Two years ago their choice for athlete(s) of the year was the U.S. women’s soccer team, winners of the World Cup. Last year it was LeBron James, America’s biggest sports celebrity who’d also just won a fourth championship with his third different team.

This year it’s someone who was, effectively, injured for her big competition and chose to limit her participation, finishing third in her lone solo event.

The Internet had a week-long fight in July over whether Simone Biles was a weak-kneed quitter for withdrawing from most Olympic events or whether she deserved sympathy for struggling with the mental ordeal of participating. I was in the second camp, with the proviso that sympathy doesn’t mean celebration. One can feel compassion for her without heralding her as some sort of hero for being unable to perform.

So here’s Time making her their top sports hero of 2021.

.@Simone_Biles is TIME’s 2021 Athlete of the Year.

With the eyes of the world upon her, she took the extraordinary step of saying: That’s enough. I’m enough #TIMEPOY https://t.co/mq8jjVwmzo pic.twitter.com/DTEEQaZeXg

— TIME (@TIME) December 13, 2021

It’s unfair to dismiss Biles as weak for having withdrawn from most Olympic events. The stress she was under wasn’t just the stress of competition (which hadn’t stopped her in the past from becoming the GOAT in her sport) but the trauma she suffered from being abused by Larry Nassar. On top of that, once she arrived in Tokyo Biles began experiencing the “twisties,” a phenomenon in which a gymnast becomes disoriented about their position in space while they’re performing. If you attempt a vault that you’d normally nail while you have the “twisties,” instead of sticking the landing you might plow headfirst into the mat. Declining to do so isn’t choking under pressure, it’s deciding that you probably shouldn’t perform a highwire act without a net while you’re experiencing vertigo.

She was injured psychologically to the point where she couldn’t participate in her sport without risking more severe injury. Guys in the NFL miss games all the time for minor physical injuries to avoid the same risk. It sucks that Biles had to miss the gymnastics equivalent of the Super Bowl but football players sometimes miss the Super Bowl too. It’s life. It happens.

They just don’t get named “athlete of the year” for doing so.

I stand by this post, written on the day Biles announced she wouldn’t take part in the women’s all-around competition:

But the fact that we can sympathize with Biles’s predicament doesn’t justify the clammy celebrations of her withdrawal that are piling up online today. That’s the other side of the dispute, the faintly Orwellian “losing is winning” camp. Morgan is unfortunately right about the commentariat’s habit of actively extolling “losing, failure and quitting” when the loser is likable and their failure is relatable, due to some human frailty. It’s an extension of the anti-bullying ethic behind so much Internet discourse (and which is used so often to justify bullying the “bullies,” ironically). The words “mental health” in particular are almost talismanic, a cue that the person suffering is not to be criticized lest mental illness be further stigmatized. Under those circumstances, failure isn’t just unfortunate and forgivable, it’s treated as admirable and glorious, even heroic…

It’s humane and compassionate to feel for her at an agonizing moment in her career and want to go to bat for her. “She’s still the greatest ever no matter what happened this week” is a fine (and accurate) take. “We shouldn’t forget that even the best athletes are human beings with human foibles” is another one. But calling her a “hero” for choking goes beyond that and veers into something more like propaganda, where being the best gymnast ever, enduring all the work and pain and pressure that entailed, is less impressive than finally buckling under all of it. Consolation for failure is one thing, glorification of it is quite another.

Time didn’t award “athlete of the year” in 2016 but it’s anyone’s guess whether Biles’s astounding performance at the Olympics in Rio would have earned the title. That was the year the Cubs broke the curse and the year LeBron returned to Cleveland and led them to the title. Four gold medals might not have been enough for the GOAT in gymnastics to claim the honor five years ago. But having a mental health crisis in front of the media in Japan got it done in 2021. Not progress.

Then again, if Time didn’t give it to Biles this year there was only one plausible alternative. And no one wants to see Old Man Brady claim another award, however much he deserved it.