When Simone Biles nearly died, Yahoo Sports considered one of the greatest athlete in the world and decided to label her an “NFL wife.” Then the writer apologized… which somehow made it worse.
Simone Biles nearly died last week (thank goodness she is fine) and Yahoo Sports marked the occasion by calling her an NFL wife.
The headline they ran, “Breaking: NFL wife Simone Biles nearly passes away.”
She has eleven Olympic medals and thirty World Championship medals. She is so far past every gymnast who has ever lived that the judges had to keep rewriting the scoring, because the old numbers could not hold what she does in the air!
It is true that she is married to NFL safety Jonathan Owens. It is also true that she is one of the most accomplished athletes alive, and the headline reduced the greatest gymnast who ever lived to a man’s accessory.
This misogynistic and racist headline is only the latest entry in a long tradition of newsrooms looking straight at an exceptional woman and seeing only a wife.
In 2016, the Chicago Tribune covered an American winning a medal at the Rio Olympics, and the first thing they pushed out did not contain her name at all. It announced that a Bears lineman’s wife had won a bronze. Corey Cogdell was a two time Olympic medalist in trap shooting, and a major newspaper decided the most clickable thing about her was the man she married. It’s the same thing…just ten years later.
McQuade Arnold, who wrote the piece, posted an apology. It’s a small masterpiece in saying “sorry” while admitting absolutely nothing.
He apologized for how the headline “came off.” It’s the “I’m sorry you feel that way” of apologies. The headline did nothing. You simply received it wrong.
He told us he never meant it, not in a million years! And just like that, the story stops being about a woman who got erased and turns into a story about a man with a good heart. Watch how fast the comments filled with people rushing to hand him grace, eager to praise a man for apologizing without ever stopping to realize this was NOT a real apology.
He blamed the need for good SEO. The keyword was NFL, he explained, as if a working writer were helpless, as if it were somehow impossible to put NFL and Simone Biles’ real accolades in the same sentence. Here, I will do his job for him: “Olympic legend Simone Biles, wife of NFL safety Jonathan Owens, hospitalized.” That took nine seconds, and his precious keyword is right there in it.
Then he wanted us to know about himself. He walked us through his website and his off season and the content his job demands of him. He spent his apology making sure we understood his working conditions when he could have spent it on her.
Here is what an apology sounds like when a person actually means it. I took the most decorated gymnast in history and called her a wife. That was wrong. I erased her, and I have rewritten the headline to put her name and her record first. No dumb alibi or guided tour of his precious and fragile male ego feelings. He says what he did plainly.
We tell girls and women to be so excellent that nobody can deny them. So they become excellent and they just rewrite what counts as your real achievement and decide the headline of your life is your marriage. They announce that your finest accomplishment was becoming a wife and a mother, no matter what else you achieved. They will make you smaller at the very top, with the medals still warm around your neck.
And let’s not pretend race isn’t a factor here. Simone Biles is a Black woman, and the white supremacist urge to shrink her pairs with the long habit of refusing to believe Black women about their own lives. Serena Williams nearly died after childbirth because the people in the room would not act on what she was telling them was happening inside her. The newsroom that will not lead with a Black woman’s name with accomplishments and the delivery room that will not hear a Black woman’s voice are the same.
Here’s why this all matters to you and me….
You are the headline of your own life. You are not just “the wife of” or “the girlfriend of” or “the mom” of. “The daughter of.”
You have been the woman a room did not appreciate until it found the man standing next to you.
And it is not only the headlines.
It is the bank that phones him about the account with both your names on it. It is the doctor who keeps talking to your husband while you are the one in the paper gown. It is at the closing table, in the divorce you are footing the bill for, and the wedding vows where you pledge your “obedience.” Whose wife are you? Whose mom? Whose daughter? Who are you here to pick up?
Listennnn….B*Tch, that’s Simone Biles. The greatest gymnast who ever lived.
Now put your own name in that sentence. I am _____ who _____.
You have a name, your own record, and a legacy that belongs to YOU.
When they shrink a woman in print, when they look at a champion and type wife, we do not let it scroll on by. We need to get loud and demand that they say her name with her titles attached, until the correction drowns out the insult.
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I’m Susan Hyatt, a Master Certified Life Coach who writes every week about women and power and the daily work of refusing to get small.
Know a woman who needs to read this? Send it her way.
And when you’re ready to build a business and a life that honors your legacy, that’s the work we do inside my Beyond Business Mastermind. The next round opens July 15.
Susan!!!!! I'm so glad you're here!
You have been on fire with your revelatory Facebook posts. Even if you're posting once a week here, I hope you'll share some of that back catalog. 💖