What kind of champion withdraws at the Olympics?
One who can recognize her limits and stop before she crashes into them. And so in dropping out of the team gymnastics competition at the Tokyo Olympics, Simone Biles, the best gymnast America has ever produced, issued a statement as powerful as anything she’s done in competition: She said “enough.”
After an unusual underperformance at the preliminaries — by her own high standards — Biles realized she could not execute her planned vault in the team finals. After some deliberation, she bowed out.
“At the end of the day, we’re human, too, so we have to protect our mind and our body rather than just go out there and do what the world wants us to do,” she told reporters after the competition, in which her team earned Olympic silver medals.