Like people needed another excuse not to succeed, US Olympic gymnast Simone Biles celebrates giving up as a virtue.  It would be understandable if she retired in order to go out as one of the best ever, but she made the decision to train as a member of a TEAM  representing the United States of America in the Olympics.  As a member of that TEAM, she failed them as well as the American’s sponsoring and supporting her.

The timing is suspect.

Recently tennis Olympian Naomi Osaka made it OK to avoid questions from the press and then went on to lose in the early rounds of the Olympics based on her alleged fragile state of mind.  After observing the fawning adulation and high levels of support for Osaka’s “bravery”, Biles found a new strategy; failure sold as strength.

Lincoln penned one of the greatest speeches ever written under the pressures of a civil war, a battle at Gettysburg with 50,000 casualties, his 11 year-old son dying only a year earlier, and a wife suffering from severe mental illness.

Imagine what the Gettysburg Address would look like had Biles, (instead of Harriet Beecher Stowe) been around to influence President Lincoln.