History Is Always Changing. Just Ask Kerri Strug and Simone Biles.

It all came down to the vault. The Cold War was over, but the U.S. women’s gymnastics team—they would soon become known as the Magnificent Seven—still had some work to do. The Soviet Union had dominated the all-around team event, winning the gold medal in every Olympics in which they competed since 1952. The best the United States could do during this period was winning a silver medal in the 1984 Los Angeles games (the Soviets did not compete in these games due to a boycott) and a bronze in 1992 at Barcelona.

But the gymnastic world was changing. The mighty Soviets were now competing as “Russia,” and the United States entered the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta with arguably its best team in history. With only one event remaining, the U.S. team held a comfortable lead over the Russians. All the American gymnasts needed to do was land their vaults. 

Easier said than done.

Amy Chow and Shannon Miller delivered sub-par vaults. Dominique Moceanu landed on her keister. The gap in points between the United States and Russia had narrowed considerably, as Kerri Strug, a four-foot-eight, eighteen-year-old gymnast from Tuscon, Arizona, got ready to vault.

On her first attempt, Strug fell, injuring her ankle. As she limped off the mat, she said to her coach, gymnastics legend, and Romanian defector Bela Karolyi, “Do we need this?” Karolyi responded, “Kerri, we need you to go one more time. We need you one more time for the gold. You can do it, you better do it!” Strug told Karolyi that she couldn’t feel her leg. Karolyi told her to “shake it off.”

Strug somehow managed to land the second vault and then quickly dropped to her knees in pain. NBC announcer John Tesh shouted, “Kerri Strug is hurt! She is hurt badly!” As her coaches carried her off the mat, Tesh announced that her score was high enough to secure the gold medal for Team U.S.A. (As it turned out, the Russian gymnasts also vaulted poorly and the U.S. team would have won without Strug’s vault). Karolyi’s wife Marta told the Associated Press that she thought Strug had a stress fracture, but “because of her team spirit she wanted to go again.”

Bela carried Strug to the gold medal stand. A national hero was born.

The Wall Street Journal wondered whether Strug would make it onto a Wheaties box (she did). The 1984 individual all-around champion Mary Lou Retton said Strug had delivered “the most heroic performance I’ve ever seen.” Sports Illustrated titled its story on Strug “True Grit.”  Veteran New York Times sportswriter George Vescey compared her to a character in an old war movie who “took the hit on the last patrol but carried the flag up the hill anyway.” Strug made an appearance on The Tonight Show, where Jay Leno acknowledged her courage. President Bill Clinton invited her to his fiftieth birthday party and seated her next to his daughter Chelsea.

Fast forward 25 years. 

At the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, the world’s greatest gymnast, Simone Biles, was also vaulting for the United States in the all-around team event.  But something was not right. She did not perform the expected number of twists in the air and nearly fell on her landing. This was not the same Simone Biles who had thirty-one Olympic and World Championship medals in her trophy case.  Minutes later she withdrew from the competition and eventually announced that she would not participate in the individual all-around finals and three of the four-event finals for which she qualified. Biles said she was experiencing “the twisties,” a psychological condition causing her to lose mental control of her body as she performed aerial maneuvers.

Biles used her misfortunate as a platform to raise awareness for mental health. Although some pundits criticized her for letting down her teammates and her country, the overwhelming response to her withdrawal from competition was positive and empathetic. There were few references to Biles’s lack of courage or her failure to carry the flag up the hill for the United States. 

Michael Phelps, the greatest Olympian of all time in any sport, defended Biles from his post as an NBC swimming commentator. And when Biles returned to competition on the balance beam this week (she won a bronze medal) the network ran a moving video, narrated by pop star Taylor Swift, celebrating her humanity and heroism.  

New York Times sportswriter Kurt Streeter, in a piece titled “The Power of No,” praised Biles for resisting a sports culture that “commodifies athletes and prize winning at all costs,” comparing her stand for mental health to NBA and WNBA players refusing to play in the wake of police shootings in the summer of 2020. 

It didn’t take long before commentators and social media pundits started comparing Biles’s decision to withdraw from competition for health reasons to Strug’s decision to risk her health in the 1996 vault for the gold. In my view, both gymnasts were heroic. They were also both products of their time. A lot can change in twenty-five years, including the meaning of “heroic.”

Since Strug’s vault, we have learned a lot about the culture of American gymnastics. We now know, for example, that Bela and Marta Karolyi were tyrants who psychologically abused young female gymnasts and often made them train and perform with serious injuries. As one former American gymnast put it, “If Marta Karolyi was there, [Biles withdrawal from competition] would never have happened.”

Anyone who looks closely at the events surrounding Strug’s vault will see that one of the people who helped her off the floor was Larry Nassar, the doctor who sexually assaulted hundreds of female gymnasts in his eighteen years working for the national team. Nasser’s sexual abuse of young girls often occurred on the Karolyi ranch. He is now locked away for life. 

In a viral Facebook post on July 27, Byron Heath, an Idaho father of two young girls, described what it was like to show his daughters a video of Strug’s vault: “I wasn’t inspired to watch it this time. In fact, I felt a little sick . . . all I could see was how Kerri Strug looked at her coach, Bela Karolyi, with pleading, terrified eyes, while he shouted back, ‘You can do it!’ over and over again.” When his daughters asked, “Why did she jump again if she was hurt,” all Heath could come up with was “some inane reply about the heart of a champion.” He could not even convince himself that Strug did the right thing. And if the overwhelming response to Heath’s post is any indication, a lot of other Americans, now looking back a quarter-century later, also wonder if Strug should have taken that second vault. 

Kerri Strug’s comments on Simone Biles’s decision to withdraw from competition did not go much farther than an encouraging tweet. Strug does not strike me as someone who wants to get involved in this debate. 

Meanwhile, Biles seems fully aware that by making her health a priority, she was breaking with the past, and an older interpretation of Strug’s legacy.

History is always changing.

John Fea is Executive Editor at Current.