Simone Biles led the U.S. gymnastics team to gold Tuesday night in the 2024 Paris Olympics, four years after they won the silver medal.
On that silver medal team was gymnast MyKayla Skinner, who had some pretty harsh words for the 2024 gymnastics squad in a since-deleted video.
“Besides Simone, I feel like the talent and the depth just isn’t like what it used to be,” Skinner said. “Just notice like, I mean, obviously a lot of girls don’t work as hard. The girls just don’t have the work ethic.”
Skinner tried to clean up that comment by claiming that the required abuse awareness training program SafeSport was one of the reasons she felt the work ethic had changed.
“Coaches can’t get on athletes, and they have to be really careful what they say,” she said later. “It was more about going back into my own gym, just the work ethic is different compared to when we were doing gymnastics in the [former team coordinator] Márta [Károlyi] era. And I’m not sticking up for Márta or saying what she did was good, I’m just saying it was different.
“So anyway, sorry for anything that got out of context or seemed hurtful. That is never my intention. And seriously, throughout the video, I was so pumped for the girls, and it was so fun watching trials and doing a live with everybody.”
Despite her apologies, Biles sent her own message to Skinner after the 2024 team won the gold.
“Lack of talent, lazy, Olympic champions,” she wrote on social media with a photo of her fellow gymnasts.
Skinner apologized once again on Thursday as well.
“I want to formally apologize to Team USA and to our gymnastic community for my comments during my recent YouTube episodes of the gymnastics Olympic trials. It was not my intention to offend or disrespect any of the athletes or to take away from their hard work. Your hard work and dedication has paid off and I congratulate every one of you,” she said.
{People}
