I’m not choosing the best time to say that I don’t like Simone Biles’ gymnastics, but at least no one will accuse me of being an opportunist. I write this while she is proclaimed Olympic champion again, another milestone to add to a dazzling list of achievements. There is no space in this column to list all her achievements and yet I find nothing in her gymnastics of what made me fall in love with the sport. They say she has changed gymnastics forever and I’m not sure that’s for the better. It’s not her fault either, it’s just the culmination of a process that many sports have followed. Elegance has been replaced by power; time no longer freezes in each jump, it speeds up; the rhythm is not that of the ballet that the evanescent Boguinskaia, Gutsu or Khorkina seemed to practice, it’s the vertigo of a video game; spectacularity prevails, it no longer seems possible to add more difficulty unless between round-offs and round-offs. flicflac Biles solves the Hodge conjecture or composes a cantata in the twelve-tone system. I am an old woman shouting at a cloud, I am aware.
When she finished her floor exercise the crowd roared, even her main rival, the elegant Rebeca Andrade, applauded with a joy that seemed sincere. I applauded too because I don’t like Simone Biles’ gymnastics, but I like Simone Biles a lot. It’s easy to be enchanted by her story, and to know why you just have to watch Simone Biles flies again.
The Netflix documentary begins at the moment her career went awry, the night her career took a turn for the worse, to the astonishment of the public and also of Paloma del Río —the great absence from these games is not Russia, it is her, everything seems less important without her narration—. But for Biles at that moment the most important thing was not to win, but to not die, and she abandoned what were going to be her games. And there were those who did not forgive her for prioritizing her physical and mental health.
It is devastating to see her face insults on social media. They called her a coward, a crackpot, a loser… Little has changed. At these games, similar insults have been hurled at Nadal. Nadal! Be amazed. The Algerian boxer Imane Khelif has to endure even greater ridicule, in this case the hatred comes via a hoax from the far right, the only one that comes out on top in all the cultural wars that involve the dehumanization of the other. In an Olympics of filth there would not be gold for so much misery.
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