Simone Biles drops out of the Olympics for mental health reasons (7-27-21)

Posted on July 27, 2021 by Luke Ford

I’m trying and failing to think of some other professional athlete bowing out of competition to concentrate on mindfulness. Can you imagine a QB pulling this?

To quit at the Olympics is the equivalent of taking a mental health day during the Super Bowl. I don’t recall any football player taking a mental health day to avoid playing in the Super Bowl. Simone Biles is on a team, she quit on her team, and on her country.

Wasn’t Simone Biles lecturing America and American gymnastics on its failings? Do they get to have opinions about her choices?

Michael Tracey tweets: “In a way, Simone’s spectacle was probably the most rational thing she could do — it seems to resonate with the current culture more than if she’d actually won the Gold Medal for the USA. Will turn her into an even bigger, more valorized celeb. She’s just responding to incentives.”

A review of major media reveals only gushing stories about Simone Biles. We’re told she’s stunning and brave for quitting on her team.

This story illustrates the benefits of the situationist approach — everybody quits in some situations, everybody is courageous in some situations, everybody has situations where they are honest and situations where they are dishonest. Nobody is always brave and noble and true. Nobody always takes the high road. Nobody is always up to every challenge. Nobody is always helpful.

There’s no such thing as moral character because there’s no true self. Who we are depends upon the situation.

In this situation, Simone Biles feels like the John McCain of US gymnastics. McCain had no interest in winning in 2008, he should never have sought the nomination. “I just felt like it would be a little bit better to take a back seat and work on my mindfulness,” she said.

Should the United States have placed her on the team if there was good reason to believe she would fold under pressure? Why didn’t she bow out ahead of time and let someone else shine?

“[Simone Biles] had been struggling with the stress of being the greatest gymnast in history, she said, and outside expectations were just too hard to combat.”

Biles said: “There’s more to life than gymnastics.” Perhaps she should have shared this attitude with the selectors before dropping out due to sad feelings.

Steve Sailer comments:

It sounds like all this #BlackGirlMagic / #RacialReckoning / #Intersectionality hype might be taking a toll on Naomi Osaka, the torch-lighter who just went out in the first round of the Olympic tennis tournament, and Simone Biles.

The media wants these poor girls to embody #BlackSupremacy and #FemaleSupremacy. That’s a lot to ask of anybody.

COMMENTS:

* This mental illness thing seems to be quite contagious.

Those English soccer players who missed their penalty kicks did the right thing in taking a private jet to the Cayman Islands for a mental health break.

Biles has said that there are more important things in life than sport. Precisely! It is not like she is a highly paid professional athlete or anything. She should just have fun jumping and running and tumbling, but not to the extent of making it an obsession.

* I think part of it is the nihilism of this moment of black ethnocentric politics. There are no laws to be passed and there are no real problems with racism. So without that and without a plan for self-determination, it probably is getting depressing to people other than criminally-inclined males aged 18-24.

If there was some objective this black ethnocentric politicisation was working towards, something positive, the establishment of African-American self-determination, a homeland. Otherwise maybe that unmet need just makes it depressing like for Native Americans who faced into oblivion and white Americans. Whipping people up into an ethnocentric frenzy and telling them the majority population is against them and creating antagonism is pretty depressing when you have to live with those people day to day.

There certainly isn’t a plan to elevate blacks socio-economically in play. Black politicisation is stuck in the 60s, LARPing the civil rights movement with no leadership to move it forward.

00:00 White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07K356517/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
03:00 Simone Biles drops out of the Olympics for mental health reasons, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=141426
05:00 Simone Biles Says She Wasn’t in Right Place Mentally During Olympic Final, https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/27/sports/gymnastics-olympics-results
14:00 Michael Anton: “That’s Not Happening and It’s Good That It Is”, https://americanmind.org/salvo/thats-not-happening-and-its-good-that-it-is/
20:00 Michelle Goldberg: We can replace them,

42:00 Dennis Prager: The Media Produces Derangement: Proof From New York Times Readers, https://dennisprager.com/column/the-media-produces-derangement-proof-from-new-york-times-readers/
45:00 Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=130046
50:00 WOKE JAPAN’S POSTER GIRL FAILS TO GET A MEDAL, https://affirmativeright.blogspot.com/2021/07/woke-japans-poster-girl-fails-to-get.html
55:00 Beate Sirota Gordon and Japan’s Post-WWII constitution, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beate_Sirota_Gordon

About Luke Ford

I've written five books (see Amazon.com). My work has been covered in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and on 60 Minutes. I teach Alexander Technique in Beverly Hills (Alexander90210.com).
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