Simone Biles is betraying her sisters in sport

Simone Biles is undeniably the GOAT – the sporting icon every girl in a gymnastics class aspires to be. Yet over the weekend, the Olympian took a figurative dump on those girls’ dreams.

In an unprovoked, unhinged rant on X, Biles scolded swimmer Riley Gaines for daring to sound the alarm about men muscling into women’s sport. As everyone is surely now aware, males who identify as female are able to cash in on women’s prizes, scholarships and opportunities.

Gaines was thrust into activism in 2022 after racing Lia Thomas – a 6’1” hulk of a man who claimed to be a transwoman and reportedly changed with his female teammates 18 times a week. After they tied in a race at a national college championship, Thomas went on to win a trophy and Gaines got radicalised.

It’s fair to say Gaines dived into the deep end of activism. At one point, she was forced to barricade herself inside a room at San Francisco State University to protect herself from a baying pack of trans activists. But the mobbing only steeled her spine. And rather than retreat, Gaines has gone on to become one of the strongest American voices for fairness in women’s sport.

But Biles has remained either unmoved by or ignorant of Gaines’s work and the details of her backstory. On X, she branded Gaines a ‘sore loser’ and said she should be ‘uplifting the trans community’, as if it were the duty of female athletes to offer specialist support to men who identify as women, like some sort of trans-inclusive leotard.

Biles continued her tirade by helpfully suggesting that Gaines create ‘a new avenue where trans [people] feel safe in sport’, seemingly confusing sporting competition with soft-play areas. Finally, Biles sneered at the 5’5” Gaines: ‘Bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male.’ A low blow from a woman who’s spent years demanding female athletes be spared criticism for their bodies.

Unfazed, Gaines shot back: ‘Let me get something straight. It’s the women’s job to find a way for men’s feelings to be validated?… That’s not my job, actually.’ Well, quite.

At 28, Biles is already on the dismount from elite sports. She’ll soon vault into a new career of talk shows and gala dinners. Irrespective of her 4’8” frame, she’s too big to fail. She had nothing to lose by backing her sisters in sport. But instead, she churned out the same limp, dreary take on ‘trans rights’ as every other cretinous US celeb. She might as well have donned a keffiyeh and weighed in on peace in the Middle East.

It’s hard to know what’s more galling: the wilful ignorance or the hypocrisy. Biles wasn’t made to compete against men in Paris, Tokyo or Rio. She competed – and excelled – in a female category designed precisely to account for the physical differences between the sexes. If Biles truly believes biology doesn’t matter, perhaps she’d like to try the rings or pommel horse next time, where male gymnasts – on average bigger, stronger and faster – would leave her spinning.

As Gaines aptly noted, had Biles been forced to compete against men, she’d be anonymous today. Her fame rests on the pioneering women who carved out space for female athletes on the world stage. Yet now, Biles risks undermining that legacy – potentially closing the door on the next generation of girls daring to dream. She has in effect become a men’s rights activist.

Biles ought to be remembered as a gymnast who embodied human potential. Now she risks becoming yet another sneering and smug celeb, a cautionary tale about what happens when ideology vaults over integrity.

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.