JD Vance made another gold-medal blunder.
Not long after the U.S. women’s gymnastics team topped the Olympics podium on Tuesday, one more round of poorly aged comments from the Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential candidate came to light, this time focusing on star gymnast Simone Biles.
Back in 2021, before he was a U.S. senator, Vance had a strange take on Biles’ decision to step back from the Tokyo Games after she was overcome by a case of “the twisties,” an often-dangerous condition in which athletes temporarily lose their sense of spatial awareness while midair.
While he was somewhat sympathetic to Biles’ situation, Vance told a panel on Fox News’ “Outnumbered” that celebrating her decision to withdraw from the Games showed how soft the world has gotten.
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“Well, I think, obviously, it’s understandable that she was going through an incredible amount of pressure,” the “Hillbilly Elegy” author began. “What I find so weird about this, and it reflects on the media more than it does on Simone Biles, is that we’ve tried to turn a very tragic moment — Simone Biles quitting the Olympic team — into this act of heroism.”
“And I think it reflects pretty poorly on our sort of therapeutic society that we try to praise people not for moments of strength, not for moments of heroism, but for their weakest moments,” Vance added.
“Being an athlete at that level is incredibly tough,” he acknowledged. “A normal response in this moment would be to say, ‘It’s just a shame that she’s going through this. It’s a shame that she quit,’ but instead, what our press has done, I think, is turn this into this weird therapeutic moment. ‘Let’s praise her for doing this.’ And I think that’s really where the problem herein lies.”
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Vance’s 2021 remarks clearly didn’t improve with time.
Biles made history on Tuesday when she won her eighth Olympic medal, becoming the most decorated gymnast in Team USA’s history.
Watch Vance’s full comments here:
