Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
Pick a sport — any sport — and consider which athletes are lauded as the world’s best. Take a mental snapshot.
Now look through history’s lens and scroll through past decades. The picture gets paler and paler the further back you go, brown faces slowly disappearing like Marty McFly’s hand in “Back to the Future.”
That era is romanticized by those who desire its return, with some bad actors working earnestly to rewind time and reverse progress on a grand scale. Unfortunately for them, no one is lightening major team sports like football and basketball, where dominant Black athletes are plentiful and permitted to thrive. Even worse, colorization is happening in gymnastics, too, where a bevy of Black girls can see themselves in the GOAT, Simone Biles.
In case you forgot or thought she was cooked, Biles sent reminders this week at the World Championships in Belgium. She became the first female gymnast to perform a skill that looks as dangerous as its old name — the Yurchenko double pike vault. Historically only done by men, the element is officially renamed the Biles II.
Roman numerals are necessary because she already owned the Biles on vault. Three other gymnastics skills bear her name in the international rule book: the Biles and Biles II on floor…
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