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MyKaylaSkinnerSimoneBiles.jpg

MyKayla Skinner Begs Simone Biles To Save Her From Herself

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | August 7, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | August 7, 2024 |

MyKaylaSkinnerSimoneBiles.jpg

Last week, Simone Biles had the clap-back heard ‘round the world. After winning gold with her Olympic gymnastics team, she posted a picture of them to Instagram with the caption, “lack of talent, lazy, olympic champions,” seemingly responding to a controversial statement made by her former teammate MyKayla Skinner.

“Besides Simone, I feel like the talent and the depth just isn’t like what it used to be … obviously a lot of girls don’t work as hard. The girls just don’t have the work ethic,” Skinner said of the USA team in a since-deleted YouTube video that went viral. She seemed to place blame on SafeSport, the organization that prevents abuse and misconduct by coaches, and how these measures have meant coaches can’t be as “aggressive” or “intense” as they once were. This is an especially offensive statement, as Biles has long been a proponent of mental health awareness, and her teammate Suni Lee has been open about her health struggles, including her battle with kidney disease.

Skinner posted a written apology on Instagram after the backlash and then returned to her usual programming of baby stuff and media appearances. Now she’s back with a video in which she pleads for Simone Biles to “put a stop” to the online harassment she’s received after her comments.

In the video, an emotional Skinner whines that she made her public apology before the Olympic team finals in which Biles and the team won gold, and even texted Biles to apologize personally, to which Biles allegedly responded by saying she was “proud” of her. Then, much to her surprise, Biles made that Instagram post and Skinner’s name was dragged through the mud all over again.

“If Simone truly believes that I called our team lazy and lacking talent and if that’s really how she feels, I am really heartbroken over it,” Skinner says. “But not just heartbroken because it isn’t what I feel or even how I previously said, but because Simone’s latest post and others that followed it fueled another wave of hateful comments, DMs, articles and emails.”

In the apology Olympics, MyKayla Skinner doesn’t make it onto the podium. She’s now saying that she didn’t say what Biles has accused her of saying and blames Biles for fueling the fire. And since this is all Biles’s fault, she’s also begging her to make it stop.

“To Simone, I am asking you directly and publicly to please put a stop to this. Please ask your followers to stop. You have been an incredible champion for mental health awareness and a lot of people need your help now.”

No one should be subject to death threats and harassment, but it also certainly isn’t Simone Biles’s job to stop it. It points out another layer to this whole debacle that can’t be ignored: race. While Skinner was begging a Black female Olympic champion to save her from a hell of her own making—and criticizing the other members of her very diverse team in the process—Biles was being awarded the silver medal in the first all-Black gymnastics podium in Olympics history.

All three of those champions, and the rest of team USA, are unbothered by the white woman’s tears. Let’s all take a page out of their playbook, shall we?