When you’re already the best, what comes next? Competitors at this year’s Olympics are getting a little sick of that question – especially gymnastics champion Simone Biles, who tweeted a plea on Aug. 4 for people to “stop asking athletes what’s next after they win a medal at the Olympics.”
The tweets came a day after winning her third gold medal of the 2024 Games, and a day before winning her only silver. “Let us soak up the moment we’ve worked our whole lives for,” she added.
Supporters flocked to the thread with suggested spoof responses to that question, like “I’ve always wanted to work at a Best Buy” or “I’m going to Disneyland.” But embedded in Biles’s tweets was a deeper message: that our collective obsession with output and productivity robs us of moments of celebration and the chance to reflect on our accomplishments – whether we have Olympic-level moves or not.
Beyond the world of sports, Biles’s tweets read like an indictment of “hustle culture” writ large, which tells us that our worth as individuals is tied to how hard and how much we work, not how well we take care of ourselves. In capitalist societies like the United States, that can look like working long hours at the expense of your own well-being, and results in chronic feelings of failure – or, for 77 percent of Americans polled by Deloitte, burnout.
For the most ambitious among us, disrupting hustle culture can feel especially stigmatized, making it even harder to stay present and acknowledge the wins as they come. But Biles – who seems to leave a steady stream of wins in her trace everywhere she goes – has long set an example of how to remain mindful, even in the midst of the chaos of competition. In 2019, when she became the first woman to land a triple-double in a floor routine, she gushed to the press about how each win was more “exciting” than the last. Instead of immediately setting her sights on the next goal, she briefly hit pause so she could take stock of how far she’d come.
Aside from her ability to rocket herself halfway to space (12 feet in the air during a floor routine at the gymnastics trials!), what fans of Biles have found especially captivating throughout her years in the spotlight is her ability to assert and protect her own boundaries. Whether it’s her opening up about needing to take a break from competing, rejecting racist beauty standards, or expressing frustration with the swarm of cameras in her face during this year’s Games, Biles seems to have maintained an unflappable sense of self despite all the stressors.
Of course, die-hard fans of the “iced-out GOAT” who are aching to know what’s next up on her agenda will be relieved to learn that the record-shatterer did recently hint at competing in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, per Reuters. “Never say never,” the 27-year-old said. “The next Olympics is at home, so you just never know. But I am getting really old.”
Until then, if Biles’s tweets are any indication, her plans mostly include basking in her success and, of course, “babysitting the medal.”
Emma Glassman-Hughes is the associate editor at PS Balance. Before joining PS, her freelance and staff reporting roles spanned the lifestyle spectrum; she covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, travel for Here Magazine, and food, climate, and agriculture for Ambrook Research.
