(REACTION VIDEO) MyKayla Skinner responds to backlash against Simone Biles and Team USA
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Updated on August 7 at 8:50 a.m.
MyKayla Skinner posted a new video on August 6, asking Simone Biles on Instagram to put a stop to the drama between them. After Skinner said she and her family have received death threats because of Biles’s Instagram caption seemingly directed at comments Skinner had made about this year’s Team USA gymnasts, the former team member made a plea for Biles to speak out again and end the back and forth.
“To Simone, I am asking you directly and publicly to please put a stop to this,” Skinner said. “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 hurt and 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 and lift each and our country up. I love our country and I love our team. And I hope that we can move on and move forward and cheer on the rest of our teammates and athletes together.”
Skinner said in the video that she’s been the target of cyberbullying after Biles’s post reignited upset over Skinner’s comments saying Team USA gymnasts lack work ethic. The post, Skinner said, was surprising to her because she said she apologized to Team USA members individually, and Biles had been the only one to respond.
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“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.”
See her full video here, and read the background on the drama below:
Previously:
It was a glorious and celebratory moment when Simone Biles clinched the gold medal for Team USA at the women’s gymnastics team final on Tuesday during the 2024 Olympics. But amid the joy of becoming the most decorated Olympic gymnast of all time, queen Simone found a spare moment to be petty.
On Simone Biles’s Instagram, the athlete seemed to take aim at former Olympic team member MyKayla Skinner, who had previously appeared to criticize the current women’s gymnastics team as lacking talent and not working hard.
“lack of talent, lazy, olympic champions ❤️🥇🇺🇸,” Biles captioned her Instagram post. The day after Biles posted that caption, she posted on X that she’d been blocked, presumably by Skinner (which teammate Jordan Chiles later confirmed).
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The backlash to her comments was swift. By July 3, Skinner had issued an apology, claiming that her words were misinterpreted.
“Hey, guys, just wanted to pop on here really quick, because I know we did the recap on YouTube, and I feel like a lot of you guys had misinterpreted or misunderstood exactly what I was meaning or had said,” Skinner said in an Instagram story, according to People. She claimed that her comments weren’t “always necessarily about the current team, because I love and support all the girls that made it and I’m so proud of them.”
In her initial YouTube video, Skinner said that some of the apparently lacking work ethic could be attributed to new SafeSport regulations, rules put in place to help prevent abuse in U.S. Olympic sports. “Coaches can’t get on athletes, and they have to be really careful what they say,” she said in the video.
Skinner addressed this claim in her apology, saying that her comments were geared toward her experience in the gym compared to what she sees today. “It was more about going back into my own gym, just the work ethic is different compared to when we were doing gymnastics in the [former team coordinator] Márta [Károlyi] era,” People reports. “And I’m not sticking up for Márta or saying what she did was good, I’m just saying it was different.”
In a formal apology posted to X, Skinner said she’s still “coming to terms” with emotional and verbal abuse that she experienced, which she said may have contributed to her hurtful comments.
After the current Team USA won gold, Skinner posted a picture of the team with heart emojis on her Instagram story.
Still, after Biles’s clapback, it appears the former friends are now officially on the outs. Team USA member and Teen Vogue cover star Jordan Chiles posted a photo of Biles’s phone with Skinner’s Instagram opened, only to reveal that Skinner’s page has no posts visible to Biles. “When she blocks Simone,” Chiles wrote.
