This is part of Slate’s 2024 Olympics coverage. Read more here.
As far as the American women’s gymnastics squad is concerned, the biggest villain of these Olympics games isn’t Team Italy or Brazil or another athletic rival. In fact, the women’s public enemy No. 1 isn’t even in Paris at the moment: Former Olympic gymnast MyKayla Skinner is sitting at home in Utah, as far as we know, but she managed to piss off Simone Biles and Co. enough to earn their ire from 5,000 miles away.
Though this beef has been brewing for a while, it burst into the public consciousness earlier this week, after the U.S. nabbed a gold medal in the team final and captain Biles posted some photos of her teammates and her celebrating on Instagram alongside a curious caption: “Lack of talent, lazy, olympic champions ❤️🥇🇺🇸,” she wrote. People who follow gymnastics immediately recognized that Biles’ words were referencing a now-deleted video Skinner had made earlier in the summer in which she aired a few, ahem, criticisms of the Olympic team. In the video, which was posted shortly after this year’s Olympic team had been selected, Skinner mused that the athletes and sport have gone downhill, saying, “I feel like the talent and the depth just isn’t like what it used to be. … A lot of girls don’t work as hard.”
Skinner retired from elite gymnastics after the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, in which she took home a silver medal and her teammates, Biles among them, cheered her on. So how did it wind up that a short three years later, she’s trashing Team USA online? In truth, Skinner has long had a prickly relationship with the gymnastics world, as my colleague Rebecca Schuman has written about extensively: In 2016, after she failed to make the Olympic team and was instead chosen as an alternate, she let out her frustration in the form of racist and homophobic retweets, which she was widely criticized for. In her subsequent college career at the University of Utah, she developed a reputation as abrasive for reasons that were both fair (the aforementioned tweets) and less so (judges and fans seemed to ding her for not always smiling and playing the part of the perky gymnast). Though she left the NCAA and made an impressive comeback into competitive gymnastics in 2019, she remained a divisive figure for her personality and her skills themselves: Though she is undeniably talented, her gymnastics were arguably less elegant than many of her competitors—I saw one social media user compare her moves to karate. In 2021 she attended the Olympics as an individual specialist, and though she won a medal in vault, one wonders if she still has a chip on her shoulder about never fully making the team. When, in her recent video, she pondered coming out of retirement to show the current gymnasts how it’s done, she was probably hoping that most viewers wouldn’t remember the part about how she never actually did make the team.
Also in that video, Skinner specifically cited SafeSport, an organization that exists to help curb emotional, physical, and sexual abuse in sports, as among the reasons gymnasts today aren’t as competitive as they once were. It’s easy to see why these critiques would anger the gymnastics community, which is only a few years out from a painful sexual abuse scandal and reckoning. Skinner later apologized for her comments, but the damage was done. Plus, it was hard to take the apology seriously when Skinner continued to post so saltily. Why does she feel the need to pipe up at all? The Olympics are the time when she knows everyone will be paying attention, and I guess even negative attention is still attention.
Plus, there are other things about Skinner that make her a particularly unlikable figure for many people: As she has moved away from gymnastics, she’s become a lifestyle influencer, and people do love to hate conservative-coded female influencers in Utah with nonstandardly spelled names, especially when those influencers had gender reveal parties last year featuring huge “Baby Harmer” signs. (Maybe it was an honest mistake: Skinner’s married name is Harmer. But it made for a pretty unfortunate sign!)
And it certainly seems as if Skinner doesn’t have many fans in the gymnastics community to stick up for her, if you go by the comments Biles’ post received. “And that’s on periodt!!” Biles’ teammate Jordan Chiles wrote. “Micdrop,” responded 2008 gold medalist Nastia Liukin. After calling the post “iconic,” former Olympic vault specialist and human meme McKayla Maroney felt the need to clarify that it was someone else with her first name and not her causing all this trouble: “Feels like I need to apologize just to redeem my first name,” she wrote. Even Laurie Hernandez, the 2016 Olympian who is doing sports announcing for NBC this cycle, wrote, “LMAOOOO I LOVE YALL.” The post earned support beyond the gymnastics-verse as well, from sources as diverse as music star SZA, actress Viola Davis, and fast-food chain Wendy’s. Yes, Wendy’s: “Careful she might block u lol,” the company wrote.
Weirdly enough, Wendy’s was right: Skinner did block Biles, and their contretemps received another round of social media attention when Biles posted about that too: “oop I’ve been blocked 👀🤭😂,” she tweeted Wednesday.
Was it messy of Biles to post the caption to begin with and to revel in the blocking? Maybe a little. But Skinner had gone out of her way to leave Biles out of her criticism, stating that it applied to the rest of the women and not Biles, so this was also Biles being protective and showing leadership: Do not mess with my girls, her post seemed to say. (Biles displayed sportsmanship elsewhere at the games, such as when she literally cheered on gymnasts from other countries.) The way everyone else responded to Biles’ jab at Skinner also spoke volumes, showing that Skinner has earned some enemies in this sport all on her own. It’s all very movie mean girl getting her comeuppance.
Since the blocking, things have seemed quiet on the feud front, but maybe that’s only because Biles was busy winning an all-around individual gold medal. This weekend, she’s competing in individual skills and has already won more medals. Sadly, gold will continue to elude Skinner … at least until they make “sore loser” a category.
