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An old clip of an interview with JD Vance has resurfaced shortly after Simone Biles made history at the Paris 2024 Olympics, with the potential vice president criticizing the media response to her withdrawal from the Tokyo Olympics.
On Tuesday, July 31, the 27-year-old became the most decorated gymnast in U.S. history after the U.S. women's gymnastics team took gold in the all-around final. The win marked the return of Biles, who withdrew from the last Summer Olympics in 2021 due to her mental health.
Following his retirement from competition, Vance appeared on Fox News Outnumbered in July 2021, where she criticized the media for supporting Biles during her “weakest moment.”
“It's understandable that she was going through an incredible amount of pressure,” the Ohio senator said at the time. “What I find so strange about this — and it's reflected in the media more than it is on Simone Biles — is that we've tried to turn a very tragic moment, Simone Biles' withdrawal from the Olympic team, into this act of heroism.
“And I think the fact that we try to praise people not for their moments of strength or heroism, but for their moments of greatest weakness, reflects rather poorly on our therapeutic society.”
Vance continued: “Being an athlete at that level is incredibly hard. A normal response right now would be to say, ‘It’s a shame she’s going through this. It’s a shame she stopped doing it.’ But instead, what our press has done, I think, is turn this into a weird therapeutic moment. ‘Let’s praise her for doing this.’ And I think that’s where the problem really lies.”
In 2021, Biles retired from women's artistic gymnastics competition to focus on her mental health, after suffering from a condition known as “twisties.” The phenomenon, commonly experienced by gymnasts, involves losing control in the air and feeling unable to perform the movement, creating a high-risk and dangerous situation. Biles has previously described twisties as “getting lost in the air,” comparing the uncomfortable experience to not being able to drive while behind the wheel of a car.
But all of that went up in smoke during Tuesday's all-around team final, when Biles claimed her eighth Olympic medal, becoming the most decorated U.S. gymnast and the fifth most decorated female Olympic gymnast in the world.
This is not the first time past comments made by Vance have resurfaced since he was selected as former President Donald Trump's running mate in the 2024 presidential election. The 39-year-old Republican politician sparked outrage after describing Vice President Kamala Harris as a “childless cat lady” during a 2021 interview with Fox News Host Tucker Carlson.
He Peasant Elegy The author claimed that the United States was ruled by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable with their own lives and the choices they have made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”
“Look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance said. “How can it make sense that we have handed our country over to people who really have no direct interest in it?”
Despite being chosen as Trump’s running mate, another old video interview shows Vance admitting that “there were definitely some people” who voted for Trump in 2016 “for racist reasons.” Meanwhile, recently surfaced emails revealed that Vance once privately called Trump a “demagogue,” a “disaster,” and a “morally reprehensible human being.”
