In Defense of Simone Biles
07/28/2021
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iSteve commenter Gamecock Jerry writes:

My wife is a former Olympic gymnast (from [an Eastern European country]) and we were discussing this today. I was shocked how sympathetic she was to Simone. She said as you get older you start to fear the routines that when you were 16 you didn’t even think about.

She’s 24, which is old for a female gymnast. Maybe she would have lived up to the hype if the Olympics had been held in 2020 when she was a year younger.

Her routines are sometimes so extraordinarily difficult that the governing authorities have decided not to give her extra points for her hardest stunts because they are too dangerous.

Simone had reduced the difficulty of her routines while performing and this was causing her to make mistakes on easier stuff.

I think most of us can think back on things we did as kids and think wtf was i thinking. We weren’t.

Hopefully she can regroup before the individual events.

Okay, now back to the hair.

In general, judged events have a tendency to get more and more dangerous as competitors try ever more extreme stunts. Among the well-informed, there’s a particular concern about women competitors injuring themselves trying to land crazy aerials because they are not as sturdily built.

[Comment at Unz.com]

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