The news reports are quite unhelpful about what the rules for substitution in a team event are. Apparently a substitution was made, did well, and the team won a silver medal? In most team sports (basketball, football, soccer, etc.) there would be nothing unusual about a player taking themself out when they recognize that they're not mentally in the game and the team would finish better with a substitute.
Obviously it's a crazy situation, the yips are certainly not unheard of see Rick Ankiel. But a complication here is that gymnastics is fucking dangerous in a way that's different from most sports. Not that other sports aren't dangerous, but it's different sort of situation than Chuck Knoblauch not being able to make the throw from 2nd to 1st.
[can't manage to do the requisite snark, so] Ms. Biles is the only remaining victim of that Pedophile Criminal Nassar, who is still in competition. She is on record as stating that one of the reasons she continues to compete, is so that the ... "management" of USA Gymnastics has to deal with the fact that they did *nothing* to protect these children and young women from that criminal.
She owes them [and us, and the world] *nothing*.
I myself suffer from depression, and I've never been the victim of these sorts of assaults. The idea that anybody can judge here .....
Ugh.
Maybe "weird" in the OP was a little judgemental, now that I'm reading some of the articles about it. The way it was shown on TV, I thought Biles was giving bland platitudes and a totally different story was unfolding behind the scenes, one that we'd find out about in a few weeks. "Surprising" would be a better choice?
I happened to read about how the women's cycling road race went to an Austrian math postdoc who isn't even pro. That was even weirder, it appears to be a complete mess up by the Dutch riders who thought their person had won because they didn't know how many people were in front.
Math postdocs can count, so she won?
6: She won by pursuing the suboptimal strategy of "going faster than everyone else". The Dutch team pursued the optimal strategy of "Hiding behind teammates that are sacrifices, and then hurrying up at the last minute", but messed up because they didn't switch to hurrying up because they didn't realize that there was a "going faster than everyone else" person who had an 11 minute lead.
7 me of the forgotten personal info.
I so wanted this to be the year the olympics died an unlamented death. like, covid and beijing 22 boycott would surely be the double tap that finally ended the farce. silly fucking rabbit.
11 minutes seems like a lot. Even I could probably bike a mile in that time.
8 is a good summary. The added wrinkles are: 1) usually they have radios to help them communicate about whether someone is ahead, and 2) they didn't know the mathematician from previous races and so didn't notice she was missing from the pack.
13: I love everything about the story. I heard about the radios, but I didn't know they forgot about her because they didn't know who she was.
Also, she used to be a pro, but she didn't like being part of a team. It interfered with her "go faster that everyone else" lifestyle.
Interesting article on the mind-body aspects of gymnastics (and the risks of overpushing).
11 wasn't me, but I endorse it.
Nobody likes the Olympics, but if they stop, you'll have thousands of fit, intense young people with nothing to do. They'll think of something else just as baffling.
I'm always curious about the line of what worlds are small enough that everyone automatically knows each other, and which aren't. Of course, this is a little delicate and one shouldn't assume, and no all black people don't know each other but literally all African Muslims in my town do know each other. So the question I'm curious about is whether 30-something women Austrian mathematicians is a small enough world that they all know each other even if they're in wildly different fields?
I guess we know that the Olympic cycling world isn't that small.
18: They can still have international competitions, just don't bulldoze a tenth of a city for each one and play it on the three-digit channels.
11: I have some sympathy for this position, but my mother enjoys them so much.
She could watch college sports instead.
I'm mixed. They're so bad, but they tend to be aired when we're here in Montana, and it's such a nice thing to watch with Jammies' family that isn't either politically fraught or boring me to tears.
My second-favorite thing they watch is Family Feud, which I truly don't mind. (After that it's mostly action movies and cop shows, and I get very bored.)
I asked Jammies' sister and her husband about the new supreme court ruling about NCAA players being able to profit off their image, and they are both opposed to it, and the reasons that they are opposed to it convinced me that I did in fact understand the complexities correctly and that it's a good thing.
It's going to revolutionize Only Fans.
26: Driven by my state senator! We're very proud.
24: Probably not available as easily in Israel.
They have colleges. I've read articles by people at them.
31: They do have colleges, but not in a way that we can understand. College sports are just not a thing there.
That's ridiculous. Just tell them about Sandy Kaufax and encourage them to try sports.
33: No, they are quite into sports, they just don't have college sports in the way we have them here in the US. Are there any other places in the world that intercollegiate sports are a huge deal?
I heard that's a big deal in England.
Rowing with boats, not like debate.
