Simone Biles And The Media’s Celebration Of Choking – The Federalist

Its not a crime to choke under pressure but when did it become something to admire with deep reverence?

After U.S. Olympian Simone Biles dropped out of not one but two games this week, events that she and her peers have been training their entire lives for, the response from the national media has been to effusively cheer and pay homage to the power and bravery of giving up.

And make no mistake, much or most of the celebration for Biles backdown is because she happens to be black.

Its not enough for the media to say, Gee, its too bad she quit and hopefully she works out her problems, but they have to herald her as a trailblazer because it makes liberal journalists feel good to pity (i.e. look down on) others, particularly when it comes to race.

A different kind of pressure follows Black women who achieve in traditionally White spaces, wrote Washington Post sports reporter Candace Buckner. If theyve had a realist for a mother, since childhood theyve heard the refrain theyve got to work twice as hard to get half as much. And if they spent two seconds in America, then they know that mama was right.

She said the lesson of Biles abrupt withdrawal should be in letting Black women be great without carrying a deeper narrative.

MSNBCs Hallie Jackson similarly observed that Biles is not just an athlete. She is not just one of the best athletes in the world. Shes also a black woman athlete.

Jacksons guest, sports writer Kavitha Davidson, nodded along thoughtfully and bemoaned the pressure on black women to be 100 percent perfect all the time.

(When you work in the national media, youre allowed to invent new racial stereotypes and concepts at will.)

Davidson said Biles is literally carrying the weight of an entire country on her shoulders and probably an entire sport, and that weighs a lot.

Eren Orbey of the New Yorker was in awe at the radical courage it took for Biles to see herself out of the games. He called it its own kind of achievement.

Remember that the next time youre given an assignment on a tight deadline at work. Should you feel that the pressure is too much, walk out and remind yourself that that in itself is its own kind of achievement.

There is of course nothing wrong with Biles choosing not to compete. Its very literally her neck on the line each time she hurls and twists her body into the air. She said she was sitting the games out not for physical injury but because the mental is not there.

Fair enough! Plenty of people cave under pressure. Very few of them will know pressure like the Olympics. Biles certainly didnt seem to think much of it, even referring to herself after withdrawing the first time as the head star of the Olympics.

But choking doesnt make Biles special. And the incident certainly doesnt reveal a superhumanity, as a headline in New York magazine asserted. That remains true even though Biles is black.

No one in America interested in the Olympics expects anything more or less than that she do our country proud. If someone like Kavitha Davidson believes theres some added responsibility on black women to be 100 percent perfect all the time, thats something she might raise with a therapist, rather than project it on the rest of the nation.

Biles is an undeniably gifted athlete. She choked. It should be very easy to celebrate one and not the other, even though Biles is black.

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Simone Biles And The Media's Celebration Of Choking - The Federalist