Ten years ago I said silly things like, “It isn’t a good ride until you get pelted by insects.”
Today — as I’m trying to wipe one bug away from my eye and get hit on the other cheek by another hard-shelled critter — I say “That was inconsiderate.” And then the last cicadas in town come in for a low-altitude harassment pass …
These days I also say “Twenty-six is a little hard, can we hold it at 23 or 24 miles an hour?”
We were watching the tape-delayed Olympics last night, watching the gymnastics, knowing she was out, knowing something. And in the middle of Simone Biles’ vault The Yankee, herself a Division 1 gymnast, a high school All-American, tensed up during that vault. (My wife’s gymnastics career was ended suddenly by injury, one she still deals with decades later.) She spent the next several minutes talking about what an amazing save that was, and then several more moments about what terrible things could have happened in Tokyo.
And so this little thread cinches it. Gymnasts know what they saw. They alone know what the rest of us missed. That’s good enough for me.
One former US elite gymnast I talked to said that if it was someone other than Simone Biles who had made that same error, they would have certainly blown a knee, at minimum. Another said if it had happened to her instead of Simone, “I probably would have ended up paralyzed.”
— Deanna Hong (@DeannaHong) July 28, 2021
It’s not that she made a silly mistake and landed poorly – her mind & body betrayed her in the air while doing one of the hardest vaults in the world, and it’s only due to her extreme athleticism that she was able to land safely.
— Deanna Hong (@DeannaHong) July 28, 2021
And, also, this:
See, no less a competitor than the great @Dmoceanu — herself an all-around gold medalist from the Goodwill Games, a dual medalist from the 1995 World Championships and a 1996 Olympic gold medalist — knows Simone Biles put down an important, powerful marker for young athletes. https://t.co/jhP1rIvNeK
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) July 28, 2021
A watershed moment occurred in these Olympic Games. The rest is just noise.
