Why are we celebrating Simone Biles for quitting the Olympics?

This is what is worrying about the praise for Biles – it looks like further confirmation that our societies are abandoning the virtues of courage, determination and aspiring to victory in favour of celebrating people’s feelings of weakness. So Biles is brave not for all the astonishing things she has achieved in gymnastics, but for telling everyone she has mental-health problems. That is crazy. A similar valorisation of failure occurred after the Euros final, when the ‘three lions’ we were all expected to cheer were penalty-missers Rashford, Sancho and Saka rather than goal-scorers Kane, Maguire and Shaw (not to mention the heroic Jordan Pickford).

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A new generation is being encouraged to admire those who fail or quit more than those who go on, against all the odds, to achieve great and wonderful things. That is a betrayal of the Olympian ideal, and of the broader human ideal of making good on one’s life and one’s talents. We urgently need a countercultural pushback against this love of losers. It can start with recognising that Biles’ abandonment of the Olympics was sad, not heroic.

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