The 2021 Simone Biles Controversy That Nobody Wants to Forget
Simone Biles stepped away from the Tokyo Olympics in July 2021. She had just won her first-ever all-around title at the U.S. Olympic trials with a performance that looked impossible, then decided she wasn't going to compete in the individual all-around or floor exercise. Her stated reason was the "twisties" — a moment where a gymnast loses spatial awareness mid-air — combined with general mental health concerns. It was the first time an American gymnast had withdrawn so publicly from the Games since at least the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, maybe ever at that scale. Charlie Kirk didn't stay quiet about it. Within hours, he was posting on social media and on his podcast, Turning Right, about what he saw as a failure of character and a symptom of a broader cultural problem.
What Did Charlie Kirk Say About Simone Biles In 2021
Kirk's core argument was that Biles was making excuses. He framed her withdrawal not as a legitimate health decision but as a refusal to compete through adversity. He specifically contrasted her approach with what he considered the right attitude — one rooted in toughness, sacrifice, and putting the country above personal comfort. On Twitter, he wrote things along the lines of: "She should just do it," and suggested she was letting herself and her teammates down by prioritizing her own well-being over competing. He also linked her decision to a wider pattern he was already criticizing — the rise of "snowflake culture," the normalization of mental health language as an escape hatch, and what he saw as a generation that had been coddled into fragility. His position wasn't nuanced. It was blunt. Here's the thing most people don't remember about this episode: Kirk wasn't really talking about Simone Biles. He was using her as a lightning rod for a cultural argument he'd been running for years. The gymnast was convenient because she was young, Black, female, and incredibly visible. Every element of her identity aligned with the narrative he was trying to dismantle.
I've covered sports controversies for a long time, and what struck me about this one was how little anyone in the athletic community defended Biles on her own terms. The gymnastics world was split. Some coaches said Kirk was absolutely right — athletes should push through. Others stayed silent, not wanting to reignite a debate about mental health in women's sports. What I found myself doing was reaching out to former gymnasts privately, and almost without exception, they expressed sympathy for Biles but worried about speaking publicly. The fear was real: you're either a team player or you're part of the problem, and the line between those two categories is thinner than people admit.
Get the Full Details
What Actually Happened That Day
Biles was medically evaluated by team officials. They cleared her to compete but also acknowledged the risk of serious injury if she attempted skills while experiencing the twisties. This is a standard protocol in elite gymnastics — you don't send someone aerial through their head without them knowing where they are. A fall from that height with no spatial orientation can mean a broken neck, a career-ending injury, or worse. Biles understood this better than anyone in the commentariat. She subsequently competed in the team final, won gold, and then won silver on vault before withdrawing from the individual events. She eventually returned to win bronze on floor exercise and gold in the team event. By the end of the Games, she was one of the most decorated Olympic gymnasts in history regardless of how this controversy played out online. Kirk's criticism didn't shift. He moved on to other topics within days, as he always does. But the conversation he started — about whether athletes owe it to their countries to compete through mental health struggles — kept getting recycled for months. It came up again in 2022 when Naomi Osaka withdrew from the French Open. And again in 2023 when Caster Semenya's legal battles resurfaced in right-wing commentary circles.
The Counter-Argument You Never Heard on His Show
There's a technical detail about the twisties that most people outside elite gymnastics don't understand. It's not anxiety in the way we normally think of anxiety. It's a neurological disruption. Your brain temporarily stops sending the right signals to your body about where it is in space. This isn't something you can "push through" with willpower, the way you can push through a muscle cramp or a tired leg. It's like trying to walk a tightrope blindfolded. The risk-reward calculus is brutal: attempt the skill and potentially paralyze yourself, or sit it out and accept the criticism. I had a conversation with a USA Gymnastics coach about this after Kirk's posts went viral. She put it plainly: "Charlie Kirk has never held a gymnast upside down at thirty feet in the air. He doesn't get to tell us what the right choice is." That's not a dismissive statement. It's an accurate one. The gap between watching something on television and understanding what it actually requires is enormous, and commentators who ignore that gap tend to say things that sound reasonable to their audience and completely wrong to practitioners.
Why This Still Matters
The Biles-Kirk exchange happened before the current wave of institutional focus on athlete mental health. Since then, the USOPC has adopted much clearer protocols. Simone Biles herself has become an advocate for mental health in sports, speaking openly about how the twisties episode changed her relationship with the sport and with public scrutiny. She didn't back down from criticism — she just kept competing and kept winning, which is perhaps the most effective rebuttal available. Kirk never issued a correction or expressed regret about his comments. He has a long track record of making definitive statements about subjects he doesn't fully understand and then moving on when challenged. That's a feature of his model, not a bug. What I found myself thinking about repeatedly while tracking this story was how quickly the narrative hardened. Within forty-eight hours of Biles's withdrawal, the conversation was already locked into two camps: those who supported her and those who didn't. There was very little room in either camp for the actual technical reality — that she was making a rational safety decision based on information that none of the commentators had access to. The simplification wasn't accidental. It served both sides. Kirk needed a villain. His audience needed a simple story. Biles just needed to compete.
The gold medal count settled the question eventually. But the cultural argument it ignited hasn't really been resolved, and it keeps coming back whenever a high-profile athlete steps away from competition for reasons that aren't purely physical.
