Celebrity
Simone Biles Clapped Back At MyKayla Skinner’s Team USA Shade
The retired Olympic gymnast stated that today’s girls “don’t have the same work ethic.”
Don’t come for Simone Biles’ team. After helping the U.S. women’s gymnastics team, dubbed the “Golden Girls,” take home the gold medal in the team finals, Biles celebrated their victory on Instagram by seemingly responding to controversial comments made by retired Olympic gymnast and former Team USA member MyKayla Skinner.
After the team heading to the 2024 Olympics was formed in June, Skinner, who won a silver medal on vault during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, argued in a YouTube video that most U.S. gymnasts don’t have the same “work ethic” as before, singling out Biles as the exception to this trend. While the video has since been deleted from her channel, the clip is still going viral on social media.
“Besides Simone, I feel like the talent and the depth just isn’t what it used to be,” she said. “I mean, obviously a lot of girls don’t work as hard. The girls just don’t have the work ethic.” Skinner partially blamed this on the abuse awareness training program SafeSport, which is now required in many sports. “Coaches can’t get on athletes, and they have to be really careful what they say,” she stated.
Biles appeared to respond to Skinner’s comments in the caption of her Instagram post, in defense of her teammates Jordan Chiles, Suni Lee, Jade Carey, and Hezly Rivera. “lack of talent, lazy, olympic champions,” she wrote with gold medal and USA flag emojis for emphasis.
Her Golden Girls teammates backed her up in the comments, with Chiles writing, “and that’s on periodt!!” Lee seemingly challenged Skinner directly by saying, “put a finger down if simone biles just ended you,” with a hand emoji.
Past Olympic gymnasts also supported Biles, with Nastia Liukin simply writing, “micdrop” and Laurie Hernandez saying, “LMAOOOO I LOVE YALL.” McKayla Maroney jokingly apologized for sharing a name with Skinner. “It doesn’t get more iconic than this,” she wrote. “She f’d around n found out fr. Feels like I need to apologize just to redeem my first name.”
Days after her video was initially posted, Skinner responded to the controversy on her Instagram story, saying she was mainly talking about gymnasts competing at her gym. She emphasized that her comments weren’t “always necessarily about the current team, because I love and support all the girls that made it and I’m so proud of them.”
She went on to apologize for her remarks. “Sorry for anything that got out of context or seemed hurtful. That is never my intention,” she said. “Seriously, throughout the video, I was so pumped for the girls, and it was so fun watching trials and doing a live with everybody.”
