Simone Biles (Image: AP)

The drama of Simone Biles is an interesting case study as to where we’re at as a global culture, in terms of a whole lot of things.

For those who’ve been watching the badminton and skateboarding exclusively, Biles is the US gymnast claimed by many to be one of the greatest ever.

Though part of the US Olympic team, she quit the games mid-competition after an unusually average sequence — leaving, returning and then leaving for good — citing her mental health concerns and a need for mindfulness.

It’s not the first time an Olympian has snapped but Biles’ departure has set off a storm, with many writing in support of her “self-care” while there’s been a matching — and crude — right-wing backlash from the likes of Piers Morgan and Andrew Bolt, with much chatter about snowflakes and wimping out.

That chatter in turn prompted a defence, couched in terms of Biles’ background as an African-American foster child, a hothoused gymnastics kid, and a victim of abuse by her coach. (All this coach abuse in these sports! It’s almost as if there’s a problem with giving middle-aged men total control over lithe young girls.)

More than one commentator has said that Biles’ act of self care was the truly heroic act, greater than Olympic-level achievement itself. Ridicule has been directed at flabby, middle-aged journalists (in other words: journalists) telling a gymnast who can do what no one else can — landing a double somersault on a bar, 10 hours a day for 15 years — to show some guts. 

There’s a lot going on here, but the essence of it seems to be that Olympic sport and the values attached are no longer culturally strong enough to supervene the claim to vulnerability and self-knowing as an alternative idea of the heroic.

Even 20 years ago, Biles’ dummy-spit would’ve been… well, would’ve been called a dummy-spit, the expression showing disdain but also understanding. Earlier than that, it would have been shaming only. Now, we know too much about how Olympic heroes are made.

For decades, they were deformed by drugs, especially the Eastern Bloc athletes. It’s hilarious to watch Olympics of old, with commentators dutifully tallying up the medal count as the East German women’s swimming team — essentially fridges with hair in one-piece swimsuits — lined up on the blocks to win again. But after the drugs were removed, instrumental psychology took over, as it did in commercial competitive sport.

This was, in fact, the end of sport, if by sport we mean a person of given talents honing their body through practice for the purpose of rules-bound competition. Sport was the point where the chance of nature met the expression of will in the enactment of culture, and that’s what produces its capacity for joy, for a sense of collective triumph. Yes, yes, Nazis.

But Hitler’s 1936 reconstruction of the Games marks the point at which it was first fully co-opted, discrediting the notion of will in the process. But it’s the rise of the sports psychologists, and training regimes that mimic military-style “breakdown” regimes, that really undermine the spirit of sport. They’re the Taylorism of the will, turning out sportsbots for national competition or commercial gain, making for a uniformity of expression and a grim, mechanistic focus on shaving hundredths of seconds off previous records.

For quite a while, sport, as a stopwatch activity, has had a role in legitimising the domain of work and the alienated control of time; the rise of sportsbots is of one with the rise of HR departments, motivational training and attitude monitoring in the workplace. And, as Greg Jericho notes in Guardian Australia, sport is almost concluded as a rising activity.

The gains have become so micro-incremental that the curve is hitting the asymptote. Humanity has climbed Olympus. Perhaps that’s why Biles’ quitting was greeted with so much excitement and support. While there has been celebration of achievements, it was Biles’ act that released the sort of energetic enthusiasm the sport used to do.

Here was someone making the only act of will possible in this now wholly disciplined activity: refusing it. Those who apply a simple opposition between the commitment and stoicism of sport, and the supposed self-indulgence of Biles’ act, haven’t understood how reversed the polarities have become. Biles is “Bartlebying” — “I would prefer not to” — and, in that sense, resisting a world coming to be wholly dominated by administration and quantity.

One wonders if the language of self-care she uses is a cover, knowing or otherwise, for the more basic feeling that it just ain’t worth it. Nevertheless, celebrating that refusal in terms of psychological self-care brings its own problems.

There’s a difference between sympathy and acceptance of someone as fully human in falling short and a celebration of a failure at something you set out to complete. Failure is failure: the rule of human life. Success is the exception. You’ve got to shoot for the asymptote to fall somewhere on the curve.

Look at the etymology. Fail/fall — they’re of the same root. It’s what gives gymnastics its power, somewhat more central to our culture than badminton.

But if you turn an act deserving sympathy into one of heroism, then the culture enters a spiral — or what I believe they call in gymnastics “the twisties”. The celebration not of refusal but of collapse, which a certain phalanx of op-ed writers is enforcing, evacuates will from the public sphere.

Who gets custody of it? Capital, the state — an impersonal process which is dissolving the capacity for vigorous life. You can see this in the whole billionaires-in-space (actually the upper atmosphere). Doing it to address their own jadedness, they demand we applaud them and then speak the language of diversity and manufactured hope, when the response is a huge “meh”.

How is it possible to be a billionaire, go into “space” and come off as needy? Because the culture’s got itself into a twisty. You see what I did there? (Lands perfectly as Vivaldi plays.)

Perhaps Biles is a harbinger of the changes we are undergoing at the end of modernity. Modernity attached heroism to sport at its pinnacle — actual literal mountain climbing included — as well as, say, art and political revolution.

Those now appear concluded as such, and we are shifting to a new set of values while still talking an older language. After badminton, goodminton. The Olympics may retreat to a more limited role, as art has become commodified decoration and politics performance.

But it will take a while in the air yet before we finally land. See what I did again? (Turns, presents to judges, steel butt clenched tight directed to audience, nil points.)