Simone Biles and Lynn Allen
On the right, Lynn Allen, and on the left, Simone Biles
Simone Biles is the greatest of all time - period. She is the most decorated gymnast in world championship history with 25 medals, of which 19 are gold. Along with her Olympic medals, she has a combined total of 32 medals, which ties her with former Soviet artistic gymnast Larisa Latynina as the most decorated gymnast of all time.
She is the tenth female gymnast and first American female gymnast to win a World medal on every event and the first female gymnast since 1988 to win a medal at every event in a single Olympic Games or World Championships. Her named elements on the vault, balance beam, and floor exercise are the most difficult elements on the apparatuses, and in May 2021 she became the first woman to successfully complete a Yurchenko double piked on the vault during competition.
Even though she pulled out of the team event finals and withdrew from the vault, uneven bars, and floor finals in the Tokyo Olympics, Biles won a bronze medal for her work on the balance beam finals and Team U.S.A took home silver medals. Winning these medals tied her with Shannon Miller as the most decorated U.S Olympic gymnast of all time.
Yet with all of her achievements, Biles was still called “selfish” and a “sociopath” for her decision to pull out from most of the events in the Olympics, after a faulty vault wherein she balked midair and performed a 1.5 instead of a 2.5. Former teammate Laurie Hernandez called it “incredible” that Biles landed while getting lost in the air. Biles later explained on her Instagram Story that she was experiencing the “twisties,” a mental block where your brain feels disconnected from your body and you lose control of your body as you spin through the air. Peacock TV producer and gymnastics videographer Deanna Hong wrote on Twitter that, “One former U.S elite gymnast I talked to said that if it was someone other than Simone Biles who had made that same error, they would have certainly blown a knee, at minimum. Another said that if it had happened to her instead of Simone, ‘I probably would have ended up paralyzed.’”
Former gymnasts empathized with Biles and posted their support for her on social media, but there were also people complaining about Biles pulling out and telling her to get over her mental well-being and herself, since she was representing America. Others complained that Biles should have somehow foreseen these issues and just pulled out of the Olympics earlier, to give MyKayla Skinner and Jade Carey a chance to compete. However, there were just as many people, including Olympian gymnasts, who posted about how important it was that Biles was prioritizing her mental health over competition. Dominique Moceanu, the youngest Olympic gold medalist in U.S gymnastics history, said “[Stepping away during the Olympics] It wasn’t even an option in our generation and in our time. We weren’t allowed a voice. But seeing Simone do that now, it was such a sign of her strength and maturity . . . The conversation about mental health and physical well-being is shifting.”
Biles coaching her teammates after she withdrew from certain events.
Over the past week, as I completed my own work for the HistoryMakers and thinking about how I was going to convince my professors to offer extra credit to people who participated in the Black History Month contest, my mind kept returning to Simone Biles and the struggles of Black athletes in America. There is such a burden of representation upon Black athletes, to be the best and to lead with excellence so that another Black person will have the opportunity to come through. There are so many expectations placed on Black athletes, and when those expectations are unmet, the public backlash and disappointment are overwhelming.
When you take into account the fact that Black women have historically been on the periphery in gymnastics and that Black gymnasts encounter challenges that white gymnasts do not, it is a wonder that Biles has made it so far and been so successful in the first place.
As I stewed over the people complaining about Biles, I decided to search up “gymnastics” on the Digital Archive and see what I could find. I learned about Lynn Carol Allen, who is the director of multicultural education for the Oak Park Elementary School and the co-founder and gymnastics coach for Tri-Star Gymnastics in Forest Park, Illinois. During her interview, she talked about how she hired a student athlete in her junior year of college to teach her gymnastics. I found it absolutely remarkable how she went from knowing nothing to making it onto the women’s team in her senior year, becoming the only Black person on the team. She described how she “hadn’t had enough of it” after she graduated and started a gymnastics club at Unity Catholic High School. Later on, she formed the Lynn Allen’s Gymnastic Center in 1977, and in 1987, it became Tri-Star Gymnastics.
Logo of Lynn Allen’s gym
One of the things that stuck out the most to me as she talked about the struggles and trials she faced while continuing the gym and trying to find new places was her passion for coaching. She truly wants to make all of the children who come into her gym learn gymnastics in a safe environment with no worries of affordability or differences. Her gym is truly multicultural and she said that, “One thing I’m really proud of is that for the last ten years at least, even though gymnastics is not a traditional sport for Black kids, we always had at least one Black girl varsity member on the team at the high school, and I’m trying to get it to be more than that, but we have at least one. Next year we will have at least two, so it’s something.”
Allen guiding a student through a hand split
The quote that really resonated with me was when she said, “The other thing that I feel very strongly about is that you should do no damage if you’re a coach. You should not damage a kid’s psyche; you should not damage them psychologically.”
Eating disorders are as common in gymnastics as they are in ballet, because the dominant idea in these sports is that you have to have a certain body type in order to compete, and both ballet instructors and gym coaches are connoted with being notoriously tough and demanding on their students. To see and hear Allen firmly say that she is against the kind of emotional abuse that gym coaches are known for inflicting upon their students made my respect for her increase.
Allen also talked about how there are a variety of body types at her gym and that at her gym the gymnasts aren’t pressured to give up everything else in their life at the expense of gymnastics. At the time of her interview, she talked about how “when we go to a meet, we usually have the most diverse team.” As she reminisced about her students, she went on to say, “I feel anybody that wants to do it should be able to enjoy it and get satisfaction out of competing . . . We challenge the kids, let them go as high as they want to go and they have fun with it.”
Hearing Allen’s interview made me reflect on how much has changed in gymnastics over time. The first Olympics I can actually remember is the London 2012 one, and I remember watching Gabby Douglas winning a gold medal in the individual all-around competition, which made her the first African-American to win the event.
I remember being awed, and even at that young age, knowing that history was being made, not just by Douglas winning the medal, but by virtue of her presence. She was the only woman of color on that team, but in 2016, she was joined by Laurie Hernandez and Simone Biles. This year, Sunisa Lee made history as the first Hmong-American Olympian, and the majority of Team USA was women of color. Things are changing in gymnastics, slowly but surely. The Olympic teams are starting to look more diverse, but there is a long way to go in terms of coaches and trainers being more diverse.
I wonder if Allen ever met Biles, and what they would say to each other if they did. I do know that Biles has her own gym in Texas, and I hope the environment in her gym is similar to Allen’s. Given the bravery of Biles to step out of the Olympics, I think it is.
