Be anything you want to be

As long as it’s boring.

It seems to be tempting to some to use Simone Biles decision not to compete in an event in the Olympics as an opportunity to teach kids that it’s not worth risking your safety to win. Because, after all, it’s just entertainment. I don’t have kids, so I’m not going to judge whether its a good or bad thing to tell them. But this is a misunderstanding of what entertainment is.

For the entertained, yes, it’s just entertainment. Not worth taking too much risk to be entertained. But risk is integral to what entertainers of all stripes are selling. It is not always physical injury or death that is being risked, but there needs to be some sort of high wire act going on, whether literal or metaphorical.

Music is a form of entertainment that typically comes with low physical risk, assuming you don’t play drums for Spinal Tap. Yet we intuitively know an album titled Cautious, Safe or Responsible better be ironic. Michael Jackson wisely chose Bad, Thriller, and Dangerous for album titles over the first three. There has to be danger of some sort for people to respect it.

If you don’t believe me, remember Rebecca Black’s song Friday? What is so comically bad about the song is that everything about it is safe—except for one crucial thing. It features cookie cutter generic pop tracks with auto-tuned vocals. This is paired with lyrics that seem to be written solely for the purpose of saying words without taking any risks whatsoever. But poor Rebecca Black took way more risk than she realized by releasing her video publicly on Youtube, which has since been laughed at by approximately one hundred and fifty million individuals. An ankle sprain, even a bad one, starts to sound like a vacation when you think about what that must have been like for the teenager.

You can almost look at different forms of entertainment, even different styles within one form as different ways of taking risks. Music, sports, comedy, film, theater, magic, circus, anything that attracts a crowd, there is either physical risk, or some sort of high stakes social risk going on, whether you are aware of it or not. Gymnastics is no different.

Which makes it weird and ironic that an Olympic athlete of all people is held up as a responsible risk-averse role model. Simone Biles knows more than anyone that she would never have become an Olympic athlete in the first place without repeatedly risking injury, embarrassment, and failure, not to mention missing much of her childhood to train. That she made a decision to avoid taking a risk was so notable because its the opposite of what she normally does.

So maybe it is responsible to unintentionally sell the motto “You can be anything you want to be, as long as it’s boring” to your kids, but don’t expect them to become Simone Biles if they buy it.