The Boat Race was very surreal this year, without spectators. It started about a mile from our house and no one in town could get down to the river and watch it. It was interesting, though, to try and spot the landmarks from the television coverage.
Koufax is just Kovacs, really, like Ernie.
2 13 year olds
It's weird that Bert was the gentile one.
I keep comparing Biles' withdrawal to that final vault by Kerri Strug in '96, I think (which apparently was not needed to win gold? The Karolyis were so fucked up). I'm not a super athlete by any means, but I am really prone to oddball stuff where I just choke. I never catch it in the moment, but competing in sports, auditioning for bands, high pressure emergency repairs at work, lots of stuff where I just cannot manage to execute something I've done dozens of times before. It's an awful feeling to want to be able to do something and to know you can and just not be able to do it.
I'm glad she's not pushing herself to serious injury (paralysis, lifelong pain, all stuff that can happen to gymnasts) over sport. The Olympics seem particularly cruel to athletes given the interval where one needs to be at peak performance combined with the prestige.
The amount of strength it must have taken to make the choice to withdraw from one of the small number of events for which she's spent her life training, knowing the amount of shit she was going to be getting from a solid third of the population is inspiring to contemplate in its own right. To face both internal disappointment and some public... rage and stick with the realization that it would be too dangerous, that's a tough one.
It's got some parallels to coming out. Your actions and appearance are the interface between your internal world and the external world. When the two worlds align, there's no friction.
When the two worlds don't align, you have friction. If you're closeted or going through with an event that you know is a bad idea, the friction is on the inside and your appearance/actions align with the extrinsic world. If you come out or assert your agency, your appearance/actions align with your internal world and the friction is externalized. The friction is now visible to the world, but it's easier to be in your own skin.
Note: I am a total phony who is waxing on about situations I've never been in.
I'm sorry that things didn't work out for Biles, but I can't believe the extent to which "inspiring" has been defined down here. Biles is an incredibly famous athlete, one who probably makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in endorsements, one who was being talked up as the greatest women's gymnast of all time. Of course people are going to criticize her for withdrawing -- that's what it means to be a rich and famous athlete. You succeed, and you get to bask in glory. I must have read 50 articles over the last five years on the Greatness of Simone Biles, after her last Olympics. You fail, and fail in such a way that people can wonder if you didn't try as hard as you could have, and you get public criticism.
If anything, Biles has gotten off lighter than most athletes would experience in this situation, because so many people have developed an emotional investment in her as a public figure, rather than as an athlete. I have far more praise of her than I've seen criticism. To take a contrasting example, the Sixers had a player who developed the yips in the playoffs (Ben Simmons). His name is mud now in Philadelphia, and among NBA fans in general it's not much better.
50: There was a Twitter thread (fortunately I'm cut off from Twitter at present so I can't link) pointing to a contemporaneous case where a US player dropped out of a biking event during it, and to the extent it got any coverage it was all positive, because it was seen as making it easier for the US team to medal. Is that not comparable?
50 is amazing.
She's medalled in how many events? She has how many elements named specifically for her? Gold medalled while passing a frickin' kidney stone. Oh, yeah, endured sexual assault for years by her own federation's doctor, and continues to compete. And has the mental fortitude to recognize that despite all that pressure, internal and external, she's gonna step aside.
Ben Simmons doesn't risk paralysis or death when he gets the yips.
Defining down inspiring, my shiny metal ass.
52 is an example of the bizarre investment people have in Biles. Biles doesn't care if you live or die, dude.
So? It's not a parasocial relationship, it's a performance one. I only know Biles as someone who does extremely difficult things in public well, and she's done another one. Brava Ms Biles.
Plus I do not want a "let's just do it and be legends" norm, least of all in death-risking sports.
51: For all I know, she made the completely correct call, one that maximized the chances of the US medalling. But I swear to God, I've read more praise of her today for her inspiring example than I read for Moderna developing a vaccine for coronavirus in 2 days, a literal life-saving miracle. It's fucking crazy. I don't know if it's a sign of how deranged our relationship with sports has become or what.
55: I suspect it says more about your reading habits and recency bias but hey, if this is the way you like to go through life, have at it.
53: It's extremely difficult to decline to perform because you are afraid of injuring yourself?
Also, it clearly is a parasocial relationship.
Nobody wants to try my new sport, which is a combination of parallel bars and fencing.
57: When all eyes (in this case, of the world) on you? Seems likely, yes, especially considering the injury rate in gymnastics.
60: Her being too terrified to perform and her being brave enough to resist public pressure are observationally equivalent. I'm happy to not speculate on which it is, but I'm not invested in the Simone Biles American Hero narrative, either.
