Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) betrayed her ignorance about sports as she attempted to engage with Simone Biles amid the gymnast’s online clash with right-wing activist Riley Gaines.
“Honey, if biological men competed in women’s gymnastics, odds are no one would know your name,” Mace wrote on X in response to Biles’ post calling out Gaines for targeting a transgender high school athlete.
But people were quick to point out a glaring issue with Mace’s claim, namely that it ignores the particular skills and attributes that help athletes like Biles thrive in women’s gymnastics ― as well as the extent of the seven-time Olympic gold medalist’s talent.
Samuel Phillips, a student athlete on the University of Illinois Men’s Gymnastics team, told HuffPost that this kind of claim can only come from people who “clearly don’t watch or know about the sport of gymnastics.”
“What makes gymnastics unique is that men’s and women’s gymnastics are realistically two different sports,” he explained. “It’s not like track and field or swimming where you have men and women perform the same distance races within the same length pool or track. These are two different sports with completely different events and skills. The only shared events are floor and vault, while the men have the pommel horse, rings, parallel bars and high bar and the women have uneven bars and beam.”
