Simone Biles and Pommel Horse Clark Kent: USA Gymnasts Are Saving Me From Insanity

You can keep your coconut trees, your couches, and your designer trash bags.

The only newsmakers I care about this week are 4’8”, flipping through the air with ease, scripting the clapback of the year on Instagram, and mastering a pommel horse like a cowboy on a mustang. They’re not falling down from anything—coconut trees, uneven bars, or otherwise—and their choice designer accessories are the gold and bronze medals dangling from their necks.

I exaggerate. I very much care about all of this extremely consequential news happening in our country, as much as my sanity can take it. It’s been such an energizing respite from all of that, however, to bask in the glory these last few days of the Team USA gymnasts making history at the Paris Olympics.

In precarious, unprecedented times for this country, it’s a treat to engage in very precedented patriotism: for two weeks, rooting for America at the world games without feeling any impulse to caveat a single “USA! USA!” cheer.

Even more blissful, and maybe it’s because we’re all so dizzy and unmoored by the act of Existing as an American Human Who Reads the News These Days, the gymnasts I’ve spent this week swooning over have proved to be not only great athletes: They’re epically entertaining, alternately charming and sassy celebrities in their own right. I’m obsessed with them.

The scale of emotion attached to their accomplishments are undeniable.

I cried when the men’s team won the bronze medal, their first time on the podium since 2008. I cried when NBC showed footage of them leaping into their parents’ arms to celebrate once they received their prized necklaces. I cried the next day when Jordan Chiles’ eyes welled with tears and she clutched her mouth after nailing her floor exercise routine, when Simone Biles clinched the gold, and again, as they were shown weeping into the crooks of their parents’ necks after.

(Remember the pandemic Olympics when, after winning, all athletes could do was, while wearing masks, Zoom with their families back home? My tear ducts were deprived!)

What I’m most struck by, though, is how dynamic they’ve all been so far (they’ll still be competing the rest of the week!).

It’s been nearly 24 hours and I’m still gooped, gagged, gasping—clutching my pearls, clapping, screaming, crying, throwing up, hooting, hollering—over how ballsy and brilliant Biles was when she posted her first Instagram celebrating Team USA’s gold. The caption read: “lack of talent, lazy, olympic champions.”

It was not so much a clapback as it was a thunderstrike in response to former teammate MyKayla Skinner’s previous controversial comments that the current squad lacked “talent,” “depth,” and “work ethic.”

To be the GOAT in the glow of a record-setting eighth Olympic medal and still want to make a statement like that: The far-too PR-controlled other athletes could learn a thing or two. It’s a potent cocktail of pettiness and pride, and it goes down real smooth.

But I was ecstatic the entire night watching these women, all of whom have overcome incredible obstacles to score victory as what is, apparently, the oldest gymnastics team that competed at the Olympics this year—which Biles memorialized by dubbing them the “Golden Girls.” (As if she needed to appeal any more directly to me.)

And don’t even get me started on my new icon and inspiration: the one who didn’t do a damn thing all night, and got the gold medal anyway. I aspire.

Now, as I relish bellowing during the Jekyll & Hyde section of a trip to the Marie’s Crisis piano bar: “Bring on the Men!”

I’m a proud armchair Olympian. (They’ve named a move “The Kevin” after me: stretching your arm to grab the glass of wine from the coffee table without moving an inch from your reclined couch position.) These two weeks are so engaging because they double as a soap opera. Forget about the sports of it all; there’s nothing more entertaining than a Cinderella story. And that’s where my boys come in .

Rooting for the underdog men’s team to claim a medal for the first time in 16 years was a rousing, joyful experience.

Each time Asher Hung pumped his fist and bellowed after a successful routine, I echoed from the sofa. (Well, in my way: a whispered, though impassioned, “yay!”)

When Frederick Richard spoke about desiring more visibility and appreciation for men’s gymnastics, I cast aside my knowledge that we often dismiss these athletes from our brains when these two weeks are over, and believed him. At the very least, I followed his very entertaining @FrederickFlips Instagram account.

And each time the team’s stalwart leading man, Brody Malone, looking as if he walked onto the mat straight from the set of a Hallmark movie, was on screen, I knew I had found my husband. Is he straight and engaged? Yes. But there are no rules when it comes to Olympic crushes.

Yet nothing has brought me more delight than pommel horse specialist Stephen Nedorosick becoming the Games’ biggest viral star.

He sat on the sidelines for two hours waiting for the most pressure-filled situation of his lifetime: performing one routine that could bring Team USA Olympic glory. Memes of him closing his eyes to meditate and center himself while waiting are hilarious. The comparisons to Clark Kent becoming Superman are apt: Once he whipped off those glasses and mounted that pommel horse—there’s no way for that not to sound sexual—he was gymnastics’ version of a superhero.

Days later, the internet is still celebrating him. (Check out this video of him solving a Rubik's cube that’s gone viral.) And in response to all the attention, he seems to be positively giddy.

That’s what’s been so fun: These are unbelievably talented people making a name for themselves on behalf of our country on a global stage for their accomplishments and winning personalities. There’s nothing for us to be ashamed of in relation to their headlines, or the reasons why everyone’s paying attention to us. It’s all pure. It’s all honorable. It’s all deserved.

After these last months, it’s been such a blast—and, better yet, it’s just getting started.