Simone Biles opened up about why she felt it was crucial to stand up for her teammates at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
“It’s important because you have to teach them to use their voices,” Biles, 27, told People in an interview published on Tuesday, August 6. “And if not, you’re a voice for the voiceless, which is OK.”
After she and fellow teammates Suni Lee, Jordan Chiles, Jade Carey and Hezly Rivera won gold in the team finals last month, Biles captioned her Instagram upload, “Lack of talent, lazy, olympic champions ❤️🥇🇺🇸.”
The comment was seemingly a response to previous remarks made by former teammate MyKayla Skinner, who said in a since-deleted YouTube video that this year’s squad lacked a “work ethic.” She later apologized for the video, writing in a July Instagram Story statement, “I love and support all the girls that made it and I’m so proud of them. It was more about going back into my own gym and the work ethic is different compared to when we were doing gymnastics in the Marta [Karolyi] era.”
Biles told the outlet that it “meant a lot” to her teammates to have “somebody to stand up” for them. She added that it felt like the right moment to take a stance “because they’re so young and they haven’t fully stood in their power yet.”
In the wake of Biles’ post, Skinner, 27, blocked her former teammate on social media. “Oop I’ve been blocked 👀🫢😂,” Biles wrote via X on Wednesday, July 31. Later that day, Chiles, 23, uploaded a snap of Skinner’s profile, writing, “When she blocks Simone.”
Days later, Skinner took to social media to explain that she posted an apology video after her initial YouTube video. Skinner also alleged that she wrote notes to each of the women on the team and only received a response from Biles.
“You guys can imagine my surprise last week when I was celebrating our team winning gold just to see this brought up all over again by a caption on an Instagram post,” she said in an Instagram video on Tuesday. “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. 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. Hate that includes death threats to me my family and even my agent. My family and my friends don’t deserve to be caught in the crossfire here. They’ve done nothing.”
Skinner concluded her message by asking Biles directly to put an end to the cyberbullying she has undergone.
“To Simone, I am asking you directly and publicly to please put a stop to this,” she said. “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. We’ve been attacked in ways that I’m certain you never intended. Your performance, the team’s performance and the Olympics in general should be a time that we support one another.”
