US' Simone Biles celebrates after team USA won the artistic gymnastics women's team final during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at the Bercy Arena in Paris, on July 30, 2024. (Photo by Loic Venance / AFP)
Had former US gymnast MyKayla Skinner known the NSFW name the US women’s gymnastics team uses to refer to themselves before they cruised to the gold medal in Tuesday’s Olympic team final in Paris, she might have thought twice about criticizing the group last month.
"Lack of talent, lazy, olympic champions,” US superstar Simone Biles captioned an Instagram photo of the Americans celebrating their gold medal on Tuesday night. Biles didn’t tag her former teammate, but the caption sure seemed to be a reference to Skinner’s comments after this year’s US Olympic gymnastics trials.
"Besides Simone, I feel like the talent and the depth just isn’t what it used to be,” Skinner, who won the silver medal on vault at the 2020 Tokyo Games, said in a since-deleted YouTube video.
"I mean, obviously, a lot of girls just don’t work as hard. The girls just don’t have the work ethic, and it’s hard too because of SafeSport. Coaches can’t get on athletes and they have to be really careful what they say, which in some ways is really good, but at the same time, to get to where you need to be in gymnastics, you do have to be a little aggressive, a little intense.”
(The US Center for SafeSport was an independent body set up by Congress in the wake of the Larry Nassar scandal to investigate misconduct across Olympic sports.)
Skinner apologized in a statement a few days later and claimed that her comments had been misinterpreted, but Biles had the last word after her eighth Olympic medal made her the most decorated US gymnast in Olympic history.
"F AROUND AND FIND OUT,” Biles’s husband, Chicago Bears safety Jonathan Owens, commented on the Instagram post, a reference to the name Biles and her teammates revealed they had given themselves during a news conference after they won gold.
The befitting name is spicier than some of the monikers the US women’s gymnastics team has gone by at previous Olympics, including the "Magnificent Seven” (1996), "Fierce Five” (2012), "Final Five” (2016) and "Fighting Four” (2021).
McKayla Maroney, who won gold with the Americans at the 2012 Games, chimed in with a comment on Biles’s Instagram post, too, hoping to clear up any confusion about the similar name she shares with Skinner.
"It doesn’t get more iconic than this,” Maroney wrote. "She f’d around n found out [for real]. Feels like I need to apologize just to redeem my first name.”
"put a finger down if simone biles just ended you,” Biles’s teammate Sunisa Lee, the reigning all-around champion, added.
Biles offered an alternative, G-rated name for the squad on X.
"okay on the real though, the official team name is golden girls (because oldest olympic team),” she wrote.
To Skinner, this year’s squad might always be Team FAAFO.