Moderna would never have lost the ability in mid-air to complete the last twist off the vault. Moderna would have dug even deeper and fought for Americans all over the world.
What little I have to offer: I trained gymnastics fairly seriously until it was clear I was growing into the wrong body type. One weird vault gave me lifetime back issues and I wasn't doing anything that crazy. One of my coaches was a multiple national level champion but then fucked up their shoulders (on our rings). The injury rate is pretty high, and some of the injuries are no joke.
55: well the conservatives were calling her a selfish quitter, so some of the takes are responses to that. My read is that Biles as a champion surely knows the difference between pressure, working through pain, and "something's badly off". If she'd stayed in she would have cost them the medals - her score had to count given the format. So she basically benched herself which gave the other women a chance to compete.
I always liked the fact that "still rings" were in contrast to the "flying rings", and that was the event with the REALLY unacceptable fatality rate. Or maybe I didn't like it but at least found it darkly interesting.
I think it's because they are "still rings" and haven't broken into a cresent.
Like how "still water" is water that hasn't been turned into soda.
This pretty outraging: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/jul/26/shacarri-richardson-alen-hadzic-olympics-suspensions-fencing
TL;DR Sha'Carri Richardson was barred from competing, for having smoked pot. This [white, male] sex assaulter Alen Hadzic gets the kid glove treatment, even in the face of basically the entire US fencing team saying "no, nopes, keep the bastard away from us". Two female members of the team were signatories to that letter, and even still, he's arguing "I don't have the experience that I earned," against those restrictions.
Next we'll find out he murdered his parents and is pleading for clemency as an orphan.
yes but nobody drinks flying water either these days, now do they.
Because of masks requirements for flying.
50: "Biles is an incredibly famous athlete..." Which explains why I had literally never heard of her until two days ago. Are there actually real people out there who give a shit about competitive gymnastics?
72: She's famous in the US at least. She cleaned up at the last Olympics, and then was tops in the world pretty much since then. Women's gymnastics is one of the premiere Olympic events for a US audience.
Kudos to the Washington Post editor who wrote a headline suggesting Katie Ledecky pissed in the pool during a race.
Yeah, she's probably the most famous non-NBA Olympian in the US. Only Katie Ledecky and Megan Rapinoe are in the same conversation. (Weirdly there are no famous US men now that Phelps is retired.)
I think I've heard of a few guys on the basketball team.
it isn't just about the popularity of women's (usually girls!) gymnastics in the us. it's the wide coverage of the horrific sexual & other abuse of girls within the bosom of organized gymnastics for years (decades? probably) and that a very large percentage of the us population are heavily invested in organized youth sports as an essential part of growing up/parenting. our national psychodrama about youth-parenting is so heavily dominated by youth sports that i think it is a bit difficult to imagine from outside the us, and it's absence in other western nations (non anglophone? maybe a break there). and organized youth sports are structurally vulnerable to exploration by people interested in exploring children. plus i would guess that most people who grew up in the us personally know at least one person who as a child was pressured & valorized for taking risks (physical, mental, emotional, financial, academic) in pursuit of youthful sporting achievement wildly out of proportion to any reasonable expectation of reward. add it all up, and bob's your uncle.
The hard coupling of sports to educational institutions and in particular universities seems pretty unique to the US - it does seem one of the primary purposes of the Olympics is to provide a motivational McGuffin for the non-football portions of the NCAA (and not just for the US athletes).
I forgot about tennis.
"exploiting" *not* "exploring" shudders ...
There's also this thing where the celebration of the achievements of Black women in particular are often interpreted as performative or compensatory in some way, rather than of true talent. See popular, even liberal white men's reactions to Nikole Hannah-Jones, Beyonce, etc. The whole "you're so desperate for a minority hero that you're over-celebrating these minor achievements" trope.
having lived through a kid walking stone cold away from a decade plus of intense insular high stakes & extremely time consuming training & performance, at a still young age, it's just --- it really does take something folks. and he just had to nope out on the local russian ballet mob! i am so happy to this day that he still loves dance! he found his wierd & amazing tap dance people! 🤣😍🤣😍 & so happy that he plays and writes music for pure pleasure! it's not obvious. and he never had a whole small town baying for him to give it all at 17 to bring home the football trophy or whatever, despite substantial physical risks & my god the opportunity costs.
I have to admit, I do wish that people could say, "okay, this is just sports, it's disappointing that Simone Biles didn't feel that she could compete but we do encounter disappointments in life and frankly it would be weird to be more upset about this than about, eg, missing out on going to a concert you really wanted to actually see in person as a one-time thing." Like, a lot of this whole thing emerges from the really weird, unhealthy and nationalistic emotions around the Olympics.
