It can start with recognising that Biles’ abandonment of the Olympics was sad, not heroic.īrendan O’Neill is editor of spiked and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. We urgently need a countercultural pushback against this love of losers. That is a betrayal of the Olympian ideal, and of the broader human ideal of making good on one’s life and one’s talents. A similar valorisation of failure occurred after the Euros final, when the ‘three lions’ we were all expected to cheer were penalty-missers Rashford, Sancho and Saka rather than goal-scorers Kane, Maguire and Shaw (not to mention the heroic Jordan Pickford).Ī new generation is being encouraged to admire those who fail or quit more than those who go on, against all the odds, to achieve great and wonderful things. So Biles is brave not for all the astonishing things she has achieved in gymnastics, but for telling everyone she has mental-health problems. This is what is worrying about the praise for Biles – it looks like further confirmation that our societies are abandoning the virtues of courage, determination and aspiring to victory in favour of celebrating people’s feelings of weakness. Michelle Obama’s trite, Oprah-style platitudes grate against the singular devotion that the Olympian ideal demands. Not feeling like you’re ‘enough’, and always wanting to push harder and faster, is what the Olympics is all about. I’m sorry, but if aspiring sports stars practised this mantra, they’d never get anywhere. Michelle Obama got the social-media world hot under the collar by gushing over Biles. But isn’t stoicism central to sport? Especially to the Olympics, which is entirely about self-drive and self-sacrifice to the end of achieving superhuman feats. Is it though? The New York Times has praised her for ‘rejecting stoicism’. It’s okay to give up! ‘Simone Biles’ withdrawal is more impressive than winning’, says one headline. Her walking away is being turned into a moral lesson for the world. No, it’s the absolutely mad response to her quitting. None of us has access to her mind or soul.
Simone biles a quitter free#
‘What about my mental health?!’ has become a kind of free pass for bad, immoral or narcissistic behaviour, whether it’s talking down your family, censoring people you dislike, or quitting sports competitions when the going gets tough. I’ve lost count of the number of students I’ve met over the years who say the reason they No Platform speakers they disapprove of is because they want to protect their own mental health. For him, ‘prioritising mental health’ has become a justification for spilling the beans on his messed-up family to any big media platform that will have him. Prince Harry won’t shut up about his mental health.
Already this year we’ve seen Naomi Osaka quit the French Open because she didn’t want to do media interviews, judging them to be bad for her mental health. ‘Prioritising mental health’ seems to have become the go-to excuse for people who just can’t be arsed. It’s the ‘mental health’ talk I don’t like. And just like that, one of America’s greatest sports stars, someone millions were keen to watch at Tokyo 2020, was out. She was going to prioritise her ‘mental health’ and ‘mindfulness’ instead.
Then it was announced that she wouldn’t be competing anymore. Far be it from those of us who can’t even roly-poly anymore to criticise her for this momentary lapse, but we can surely criticise her for what happened next. She wobbled during her vault, seemed to lose her focus, and didn’t manage to do all the twists and turns she had planned to. It suggests the cult of the loser is out of control that society’s valorisation of ‘victims’ over winners is now so entrenched that we even prefer our Olympians when they’re running away from the challenge than when they’re fighting tooth and nail for gold.īiles’ quitting (though no one is calling it that) sent shockwaves through the world media yesterday. But the current celebration of her quitting the Olympics as ‘true heroism’, as better even than if she had won gold, feels deeply troubling.
She is one of the great Olympians of our age – a diminutive smasher of social barriers and executor of moves that the rest of us get backache just from watching. Everyone loves Simone Biles, including me.
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