https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/58037479
Because we live in a cultural era where everyone has to have a hot take, and being reactively nasty is mistaken for being clever, there are a lot of shit takes on Simone Biles, calling her weak, or a choker.
But Biles has done moves so difficult and risky that officials have moved to discourage others from trying to emulate her.
She led the US team to a world championship while suffering from a kidney stone.
She won a national championship with broken toes.
She's become one of the greatest of all time, perhaps even the consensus GOAT.
And she accomplished that while being sexually abused by a doctor to whom US sporting officials turned a blind eye, so being unprotected as a juvenile by those who had responsibility for her well-being, whom she should have been able to check.
Some choker.
And what she's dealing with now is a problem of proprioception, body awareness. She physically cannot feel the location and balance of her body in space, which is exceedingly dangerous for a gymnast, raising the risk of devastating injury. It's like a race driver trying to race on a superspeedway with vertigo.
And not only did she risk serious injury if she competed, she risked not being able to achieve as good a score as her replacement. Pulling out likely helped the US team, rather than hurting it.
The press (and I think Biles herself) have mislabelled this a mental health issue. It's not. But such criticism would still be crassly inappropriate if it was.
What have her critics done that even approximates her toughness and achievement? They're just puerile asses without a tenth of her demonstrated worth as a human.
