MyKayla Skinner is speaking out after Simone Biles seemingly used her own words against her while celebrating the U.S. women’s gymnastics team’s Olympics victory.
Skinner took to Instagram on Tuesday, August 6, to directly ask Biles to help stop the cyberbullying she has endured.
“I sincerely hoped that this topic wouldn’t need to be revisited but unfortunately things have really gotten out of hand lately. And it’s one thing to disagree with me regarding something I have said or a point I was trying to make, but it’s something else entirely when that turns into cyberbullying or even worse,” Skinner said. “Watching people cheer on the bullying — which has led to threats of physical harm to me, my husband, and our daughter — is disgusting. So please, at this point, I’m just asking for it to stop for the sake of my family because enough is enough.”
She continued, “About four weeks ago, I made a comment about work ethic and what seems to be taking place with the rising generation. To be totally clear, I take 100 percent responsibility for poorly articulating the point I was trying to make, and the last thing I wanted was to cause harm or offend our U.S. Olympic team. I know these women are incredible — the very best of the best — and almost all of them are my former teammates who I have enjoyed very much cheering on the last few years.”
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Skinner explained that she thought she had made amends with Biles. “I posted a video apology on Instagram and I followed up with a written apology and I sent individual messages to each of the women on the team,” she shared. “Only Simone had responded and she told me that she was proud of me. You guys can imagine my surprise last week when I was celebrating our team winning gold just to see this brought up all over again by a caption on an Instagram post. If Simone truly believes that I called our team lazy and lacking talent and if that’s really how she feels, I am really heartbroken over it. But not just heartbroken because it isn’t what I feel or even how I previously said, but because Simone’s latest post and others that followed it fueled another wave of hateful comments, DMs, articles, and emails. Hate that includes death threats to me, my family, and even my agent. My family and friends don’t deserve to be caught in the crossfire here. They’ve done nothing.”
Skinner had a message directly for her former teammate: “To Simone, I am asking you directly and publicly to please put a stop to this. Please ask your followers to stop. You have been an incredible champion for mental health awareness and a lot of people need your help now. We’ve been attacked in ways that I’m certain you never intended. Your performance, the team’s performance, and the Olympics in general should be a time that we support one another.”
Biles made headlines with her celebratory Instagram post on Tuesday, July 30, after she and teammates Suni Lee, Jordan Chiles, Jade Carey, and Hezly Rivera won the gold medal in the team finals at the 2024 Paris Olympics. “Lack of talent, lazy, olympic champions ?????,” she wrote. Her caption was an apparent dig at Skinner, who criticized this year’s team for having a lack of “work ethic.”
In a since-deleted June YouTube video, Skinner claimed, “Besides Simone, I feel like the talent and the depth just isn’t what it used to be. I mean, obviously, a lot of girls don’t work as hard. The girls just don’t have the work ethic.”
She went on to state that because of the U.S. Center for SafeSport — an organization that works to prevent abuse against athletes — the incoming generation of gymnasts are getting a different approach to training. “Coaches can’t get on athletes, which in some ways is really good, but at the same time, to get to where you need to be in gymnastics you do have to be … a little aggressive, a little intense,” she explained.
Biles is one of several U.S. gymnasts who accused former team doctor Larry Nassar of sexual abuse. He was charged with 22 counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct with minors in December 2016 and was found guilty of seven counts two years later. In 2018, he was sentenced to serve a minimum of 40 years in prison.
Skinner later apologized for the YouTube upload, claiming her comments were “misinterpreted” and “misunderstood.”
“A lot of the stuff I was talking about wasn’t always necessarily about the current team because I love and support all the girls that made it and I’m so proud of them,” she wrote in a July Instagram Story post. “It was more about going back into my own gym and the work ethic is different compared to when we were doing gymnastics in the Márta [Károlyi] era.”
Skinner previously trained under Károlyi, 81, the former USA Gymnastics national team coordinator. Károlyi was accused of making athletes follow strict rules without objection in a 2018 Associated Press exposé.
In a statement to Us Weekly earlier this month, Skinner said she was “comparing the ‘Márta Era’ to the current era” of gymnastics in her deleted video. “I am coming to terms that I have not fully dealt with the emotional and verbal abuse I endured under Márta that perhaps led to my hurtful comments,” she said. “I take full responsibility for what I said and I deeply apologize.”
Biles initially reacted to Skinner’s work ethic comments via Threads, writing, “Not everyone needs a mic and a platform.” Chiles’ mother, Gina, added in a tweet, “Whoa. She really said that out loud and posted it. That’s something.”
More fans and athletes seemingly reacted to the drama following Biles’ Instagram caption. “It doesn’t get more iconic than this … She f’d around n found out fr,” Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney wrote before joking, “Feels like I need to apologize just to redeem my first name.”
