Olympics: Simone/Suni Lee update

U.S. gymnast Simone Biles concentrating--

or looking tense? before her bow-out

at the Tokyo Olympics. (Image taken from

my TV at home)

By Ed Piper

It has been a long time since I last made a blog entry--June 24--and the whole Simone Biles "thing" during the Tokyo Olympics has come and gone. I was laboring away in an audit of a Zoom graduate-level course for the past two weeks.

Biles is a great athlete in gymnastics, and had a super Olympics in Rio in 2016. I'm not minimizing the struggles she faced coming into the present Olympics.

But a mental coach--so common now, even for our La Jolla High athletes--could have at least helped her through the thicket of struggles that presented themselves in the present Games.

I bounced this off members of my extended family. One member spoke up for Simone, who is black, as is my extended family member. She was asked to stand for any cause and speak up for the "least of these". It became too much, and Biles, as she announced over a week ago (July 24 or so), couldn't handle it and wanted out. She pulled out of the all-around, and didn't take part in any of the individual events either.

My big point: The dumbest thing she did was allow people to promote her as the "G.O.A.T." ("Greatest of All Time"). Tom Brady can handle it, and maybe a few others: Joe Namath for one.

But by allowing others--admittedly, not from her own team or family of advisors--to keep calling Biles the Greatest of All Time just set her up for the ultimate showdown: the crumbling of the mind, which happened during the all-around, and led to her bowing out of all further events.

In steps Katie Ledecky. Ledecky is not black, but her background and self-effacing comments stand in stark contrast to Simone's accepting of the "G.O.A.T." title.

Ledecky did it the right way: member of a large community of supporters, a person of faith, she takes on a grueling schedule of (swim) events, and keeps her feet on the ground. Her comments are self-effacing, she talks about gratitude. She would never accept someone promoting her as the "G.O.A.T." of her sport.

Simone ended up being isolated. Katie expands her community by crediting her former swim club, her former club coach, her coach at Stanford, her mentors back home in Bethesda, Maryland, and the schools that she grew up in in Bethesda: Little Flower School (K-8th) and Stone Ridge (high school). Ledecky never lets it be about herself.

I blame Biles' advisors. Her grandparents did a great job of raising her, stepping in when her mom could not answer the bell with her drug use. But fending off this incessant campaign to name her the "G.O.A.T." was either going to end up an unbelievable success, or a crash-and-burn as it did during this Olympics.

As another writer said, Biles succeeds as a human, but fails as a gymnast. She accepted millions of dollars to promote products off her expected success in Tokyo. Instead, she ended up taking the place of a lesser athlete who could have contributed points toward the U.S. team.

I wish her the best. I want her to succeed. All the millions that piled up on her weighed her down and led to her bow-out in the middle of competition. Now how does she deal with that in the future?

Another lesson learned to deflect praise--send it to all those mentors and supporters who surround you. Let your performances speak for themselves. Don't claim the praise yourself.

By the way, teammate Suni Lee did a fabulous job of dealing with the pressure stepping into the vacuum on the U.S. gymnastics team left by her teammate. Lee won the all-around gold medal. Well done.