What Your Teammates Never Have to Worry About
What Simone Biles carried so her team didn't have to
Our Ask - Edition 5 of 9
Read each email and reply with one simple answer: would you share this with at least one player on your team?
If yes, tell us what made it worth sharing. If not, tell us why.
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The night before the 2018 World Championships, Simone Biles ended up in the emergency room.
The pain she’d written off as pre-meet nerves had turned into something else: waves of agony that left her on the floor of her hotel room. A CT scan confirmed a kidney stone. Doctors told her to stay overnight, but she grabbed her bag and discharged herself.
She had a competition in the morning. She had teammates counting on her score.
“The kidney stone can wait,” Biles tweeted. “Doing it for my team.”
She named the kidney stone “the Doha Pearl.”
Here’s Biles talking about it right after competing, saying, “I’m here for the team” (1:17):
https://tinyurl.com/33nzwxcm
She couldn’t take painkillers; doping rules prohibited it. She competed anyway. “The pain was coming in waves,” she said. “I was walking around and then I’d be literally crawling on the floor because it hurt so bad.”
Then she went out and posted the highest all-around score in the world since her own 2016 Olympic gold. Her teammates didn’t know how bad it was until…afterwards.
That was the point.
Why It Matters
There’s a version of toughness that performs for the crowd, and a version that just handles it so the team doesn’t have to. Biles did the second kind.
Your teammates will remember the moments you showed up when it cost you something, not because you announced it or posted about on social media, but because they found out later.
This is not about playing through injuries you shouldn’t. Sometimes the right call is sitting out. Sometimes, that’s the best way to help your teammates and protect your body so you can come back is its own form of showing up for your team.
What you absorb privately so your team doesn’t have to: that’s one of the least visible and most important things a teammate can do.
The Teammate Standard
The night before the 2018 World Championships, Simone Biles checked herself out of the ER with a kidney stone.
She named it, went to sleep, and competed the next morning. Her teammates didn’t know how bad it was until it was over.
She finished with the highest all-around score in the world.
Many of the best teammates carry things on their own so everyone else can focus. They don’t make their problems the team’s problems. They handle it and show up.
What are you absorbing (or taking on) so your teammates don’t have to?