“Lack of talent, lazy, olympic champions,” Biles wrote on Instagram hours after Team USA won gold in the women’s gymnastics team final at the Paris 2024 Olympics
Simone Biles appeared to hit back at MyKayla Skinner’s previous comments about the U.S. gymnastics team’s “work ethic” in an Instagram caption on July 30
Biles and Team USA won gold at the Paris 2024 Olympics, with the 27-year-old becoming the most decorated U.S. gymnast in Olympic history
“Lack of talent, lazy, olympic champions,” Biles joked in the post shared hours after their win
Simone Biles appeared to reference those controversial MyKayla Skinner comments after the U.S. gymnastics team’s big win at the Paris 2024 Olympics.
On Tuesday, July 30, Biles, Suni Lee, Jordan Chiles, Jade Carey and Hezly Rivera won gold for Team USA at the Games, and Biles — who now has eight Olympic medals — marked the occasion by sharing several photos of the squad celebrating on Instagram.
“Lack of talent, lazy, olympic champions ❤️🥇🇺🇸,” Biles captioned the post, seemingly hitting back at 2020 Olympic vault silver medalist Skinner, who previously criticized the team, minus Biles, in a now-deleted YouTube video.
After the team heading to the Games was announced last month, Skinner, 27, said, “Besides Simone, I feel like the talent and the depth just isn’t like what it used to be.”
“Just notice like, I mean, obviously a lot of girls don’t work as hard. The girls just don’t have the work ethic,” she added, per a clip from the video shared on X (formerly known as Twitter).
She claimed at the time that the required abuse awareness training program SafeSport was one of the reasons why she felt the work ethic had changed, saying, “Coaches can’t get on athletes, and they have to be really careful what they say.”
A representative for Skinner did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment on Wednesday, July 31.
The former Olympian, who shared some red heart emojis on her Instagram Stories alongside a post about Team USA’s win on Tuesday, has since said her comments about the gymnasts were “misinterpreted.”
On her Instagram Stories on July 3, Skinner claimed that “a lot of the stuff” she talked about in the YouTube video “wasn’t always necessarily about the current team, because I love and support all the girls that made it and I’m so proud of them.”
Skinner added, “It was more about going back into my own gym, just the work ethic is different compared to when we were doing gymnastics in the [former team coordinator] Márta [Károlyi] era. And I’m not sticking up for Márta or saying what she did was good, I’m just saying it was different.”
She then apologized for her comments. “So anyway, sorry for anything that got out of context or seemed hurtful. That is never my intention. And seriously, throughout the video, I was so pumped for the girls, and it was so fun watching trials and doing a live with everybody.”
