After the women's national gymnastics team won the gold medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics, Simone Biles took a jab at MyKayla Skinner while celebrating their achievement on Instagram.
Biles posted a photo of Team USA and wrote, "lack of talent, lazy, olympic champions ❤️🥇🇺🇸," -- a callback Skinner's disparaging comments about her teammates, Jade Carey, Suni Lee, Jordan Chiles, and Hezly Rivera, which went viral following the U.S. Gymnastics Trials in June.
Skinner, who won an individual silver medal on vault during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, didn't respond to the backlash during the Paris Games. However, one day after the gymnastics competition came to a close, Skinner broke her silence on Biles' shade and the intense cyberbullying she's received in the aftermath.
“I sincerely hoped that this topic wouldn’t need to be revisited but unfortunately things have really gotten out of hand lately," Skinner started. While she took "100% responsibility for poorly articulating the point I was trying to make" about Biles' teammates, she thought the situation was put to bed after she formally apologized.
"Only Simone had responded and she told me that she was proud of me," Skinner said. "You guys can imagine my surprise last week when I was celebrating our team winning gold just to see this brought up all over again by a caption on an Instagram post."
"Watching people cheer on the bullying, which has led to threats of physical harm to me my husband and our daughter is disgusting. So please at this point, I’m just asking for it to stop for the sake of my family because enough is enough."
"If Simone truly believes that I called our team lazy and lacking talent and if that’s really how she feels, I am really heartbroken over it," Skinner continued through tears. "But not just heartbroken because it isn’t what I feel or even how I previously said, but because Simone’s latest post and others that followed it fueled another wave of hateful comments, DMs, articles and emails."
Skinner, who shares one daughter, Charlotte, with husband Jonas Harmer, then sent a direct message to Biles, begging the 11-time Olympic medalist to make it stop.
"To Simone, I am asking you directly and publicly to please put a stop to this. Please ask your followers to stop. You have been an incredible champion for mental health awareness and a lot of people need your help now.
"We’ve been attacked in ways that I’m certain you never intended. Your performance, the team’s performance and the Olympics in general should be a time that we support one another.”
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