Kiwi Olympic gymnast Angela Walker on the seismic shift in global gymnastics with Simone Biles taking back control of her career and her life.
Like Olympic viewers the world over, I was deeply shocked when Simone Biles withdrew from the women’s artistic gymnastics team finals in Tokyo earlier this week.
I’ve been pondering it ever since, trying to make sense of this unprecedented turn of events. How does the G.O.A.T. of women’s artistic gymnastics go from having won six Olympic medals, 25 world championships medals, and recently blitzing the United States national championships and Olympic trials, to suddenly deciding to pull out after one sub-optimal vault?
Commentators and journalists have waded in with numerous theories and opinion pieces. But only Biles knows for sure what's actually going on in her head. And even then, she may still be trying to figure that out.
For me, watching the American gymnasts battle it out for supremacy against the team from the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) brought back a mixed bag of memories from the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Back then I was lucky enough to have a front row seat to the women’s artistic gymnastics competition.
In those days, the battle lines were drawn between two gymnastics powerhouses, the Soviet Union and Romania. But American gymnastics was beginning to be a force to be reckoned with and their women’s team were reportedly in contention for a medal.
She has discovered that it is she, and she alone, who gets to decide when, if and how she does gymnastics
The rapid rise of Team USA in the 1980s had much to do with a famous husband and wife coaching duo - Béla and Márta Károlyi – who had been the coaches of Olympic champion Nadia Comăneci.
They had defected to the US from Romania in 1981 and gone on to set up a world-leading gymnastics school. They brought secret gymnastics know-how from behind the Iron Curtain, but with it came a very different kind of coaching ideology.
Sitting in the audience in the gymnastics stadium in Seoul, I observed the American women’s gymnastics team with a mixture of fascination and incredulity. The six gymnasts flocked around their burly coach Béla Károlyi almost like little robots. Towering over them, whenever he spoke, they responded immediately. They looked to him for their every instruction, for their every breath it almost seemed. It was clear these gymnasts didn't really think for themselves. They were completely and utterly under the control of their celebrated coach.
I found it especially perplexing because these were young women from the United States of America. They were gymnasts from a democratic country where individual freedom is highly prized; where autonomy and self-determination is everything.
At those Olympics, in 1988, the American team narrowly missed out on the bronze medal, but they had sent a signal to the gymnastics world that they would soon be invincible. The Károlyis went on to become wildly successful American gymnastics coaches. Their protégées won countless Olympic and world championship titles. But to go along with all the gold medals, there were untold stories of women with lifelong injuries, suffocating anxiety, debilitating eating disorders, and worse.
Fast-forward to today, and gymnastics has been forced to reconsider its disempowering and abusive practices. The sport has finally begun a long, overdue process of reconsidering itself.
The 2020 Netflix documentary Athlete A shone a spotlight on the horrors perpetrated by USA gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar. He had systematically sexually assaulted hundreds of young female gymnasts under his care; Simone Biles among his many victims. Shockingly, much of this abuse took place at the USA Gymnastics National Team Training Centre at the Károlyi Ranch in Texas.
Athlete A also shone an even brighter light on the actions of those who ensured Nassar and USA Gymnastics were held to account. Those included Biles and a group of fellow survivors, who subsequently received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award for their bravery in speaking out and demanding change and accountability.
Perhaps then, it's a result of the seismic shift that is taking place in the sport of gymnastics that Biles now knows her power. She has discovered that it is she, and she alone, who gets to decide when, if and how she does gymnastics. She has discovered that she is the one who is in control.
Whatever is going on for Simone Biles, the one thing we know for sure is that she is now in the driver’s seat.
And that can only be a good thing.
* Angela Walker is writing the book, Ideals are Like Stars: The Story of Dame Yvette Williams, due for release by Bateman Books in 2022.
