 At the Tokyo Olympics, there may be fewer genuine global superstars than at previous games. I'm thinking Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt, neither of them competing this year. One person who no one can deny does fall into that category, though, is Simone Biles. Biles aged 24 is a four-time Olympic gold medalist, multiple world champion, and arguably the greatest gymnast of all time. However, this year she got headlines for a different reason than for winning. It was for having pulled out of two Olympic competitions, citing mental health reasons. Yeah, I say put mental health first, because if you don't, then you're not gonna enjoy your sport and you're not gonna succeed as much as you want to. So it's okay sometimes to even set out the big competitions to focus on yourself because it shows how strong of a competitor and person that you really are, rather than just battle through it. I just felt like it would be a little bit better to take a backseat, work on my mindfulness. And I knew that the girls would do an absolutely great job and I didn't wanna risk the team a medal for kind of my screw-ups because they've worked way too hard for that. So I just decided that those girls need to go and into the rest of the competition. Now, there has been a lot of support for Biles online, lots of people saying how brave it is to come out publicly and say the reason I'm not competing is because of my current mental condition. Also, lots of people pointing out that this isn't just, oh, it was stressful, so I didn't do it. Gymnastics is incredibly dangerous. If you get those jumps wrong, you can paralyze yourself. So if you go into, I mean, I don't know what these are things that, you know, the multiple twists, if you land wrong, really bad things can happen. So there are plenty, very, very good reasons for dropping out at this point. It probably comes as no surprise though that the usual suspects were not so understanding. Piers Morgan wanted some attention this week. So he had to go at Simone Biles. He has an article in the Daily Mail, sorry Simone Biles, but there's nothing heroic or brave about quitting because you're not having fun. You let down your teammates, your fans, and your country. Much of the article is written as a response to statements Biles made to the press as if it's an interview, as if he's having a conversation with her, this is how he likes to conduct his life as if he's always at the center of the action. He writes, Biles said something really extraordinary and illuminating. I feel like I'm also not having as much fun. This Olympic Games, I wanted it to be for myself, but I came in and I felt like I was still doing it for other people. It hurts my heart that doing what I love has been kind of taken away from me to please other people. Morgan responds, sorry, what? You're not just at these games for yourself Simone, you are part of Team USA, representing the United States of America and hundreds of millions of American people watching back home. Not to mention all the sponsors who've paid huge sums to support you. And Piers Morgan, they're hoping that we feel some sympathy with Nike in cases it's caused them any problems. I doubt it has, he goes on. And when you quit, you were performing as part of a gymnastics team, not yourself. It's also not supposed to just be about having fun. The Olympics are the pinnacle of sport, the ultimate test of any athlete. They're supposed to be very hard and very tough physically, mentally and any other way you care to name. Later on in the piece, he goes on to say, what exactly is so courageous, heroic or inspiring about quitting on your team and country in an Olympics? Simone Biles was so traumatized by her experience that she reappeared all smiles a little later to cheer on the team she'd abandoned as they tried and failed to win the gold. They'd have almost certainly won if she'd stayed and battle on. That's a weird optic for a sporting champion, isn't it? Of course, no sports writer will dare say any of this because they're all too terrified of the woke mob coming for them. But I know many of them are thinking it because some have messaged me privately to say so. Darlia, what do you make of this affair? Not just Piers Morgan's response but also Simone Biles decision and the reaction to it. It's just none of his business. And I just like, you know, I kind of, I think that, I think people get very confused when we talk about why there's kind of heightened scrutiny by Piers Morgan, but also by the rest of the tabloid media, basically, with the minute decisions and sort of personal decisions of women and women of color, but particularly black women of why that's racialized and why it's racist. Do you know, people think, oh, he's not using racial slurs. He's not using epithets that are racialized. So it's not racialized. But this sort of, it's the hyper focus and the dramatization of what are essentially very uncontroversial things. Like athletes have to be in, especially if you're an athlete who's playing on behalf of a team, you have to be in peak physical and mental condition. And Simone Biles is one of the most highly demanded, highly sought out, intensely. You know, she's the only gymnast I can name. And that comes with its own pressures that might not be experienced by other members of her team. And I'm sure that that was discussed. I'm sure that, you know, with her coach and whoever else is involved, that was a decision that they came to and it's a decision that they're now presenting. You know, or, you know, so doing something like opting out of work that either you don't feel up to or that might be harmful to you, or in the case of Meghan Markle, where, you know, she has issues with her dad. These are like uncontroversial things. And yet they suddenly become these topics of national conversation and these moral referendums on the character of these women. So that kind of hyper focus, that is where the racial element comes onto because these editors and, you know, people like Piers Morgan and these other kind of culture warmongers, you know, they are seen as, they see this as a sort of lucrative and sensational modern punch and Judy where the people who are being punched are the marginalized. And, you know, it's an industry that is just guilty of basically making a huge amount of money and a huge amount of capital off of stoking up hatred against people who are cast as society's villains. Even if at one point they were, you know, put on a pedestal, that's all the more reason to pull them down because they wouldn't have deserved it. And one of those people are racialized people, black people, brown people. It's what sells papers. It's what, you know, people are drawn to. And that is why this obsession with Meghan Markle, with Simone Biles, has been so lucrative. It gets them in the press. It's so lucrative for him and for the tabloid industry. And you know what? I actually wish that Piers Morgan would take a few pages out of Simone Biles' book