter her third Olympics in Paris (July 26–August 11) with a team of young women that have been able to see her take charge of her own life, and advocate for her own mental and physical health. At a 2023 training event in Now Arena in Illinois, Biles said, “I didn’t know if I was ever going to be able to compete again because there were multiple times this year where I was in the gym and I was like, ‘I’m actually terrified of this full-in, like I’m not doing it again, never going to do it. And then I was like, ‘You know what? I’m just going to come back another day, another day.’” And she did.

She’s now 27 and married. This will be her third Olympics. No one, however, retains full capability forever. I’d like to think that seeing the bevy of younger talent about her, many of whom she’s cheered and mentored, Biles will know when to take her final curtain call. After all, she does have other things than gymnastics, and her four Paris team mates–Jordan Chiles, Jade Carey, Hezly Rivera, and Minnesota’s Suni Lee–are well prepared to carry the torch on into the future.