Five Ring Circus
“Three years after withdrawing from the team final of the Tokyo Olympics because of a mental block, a move that prompted critics to call her a loser, a quitter and un-American, Simone Biles on Thursday proved to the world — and to herself — that she was unstoppable.” NYT (Gift Article): For Simone Biles, a Long Road Back Is Paved in Gold. Biles reinforced her GOAT status in the gym, and then won the internet. ‘I love my black job’: Simone Biles appears to take a jab at Trump after Olympic win. (I guess you’d call this a DEI Higher.)
+ Biles wasn’t the only great story among the women’s all-round gymnastics medalists. “At her lowest point Suni Lee wasn’t thinking about going back to the Olympics. Just getting out of bed in the morning was hard enough. After a year and a half of uncertainty and depression while battling a pair of career-threatening kidney ailments that led to a weight gain of 45lb on her 5ft frame and kept her out of the gym for months at a time, the Tokyo Olympic all-around champion was ready to call it quits.” Update: She didn’t.
+ And… “One of 8 children raised by a single mother, Rebeca Andrade grew up in a favela in the outskirts of Guarulhos, São Paulo … Rebeca’s mother, who worked as a maid, couldn’t always afford to pay for her daughter’s bus ticket to the gym. Andrade and her older brother began to walk for 2 hours each way to get to her gym on days when their mother couldn’t afford a bus ticket.” How a bunk bed acrobat from a favela in Brazil became the #2 female gymnast in the world.
+ “Filomenaleonisa Iakopo, the 18-year-old from American Samoa who runs a national record of 12.78sec in heat two. A little cluster of volcanic islands and atolls in the south Pacific, the 77 generously-forested square miles of American Samoa do not currently possess a running track.” These are the slowest fastest women on Earth. And they have a story to tell.
+ “To make a name for yourself in the Olympics you either need to perform incredible athletic feats – or really like muffins. That last one really only applies to Henrik Christiansen, a Norwegian swimmer whose love of the chocolate muffins in the Olympic Village has taken on a life of its own.”
+ “Track fans might remember Ellis as the runner who found herself stuck in a porta potty at the U.S. track trials, in a semi-panic as she banged on the door for 10 minutes trying to grab someone’s attention, worried that her Olympic hopes were swirling away.” Kendall Ellis rides porta potty mishap to a deal with a toilet paper company, and a trip to Olympics. (I’ve panicked and raced toward a bathroom thousands of times in my life. But I’ve never panicked and raced to get out of one.)
