Last night, five-time gold medal-winning gymnast Simone Biles was voted off Dancing With the Stars, and honestly you guys, it’s like we’re just telling the universe that we don’t deserve joy.
Despite Simone and her partner’s perfect scores for their jive and rumba routines, fan voting eliminated she and Sasha Farber because they — the fans — are idiots. And then, to further prove how much better she is than all of us, Biles put a positive spin on the elimination because, as mentioned, she is a queen.
“Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise,” she told Us Weekly, proving her generosity knows no bounds. “I have been going nonstop since the Olympics, and I feel like I couldn’t ask for more of what Sasha has done for this entire season and journey, and I found out a lot about myself.”
Now, Chicago Cubs’ David Ross, NFL player Rashad Jennings, and Fifth Harmony’s Normani Kordei are left, and congratulations to them, but what the hell.
What the hell, you guys? When you vote off Simone Biles, you vote off joy. When you vote off Simone Biles, you vote off quotes like “smiling doesn’t win gold medals.” (Which is true: it doesn’t. And as a proud owner of frown lines from looking at the news/my computer/my phone on a regular basis, I can confirm that proof of a perpetual serious expression sends the distinctive message that I can/will end you.) And most importantly, when you vote off Simone Biles, you vote off the privilege of making any decisions about anything going forward. You don’t vote off anybody with a perfect score, let alone the best gymnast on the planet. Why not just vote Geena Davis out of A League of Their Own?
Exactly. You wouldn’t. First, because she’s a movie character from a film made 25 years ago and you can’t vote off the past. But second, because eliminating her would be idiotic. So there is it, yet again: everybody responsible for this is an idiot. (An idiot!)
And sure, you may think that I’m making a big deal out of a competition series based around dancing, and that would be a fair assumption if you’d never seen Center Stage or Step Up or Take the Lead or any movie about the majesty of dance (which I have many, many times). Or, if you hadn’t watched Biles’ floor routine last summer on repeat and wondered if maybe at 30, it was too late to train seriously for a career in gymnastics. (And then the same thing at 31, which I am doing right now.) But Biles’ elimination doesn’t just embody the ridiculousness of letting fans of anything make any decision, it reflects how over the last six months, we can’t do anything right. We just can’t. The world is collapsing in on itself like a dying star, and when we have the chance to have one nice and lovely thing, we blow it. Again. Guys, I know I’m not American, but how is it possible for we — citizens of this planet — to mess up a dance competition series?
Because we aren’t as good as Simone Biles. We aren’t as good at gymnastics, we’re not as good at putting a positive spin on things (my last words on the show would be, “I hate all of you and I will rule one day as your queen and god combined, so prepare yourselves, asshats”), and we’re not as good at being people. Imagine knowing the public had voted you off despite dancing perfectly, and your first instinct was to say, “It’s fine! I need to take a break anyway!” Imagine you didn’t look directly into the camera and curse everyone who’d tuned in.
But no. Simone Biles is better than us. And she’s better than Dancing With the Stars. And she’s better than an obviously flawed voting system, both in terms of television and America entirely. May you thank her every time you do not smile and still achieve greatness. May you — and I, and all of us — pray she has mercy on us when she inherits the earth.
