As American athletes compete on the world stage in the Tokyo Olympics, many on the right aren’t cheering them on. “The collection of whiny, overpaid social justice warriors are very hard to root for,” said Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield, adding that he took “pleasure” in Team USA’s basketball loss this month because of its players’ “woke” politics. “The team is filled with anthem kneelers, and I find it ironic they are willing to put USA across their chests, but in the not-so-distant past, they would kneel for the anthem.” In addition to taking pleasure in the men’s basketball team’s loss, Stinchfield also noted that he found himself “rooting against…Megan Rapinoe and her merry band of America-hating female soccer players.”
Stinchfield’s comments come on the heels of Donald Trump suggesting at a Phoenix rally last weekend that Team USA’s recent loss to Sweden was caused by the progressive politics of its athletes. “Wokeism makes you lose, ruins your mind, and ruins you as a person,” he said. “You become warped. You become demented.” Trump, who goaded the crowd into booing the U.S. women’s soccer team, went on to say that “Americans were happy” about the team’s defeat. (The former president’s son reiterated his father’s comments by heckling Rapinoe in a tweet. “Hey Megan…maybe [it’s] you!” wrote Donald Trump Jr. in response to the soccer player’s criticism of media coverage of women’s sports after her team’s loss.)
Politics certainly isn’t stopping at water’s edge, as the Olympics, traditionally a moment of national unity, has become the latest front in the culture wars. Right-wing politicians and pundits, apparently incensed that some athletes have spoken out against racial injustice and on other social issues, are now seizing on setbacks as evidence that American athletes on the court and field aren’t fit to represent the United States. Star Olympian Simone Biles was branded a public enemy by conservative talkers for dropping out of her role in the gymnastics team finals. After the four-time gold-medal-winning gymnast struggled in her early performances in Tokyo, Biles made her decision to withdraw from the event, telling reporters on Tuesday, “I came in and I felt like I was still doing it for other people. That just hurts my heart that doing what I love has been kind of taken away from me to please other people.”
Among those criticizing Biles was right-wing sports radio host Clay Travis, who appeared on Fox News on Tuesday. “I think this is a massive issue for the United States women’s Olympics gymnastics team that she’s decided to quit in the middle of competition. We’ve never seen this happen,” he said, adding that Biles should not “be praised” for her decision and should never have “started the competition” in the first place. “I think quitting during the middle of the competition is the foundational effort level that we expect from all of our Olympic athletes,” he added.
Charlie Kirk, the founder of the right-wing youth group Turning Point USA, went even further in denigrating Biles, calling her a “selfish sociopath” on his podcast. “You know who has the gold medal? Russia! I have to go look at these four-foot-11 Russian Olympians chewing on their gold medals smirking at the Americans,” Kirk seethed, before claiming that America is “raising a generation of weak people like Simone Biles.” He also called her “immature” and a “shame to the country.” Kirk, who has previously said that “these Black athletes” in the NBA “are privileged brats,” accused Biles of teaching the “rest of the nation that when things get tough, you shatter into a million pieces.”
In an article posted on the conservative site The Federalist, John Daniel Davidson published a post titled “Sorry, Simone Biles, the Olympics Isn’t About You, It’s About Winning for America,” in which he seemingly accused Biles of being too weak. “Biles doesn’t suffer from a specific mental illness, at least not that we know of or that’s ever manifested itself before,” Davidson wrote. “She wasn’t mentally tough when she needed to be.” He continued: “That’s fine. It happens to LeBron James all the time (and when it does, you can tell; he stops trying and lets his team lose). But instead of being ashamed of that, or apologizing to her teammates and her countrymen, Biles seemed to revel in taking care of her ‘mental health,’ whatever that means.” Unsurprisingly, Piers Morgan joined in on the attacks, writing in a Daily Mail op-ed that “I don’t think it’s remotely courageous, heroic or inspiring to quit.” The British commentator added that “great champions just don’t do that,” despite Biles’s historically long list of accolades.
The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, responding to Kirk’s comments about Biles, suggested “that every Trumpist pundit understands the ravenous appetite their audiences have for belittling the tremendously successful black people they see on television, and rushes to meet every opportunity to do it.”
Biles, who was a survivor of sexual assault at the hands of former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, further explained her decision to pull out of the Tokyo Games by sharing an Instagram post penned by former gymnast Andrea Orris. “It makes me so frustrated to see comments about Simone not being mentally tough enough or quitting on her team,” Orris wrote in a message, which Biles reposted to her Instagram story. “We are talking about the same girl who was molested by her team doctor throughout her entire childhood and teen years, won the World All-Around Championship title while passing a kidney stone, put her body through an extra year of training through the pandemic, [and] added so much difficulty to her routines that the judges literally do not know how to properly rate her skills because they are so ahead of her time.”
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