I mean, the average viewer is still going to have the opportunity to see many outstanding performances from her - you only really miss out if you're super, super invested in a USA-USA-we're-number-one mentality.
It is so weird and inappropriate to simultaneously infantilize a Black woman athlete ("obviously a spoiled snowflake who doesn't know what her own body feels and can't understand her own capacities as well as I, a rando in TV land, can") and feel mad that she isn't going to represent the US. It's really a slavery mentality - like, normally one would think "hey, if Biles is so stupid and incompetent, why do you even care? Also, how did she win so much?" but if you have this mindset of "Black people aren't fully people, they are chattel and simultaneously need to be directed and should work on command", well, there you go.
It's like, I notice that performers of color in general but particularly Black performers are often not respected as creatives - they're viewed as being "naturally" good at something so really it doesn't count, they're not smart or hard-working, they just love to sing and dance. So obviously their own feelings about their art are just basically misperceptions.
Biles is unusually famous because of social media and because she is a very charismatic performer - she's not just good, she projects personality and style really well. That is why lots of people have heard of her who, like me, don't care about gymnastics much.
It's weird, but it seems to me that women's gymnastics has been a huge deal in the US forever -- I can still remember names like Olga Korbut, Nadia Comenici, Mary Lou Retton etc while I can't name a single male gymnast past or present.
There was a "Kurt". They made a movie with him doing gymnastics and karate at the same time. I'm pretty sure I'm not making this up.
86: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymkata
87: Just to be clear, I had never heard of that movie. I used my superlibrarian skills and typed "Kurt" "gymnastics" "karate" and "movie" into Google.
Pretty much all of the commentary about Biles isn't really about her at all -- it's about the commenter.
So here's my narrative: Biles is a professional who made a professional decision that seems eminently defensible. Some folks want her to be a hero or a coward, but I can't work out that there is any particular moral valence at all to her decision.
89.2: is eminently rational, but ignores how we are always telling heroic narratives about athletes.
The usual story is how despite everything (crippling pain, broken bones, mental illness, death of parent, etc) the athlete goes out and gives it their all.
Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg have already come up in this thread, and they are an interesting exception to this -- among Jews, they became even bigger heroes because they refused to compete on Yom Kippur.
Sports commentary has always elevated this notion of an ineffable "championship mentality" that separates winners from losers. It's generally pretty dumb; for example, LeBron James was criticized for not winning titles early in his career with a Cleveland team that immediately became the worst team in the league as soon as he left, and he routinely won titles with better teammates.
That said, I feel that Biles has a sufficient track record of accomplishment that it seems even more absurd to think that dime store talk radio bromides apply to her. If Tom Brady walks off the field at halftime in the next Super Bowl, sure, grumble away, but it'd be ridiculous to think that he simply doesn't know what it takes to compete in a high-stakes situation.
Biles has 19 World Championship gold medals and four Olympic gold medals, people should have some basic level of respect.
Agree with 92. I also wish more of that kind of commentary acknowledge that Michael fucking Jordan quit for two years because he couldn't take the stress and was going through a difficult time in his personal life. Everyone who's obsessed with that "championship mentality" nonsense just ignores that ever happened.
Tiger Woods is another interesting example here.
As an American boy in the 1970s I was taught above all the wisdom of Vince Lombardi -- "When the going gets tough, the tough get going", and "A winner never quits, and a quitter never wins".
Are young people today even familiar with the name Vince Lombardi?
95.2: They named the Stanley Cup after him.
97: That is too stupid even for your pretending to be stupid persona.
Wait, Moby has another persona?
If people believed at the time that Michael Jordan had quit because of stress (which I have literally never heard before this second), it would have annihilated his reputation. I bet he would have never come back to the NBA. That's why he had a cover story about being bored and needing new challenges.
Why Jordan retired was a bit of a mystery. Would it really have annihilated his reputation though? "Count the rings" is supposed to be the trump card here.
Why Jordan retired was a bit of a mystery. Would it really have annihilated his reputation though? "Count the rings" is supposed to be the trump card here.
Didn't he quit when his dad was murdered? I don't really know.
Jordan's reputation is "psychopath who only cares about winning", which makes him cool because sports fans are crazy people. If he quit because he just couldn't take it, it would have changed his reputation a lot.
He retired to play baseball! I watched him play for the Birmingham Barons.
Psychopath Jordan hit .202 playing AA baseball in Birmingham Alabama while the Knicks finally knocked off a Bulls team that contended for a title without him.
