The point, Whack-a-Mole, is that Biles is virtuous for standing up to people like you.
We who have collectively created the fiction that the bodies and brains of professional athletes have less value than medals and trophies and pennants are responsible for all the deaths and permanent injuries that could have been avoided by stepping back and healing, or stepping away for good.
Biles chose her body over your sense of disappointment. I’ll happily clap her on the back for that. I’ll throw her a fucking parade. I hope other athletes take note and follow suit.
And if she gets off that plane and somebody tells her that she let down her country, I hope she gives them a case of the twisties right on the nose.
I have a good friend who was a Big Ten football player who played through concussions and pain and broken bones. He’s a tough guy in the classic sense. Very much a “tough it out” approach to life as well as sport.
He 100% supports Biles in her decision.
Then again, one of his daughters was a high-level gymnast and he’s seen what happens when gymnasts have an off day.
The point is that athletes should take appropriate steps to avoid serious injuries when the preponderance of evidence suggests that the condition they are presently in is highly likely to result in such injuries. If athletes have historically been pressured and shamed for not taking such steps, it would take bravery to speak out and refuse to take unnecessary risks. Biles did that, and indeed she is being torn apart by millions of her fellow Americans (a disproportionate number of whom are white dude armchair quarterbacks) for doing so.
I’m honestly struggling to understand YOUR point, dude, and you’re becoming entrenched in a position for which you have no evidence and, so far as anyone else can see, no logic at all. You say it’s not “laudatory” that she had the courage to walk away from the event, but don’t seem to be willing to read or listen to people explaining - in quite considerable detail, with references to the history of the sport and particular examples - why people are saying that.
Look, if you aren’t interested in the history of top level gymnastics and the injury issues its competitors have faced and the amazing extent to which they have been bullied into risking their health for the sake of winning medals, and the place Biles has in that history and discussion, that’s cool; it doesn’t need to be your thing. The logical stance to then take would be to shrug and admit you’re not familiar with the sport.
Christ on a cracker. Now I’m personally responsible for dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries because I watch football. And the long term consequences of every dozens of Olympic athlete who has ever been injured in competition or practice are my fault too. Nevermind a vast majority of them are grown people making their own decisions about what to do with their own bodies; it’s my fault.
And if you’d left it at that, you wouldn’t be part of the problem.
Just FYI, you seem to have quoted me but responded to somebody else in the thread who said something completely different. @discobot is super helpful for learning about board functionality.
Saying that she let down millions of people is denigrating her. Saying that she’s dishonest because mental issues don’t ‘poof into existence’ ‘at the last possible moment’ is even worse.
If I heard somebody giving that kind of advice to a person I’m responsible for, I’d pull the ripcord under “you are causing active harm to this individual and need to stop talking immediately.”
Johnny Bravo answered in more detail and specificity. My answers are short because at this point you seem to be playing “I’m going to just keep repeating myself until they give up”
In a lengthy thread where I posted many, many times they pounce on and repeat one thing I said that was not great and ignore the many, many posts where I said she was right to withdraw.
I have read every post of yours in this entire thread. You are clearly pissed that people are supporting Biles.
Of course I’m a parent of a teenage girl athlete and a close friend of someone who was physically, sexually and psychologically abused as a teenage gymnast and suffered lifelong injuries, physical and mental. I might be biased.
Are you denouncing that one thing you said that was not great, that implied Biles was letting down her team, letting down her fans, and dishonestly waiting until the last moment to withdraw? If you’re not, then every criticism of that statement still stands.
