There is nothing wrong with the acronym G.O.A.T.—a label being thrown around incessantly by commentators, sportswriters and athletes themselves—except that it’s pretentious, grandiose, sanctimonious. And a cliché.
It stands for Greatest of All Time, an assertion that can’t possibly be substantiated. How is it reasonable to compare a 21st Century performer to someone from, say, 1924, who functioned in an era of prehistoric nutrition, training methods and equipment?
There certainly are great modern-day champions, folks of unprecedented accomplishment, running around loose these days. And it is simple enough to quantify their specific successes. But this braying of singular majesty, often self-congratulatory and regularly perpetuated by the subject of the claim, not only invites the wrath of vicious social-media trolls on the rare occasions of a stumble, but also recalls an earlier sportsworld term that meant just the opposite.
For decades, the “goat” was the player who goofed up—spectacularly—by dropping the potential winning pass, running the wrong way, surrendering the decisive home run, failing to touch base, calling a timeout that didn’t exist, signing an inaccurate scorecard. The last thing any jock wanted to be called was a goat.
But here we are. Tom Brady has been declared the G.O.A.T. And Michael Jordan. LeBron James. Tiger Woods. Serena Williams. But if one of them is indeed the Greatest of All Time—by definition, unequalled by any other from the past, present or future—how can there be so many of them?
This isn’t just about the extraordinary Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and her agonizing realization that she couldn’t continue at the Tokyo Games three years ago while “fighting with [my] own head.” But the question has been raised in some precincts whether the relentless promotion of Biles as the G.O.A.T of those Olympics—the one-to-watch among 11,000 athletes—likely contributed to wearing her down.
She in fact had cited the weight of expectations.
To Slate.com’s Justin Peters at the time, NBC especially had “turned the Tokyo Games into the Simone Biles Games…It is a bit rich for NBC to report on the psychological pressures faced by Biles without also reflecting on ways in which its choice to make Tokyo the Simone Games surely intensified those pressures. It’d be sort of like if your boss announced to an auditorium filled with your co-workers that the fate of the company was riding on your work output, and then took you aside to sympathetically observe that you looked stressed and that the key to happiness was a healthy work-life balance.”
Plenty of reports from former sports journalism colleagues likewise hung Biles out there as something of a G.O.A.T. pinata, a challenge to be knocked off, accentuating her skills with prose filled with twists and rolls and handsprings and somersaults and roundouts.
Biles herself had begun showing up in 2019 in a competition leotard with the sequined outline of a goat’s head, just as G.O.A.T. tattoos have been sported by several athletes of recent vintage. After her all-around victory in Paris, she made a point of brandishing a necklace with a silver goat pendant. Which recalled sports performance consultant Robert Andrews, who had counseled Biles before her first Olympics in 2016, having expressed his dislike for all G.O.A.T. claims. “I think it’s misplaced,” he once told Yahoo Life. “I think it’s misused and I think it puts a big target on athletes’ backs.”
There’s this hyperbole: While Biles has dominated her sport for most of the past decade and absolutely set new standards in the sport—and has won more world gymnastic championship gold medals (23) than anyone in history—she is not the most celebrated Olympian in her sport.
In three Olympics, Biles has collected eight medals—six gold, a silver and a bronze. Brilliant work. But Larisa Latynina, competing for the Soviet Union, remains the all-time leader in that department—18 medals (nine gold, five silver, four bronze) over three Olympics from the mid-1950s to mid-‘60s. (Plus 14 world championship medals.) Old tapes verify that Latynina’s skills were pedestrian compared to the airborne gyrations all elite gymnasts can do now, but that’s not the point.
In her day, Latynina was the best. Since the early 2010s, Biles has been the best, and her performance level now, especially in light of her insecurities at the Tokyo Games, has been fairly astonishing. Still, Biles’ feat of winning all-around gold medals in two Olympics is a standard first set by Latynina (in 1956 and ’60). And a head-to-head challenge to indisputably establish which is the sport’s G.O.A.T might not be fair. Latynina is 89 years old.
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One helpful thing about the banning of (most) of the Russian athletes from this year's Olympics is how it relieves the poor ink-stained wretches from having to spell the names right. "Biles" is easy.
The whole GOAT thing drives me nuts. A lazy tag by so many people who "cover" sports.
I still have trouble wrapping my head around how GOAT now means the greatest when it used to mean the opposite for a particular game, etc. And it is just silly and the stuff of "hot take" journalism to arbitrarily decide which athlete is the best of all time. Maria Kondratyevna Gorokhovskaya of the Soviet Union won the first all-around gold medal in OlympicHistory in 1952. I think you covered that and earned a writer's gold for spelling her name correctly.