Biles is OK, but the Hmong who replaced Biles and the two 13 year gold medalists are the most important thing here.
108: I'm going to have to go with the Filipina who clean and jerked 127kg at 5'1 and 55kg. Unreal.
Ooh, a sports thread. I'm waiting for the longform meditation on Caeleb Dressel's joy and wonder ethic contrasted with Michael Phelps' somewhat different countenance.
Katie Ledecky seems less dominant this time around.
111 was me.
If the US fails to medal in basketball, I think it will prove conservative narratives of national decline to be correct.
Not that overall it was necessarily the best swim, but the most unbelievable finish was Bobby Finke coming from so far behind in the last half of the last lap to win the 800. Almost never seen someone come on like that==last lap charges almost always come from great turn, but he still looked doomed at that point. Really something.
Also the 800M Women's free relay was something to see. Aussies prohibitive favorites, but China and US both beat them.
i got some useful swim technique tips from fellow club member sharko, but he was unsympathetic to my pointing out that the "light" weight training he recommended would rule out dior, such narrow shouldered clothes. quoth sharko: "oh i don't give fuck about that." also all the free internet advice re weight training is absurd, starts with impossible weights and swiftly ascends. so now looking for both trainer & tailor.
I just go to the JCC and use the machines. I change the weight until I can do three sets of ten.
111: Yes. Combo of her slowing a bit and competitors improving. It is clear that Titmus (AUS) is d now dominant in the shorter end of Ledecky's range, 200 and 400, and really pushed her in the 800 (which was really boldly challenging Ledecky on her own ground).
Maybe the best way to see it is where Ledecky and her top competitor's times ranked all-time in 2016 vs. 2021.
Ledecky 16 Comp 16 Ledecky 21 Comp 21
200* 6 8 >25 3**,7,14
400 1 >25 4 2
800*** 1 >25 16 24
1500 n/a n/a 12 19,20,23
*Ledecky's split in the relay was "top 10" but had a rolling start.
**Titmus had 2nd fastest ever in AUS qualifying so no real surprise that she won.
***Ledecky was about half a second slower than 25th fastest and Titmus a second or so further back in the 800,
What is amazing, though is how dominant Ledecky has been in the longer 3 distances.
Her share of current 25 best times:
1500: 18 of top 25 including first 12.
800: 24 of top 25 (Titmus in 24th).
400 18 of top 25 (Titmus now has 2 & 3 and a total of 6 of top 25--I think she will likely surpass Ledecky's record at this distance).
I know of no other swimmer so dominant in this regard.
I swam a whole 600 yards yesterday. I could have done a couple hundred more, I think, but others were bored.
I swam across a very small lake last week. Which was fun, but ill-judged in that: (1) I didn't have my glasses on and had to ask some people on shore for a pointer back to the beach I'd started from, and (2) I had forgotten to mention my plans to my onshore companion who was somewhat bemused by where I'd gone off to. Lake swimming is very pleasant, though.
i used my unspent-on-acupuncturist-&-old-friend 2020 medical spending account balance on prescription photo sensitive goggles & have zero regrets. being able to see is sort of important in the bay. also they didn't have bullshit anti fog coating to swiftly decay & cloud over, so can just use baby shampoo.
Swimming up out of the middle of the lake and asking for directions, I felt slightly like a celebrity cameo in The Muppet Movie.
I can barely find the locker room without my glasses, but I don't want to bring them into the pool because I'm afraid someone else without glasses will sit on them.
The important thing about swimming is to have a elderly person in the next lane who looks about to fall over when they walk across the deck, but swims faster than you do.
this never gets old - https://www.instagram.com/p/Bz6NuhFB6sj/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
🤣🤣🤣
Very late to opine, but although it was mentioned above, I will reiterate that the outpouring of support was definitely boosted by the immediacy of the haters hating on her. AI will also note that despite her vast array of achievements, this Olympics will be a significant part of her legacy. Fairly or unfairly. But in general this kind of thing gets remembered; for instance Roberto Duran and "No mas" despite his hugely successful career prior to that.
(For baseball fan's only, a guy I have a lot of sympathy for is Fred Merkle of Merkle's Boner infamy. He did not touch second base from first on a game-winning single to right to the outfield and was subsequently called out, costing his team the pennant, However, at the time the precedent was that players did not need to do that despite it being technically necessary*. And yet Merkle's Boner lives on.
*And there were even a lot of circumstances that made the ruling even more egregious. Fans had pored onto the field, not even clear they tagged the base with the correct ball, and the Cubs had tried the same thing a week or so before and the umpires did not go for it.)