Simone Biles’ Olympic Withdrawal is Leadership Personified

Let’s face it: Women’s Gymnastics is the marquee sport of the Summer Olympics. So when Simone Biles, widely hailed as the greatest gymnast of all time, decided to withdraw this week, first from the team competition and more recently from the individual all-around competition, due to mental health concerns, the world paid attention.?

We would like to acknowledge two things about her decision. First, as many have stated, it took massive courage for Ms. Biles to withdraw explicitly for mental health concerns. Second, her decision is associated with massive disappointment for many: herself, her team, her fans, and her country.?

But we would also like to pause for a moment and to reflect on this unfolding story as a wonderful example of leadership in action - leadership that Ms. Biles is uniquely equipped to display in this particular situation. Her leadership impacts two overlapping issues.?

The first is the performance-driven, win-at-all-costs mentality that pervades sports of all types, but especially sports -like gymnastics - whose primary event is the once-every-four-years Olympics. It’s not that performance is not important or that sports need to be enjoyable at all times. Indeed, having winners and losers and learning to push through discomfort, lack of motivation, and even pain are what make competitive sports great. But there is a limit - and we believe that limit is reached when the sport ceases to serve the humans playing it and the roles become reversed; that is, the players serve the sport. Ms. Biles’ decision to withdraw is a profoundly human act to put limits on sports.

As an Olympic athlete and having had to hold the stress of expectations and the weight of the defining moment of your career, I (Iris) know how much we all want to see the hero prevail at all costs. We want the 1996 Olympic version of Kerri Strugg who breaks her ankle and keeps going. However, as a culture that sees burnout as a badge of honor, we have to make room for another hero’s tale. What if the hero story is that Simone is a champion AND because she is a champion, knows when to admit that she couldn’t move forward even in the face of all those expectations? Admitting to an off day doesn’t negate that you are still the best, it just means you know when to call it in order to live to compete another day.

The second is the role of mental health in human flourishing. Had Ms. Biles broken her leg, the reaction might have been, “That’s very disappointing. But severe injuries are a part of sports.” A broken leg is both very visible (everyone can see what it is) and very understandable (everyone can understand that you can’t stick a landing with a broken leg). A mental health concern, though, is both mostly invisible (at best, another person can see outward signs of distress, but cannot know exactly what is going on) and often not clearly understandable (what might be a minor irritation to one person might be a paralyzing fear to another). By explicitly acknowledging her mental health concerns, Ms. Biles took a major step towards making mental health both more visible and more understandable - and thus less stigmatized.?

In recent years the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) has begun to recognize the need for athletes to receive mental health support, not just in terms of sports psychology, but more counseling and therapy. Athletes like Michael Phelps, Naomi Osaka, and Simone Biles are acknowledging that their mental game is strong, probably more resilient and stronger than most, but there are places where they could use some support and help. It’s much harder to ask for help when it isn’t as straight-forward as an ACL tear, but it is just as crucial to their performance under extreme stress and pressure.

So why did Ms. Biles display leadership through her actions? Her actions exemplified leadership in several ways:

1. Shining example - Because of her fame as the greatest of all time in the middle of the Olympics, her actions sent a clear message.
2. Put others first - By deciding to withdraw, she opened the door for other gymnasts to take her place, thus allowing the strongest team to take the floor.
3. Truth to power - By her actions, she sent the message that sports are made for humans, not humans for sports - even when billions of people are watching and billions of dollars have been paid for the broadcast rights.?

And how did Ms. Biles display leadership through her actions? She did it by accumulating and then spending her social capital (or what psychologist Edwin Hollander referred to as idiosyncratic credit). With a career record of over 30 world championships and Olympic medals, she has earned the right to speak. She has played the game fully: countless hours of practice, overcoming adversity in various forms, winning again and again against the world’s very best gymnasts. She did it all, she did it right, she did it exceedingly well.?

When she decided to withdraw for mental health reasons, she broke an unwritten rule that few have dared to challenge: that mental health is every bit as important as physical health. Leadership is really about choosing to do the right thing at the right time even if it means that the “right” thing is an unpopular decision. Simone didn’t want to disappoint her fans, she didn’t want to perform poorly for her team, and she certainly didn’t want to walk away from her Olympic experience. What she actually did was make a choice to support her team and her physical and mental health in a way that she felt was best and at the end of the day, only she and the people that matter to her can validate that choice. Because of her record and experience, she knew what she could and could not do, and she knew the price she was and was not willing to pay.?

She took courageous action on the world’s biggest stage - and that is what great leaders do.?

Olympian Iris Zimmermann (Fencing, 2000) is the Vice President of Coaching Operations at Valor Performance, Inc., and an ICF Certified Coach. Mike Palanski is Professor of Management at the Saunders College of Business at RIT and the founder of MPower2Lead, a leadership coaching practice focused on the whole person.