When Simone Biles posted a congratulatory message to the US women’s gymnastics team following their big win on July 30, her caption might have seemed a little surprising to folks not in the know. The text? “lack of talent, lazy, olympic champions,” followed by a string of emojis.
To be clear: After the day Team USA had, dominating in the team finals to clinch their first team gold since 2016, Biles certainly was not calling out teammates Suni Lee, Jade Carey, Jordan Chiles, and Hezly Rivera (or herself) for slacking.
Instead, the caption was seemingly an epic clapback at a comment made by former Olympic teammate MyKayla Skinner.
Confused? We’re here to clarify. (Hint: It all started with a YouTube video.)
Who is MyKayla Skinner?
Skinner, a 27-year-old Arizona native, is a former elite gymnast. She competed alongside Biles at the 2020 Tokyo Summer Games in 2021—not as a member of the five-person team, but as an individual event specialist—and went on to win a silver medal in the vault. She has since retired from gymnastics and runs a YouTube channel that documents her transition away from professional sports.
And just to be clear, Skinner is a different person from McKayla Maroney, the Olympic medalist whose disappointed face became a huge meme during the 2012 London Games, and Mikaela Shiffrin, the two-time Olympic gold medalist in alpine skiing.
So what’s this about a feud?!
Skinner’s “feud” (as lots of outlets are calling it) with the Team USA gymnastics team started earlier this summer. In a since deleted YouTube video after the Olympic team selection on June 30, Skinner threw some not-so-subtle shade at the current crop of gymnasts, according to CNN.
“Besides Simone, I feel like the talent and the depth just isn’t like what it used to be,” she said in the video, CNN reported. “A lot of girls don’t work as hard,” she added. “The girls just don’t have the work ethic.”
And she seemed to blame the US Center for SafeSport, an organization established in the wake of the Larry Nassar scandal that handles allegations of abuse across Olympic sports. “(Coaches) have to be really careful about what they say, which in some ways is really good, but at the same time, to get where you need to be in gymnastics, you have to be … a little aggressive and a little intense,” Skinner said, according to the Associated Press.
Gymnastics whistleblower Rachael Denhollander, the first woman to publicly accuse Nassar of sexual abuse, responded on July 5. In a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, she wrote, “This is precisely why continued education is desperately needed. When an athlete reminisces about one of the most abusive coaches in gymnastics history, suggesting her abusive model was necessary for work ethic, we have a problem.”
Understandably, Skinner’s comments weren’t too well-received by anyone else, either. “not everyone needs a mic and a platform,” Biles wrote in a July 3 post on Threads that racked up more than 18,000 likes.