and just take a few more days off, maybe take a few decades off because quite frankly, we're all sick of it. It's just snowflake nonsense. I think you've covered the dynamic of Piers Morgan here incredibly effectively. And especially, I mean, you know, our audience will be aware how often this happens when it's Piers Morgan haranguing a young woman who's obviously much younger than himself and quite often a woman of color. Another angle I want to cover on this particular story is how it relates to what I think could end up being quite a big variable in politics, which is that the right have seen that certain people in the younger generation or, you know, across society, expectations have changed somewhat. And we do expect that if we're having mental health difficulties, we can make space around that. And that might be awkward for spectators. It might be awkward for sponsors. It might be awkward for bosses. And they don't like that. They want you to get on with it. If you're feeling down, get on with it. If you're uncomfortable, get on with it. Another example of this, which I think actually sums up this position. I'm seeing it all over the place, but this was quite honest actually, was in the Telegraph today. It was by Madeline Grant. And she argued that workers prioritizing their wellbeing is a threat to the economy. The piece was titled, Indolent Britain has given up on working. COVID has accelerated a shift towards a view that jobs are only worth doing if it's convenient to workers. In this piece, she complains that the end of working from home requirements is encountering major resistance with numerous employees bringing legal action against bosses. Many, such as the immunosuppressed, will have good reason for wishing to avoid crowded workplaces. Other arguments, as with those bringing personal injury claims due to stress from having to commute, seem much flimsier. Calls for progressive IDs fix A, such as the four-day week, have also grown louder recently, though presumably their proponents do not envisage any loss of pay. In all of this, we can detect an unmistakable cake-ism, not to mention something that was widespread among middle-class professionals before the pandemic, a belief in the primacy of employee wellbeing. This sense that work is meant to fit around the employee, not the employer, let alone be a compromise between the two, that work-life balance is no longer a reasonable attempt to prevent burnout, but something employees alone decide is clearly feeding into the debate too. A consensus is forming that professionals no longer need to justify working from home. It is for employers to explain why they should return. As I say, one thing that I think you can say in favor of this article is it's pretty honest. She's essentially saying, workers now think that they're too important, they should subject themselves to whatever bosses want to do, however much it destroys their mental wellbeing. Basically, people's expectations are too high. And I don't know what conditions a professional comment writer for the Daily Telegraph has, but I don't imagine it's as grueling as most minimum wage jobs in this country. So I don't think she's in particularly a position to talk here, but, darling, I wanna bring you in on this particular angle of the story as well, which is, I think, a growing rearguard action from the right, be that Piers Morgan, be that Madeleine Grant in the Telegraph to say, don't you start expecting too much? Don't you start expecting people to take your mental health seriously? Your job is to perform, your job is to work problems with it, get over it. I find this moral panic so hilarious, given that I personally believe that the vast majority of jobs in the West, at least, are sort of complete scams. I think that what happened during lockdown was that a lot of white collar workers were like, wait, like if I just don't turn up, nothing really happens. And I also don't really need to be in the office, nine to five, five days a week to finish my job. And obviously, the other side of that is that we all now know how hard so many of our most low-waged, precarious workers who are devalued by the same Telegraph columnists who are criticized, who are kind of like spoken down of, how hard they are working and how essential they are, and they're working in risky conditions and explosive conditions. And I think I said this at the time that, the government have been so desperate to get people back in the office and so desperate to get people back to 2019, even when it goes against all sensible public health guidance, partly for an ideological reason, the ending of the furlough scheme is because this kind of ideology finds it so distasteful that like the little people could possibly be surviving, putting food on the table, being alive without working themselves to the bone. And I remember at the very beginning of the pandemic when it was clear that commuting to offices and working in offices was gonna be an absolute nightmare. I remember, I think it was Ian Duncan Smith who at the peak of the first wave was like, oh, I don't think that we should have a furlough scheme because it will disincentivise people from working. So I don't know if his idea of what should have happened is that we should have just like stopped everyone going to work and just let them just starve and languish and only those people with savings would like survive. And I think, and then you have, on the other side of it, meanwhile, like the people who work the hardest, the working classes, single mothers with multiple jobs, app workers who have to piece their work together through a range of like side hustles and gigs. Those are the groups that are most disrespected and reviled by the government. So that's what's so ironic about it. But so basically I think that as much as I wished at the idea that everyone was spending more time doing things other than work, that's actually not true. This generation of workers, millennials, et cetera, these are the generations that are most likely to have a second job. We are much less likely to have sources of passive income, things like asset investments or being a landlord. We are working harder and harder for less and less security. We are like the generation that is, that can't escape work because it's on our phones and it bleeds into all parts of our life. We're working on weekends. We're working on holidays. And I don't think that should be celebrated. I don't think that's a good thing. I think it has a corrosive effect on us as a community and also individually. But that is what the reality is. And the data goes very squarely against what this columnist is saying. But a lot of these columnists work in the art of fiction and work in the art of kind of getting, creating generational wars between, and stoking up classic generational wars where older generations believe that no one worked as hard as they did even though it's sort of patently obvious on the ground that that's just not the case.