I am as guilty as anyone of being Simone Biles-focused, and I make no excuses for that — right or wrong, I am VERY invested in her feeling mentally and physically strong in Paris! — but I do love us all being reminded that the USA Gymnastics team is full of badass women. Suni Lee won all-around gold in Tokyo and a bronze on the bars, Jade Carey won a gold on the floor, and they plus Jordan Chiles are the reigning team silver medalists. Hezly Rivera is our rookie but it’s going to be so exciting for her to be on a team with four other women who know how to handle the spotlight and how to bolster the people around them — and that’s a big part of Chiles’s appeal. As the profile in Teen Vogue notes, she’s grown into a performer who can REALLY rally a crowd while also cheering on the women next to her. Jordan has a lot of valuable perspective in this piece, including about being a Black gymnast in a predominantly white sport — Biles being the face of it notwithstanding — and the discrimination she’s faced based on race and body type. There’s also this:
She’s always dancing, even at the slightest hint of bass flowing through the room. It goes back to that idea of athletes as entertainers, that Chiles’s life takes place, in part, onstage. So it’s easy to assume that there must be an extinguished, behind-the-scenes Jordan—a Jordan beyond the spotlight. That, Chiles says, just isn’t the case: “I’m going to be the person that I need to be because I was put on this earth for a reason,” she says. “I wasn’t taught to change my personality,” she adds, emphatically. “I wasn’t taught to change the person I am because that’s not being the authentic girl that grew up to have these big dreams.”
[…]
Some, she says, have called her antics dramatic, but that’s not it. “I’m not being dramatic. I’m being myself,” she says. “This is the personality that was given to me. I’m outgoing. How are you going to take something that was gifted to me?”
She had a couple rough days in Tokyo, but in the team finals she nailed down two routines in place of Biles that she hadn’t even warmed up on; I can’t wait to see what she brings after these three extra years of experience and self-confidence.
Having said that… am I nuts, or is the lighting here VERY off? I have a LOT of notes, actually.
