Leslie Jones, know for her live tweeting during the Olympics, was disappointed to see celebrated gymnast Simone Biles treated the way she was by some after she abruptly dropped out of of the team competition in the July 2020 Olympics in Tokyo (held in July of 2021), citing mental health issues. The Texas attorney general even called the athlete a “national embarrassment” and a quitter.
“This is what people need to understand: It’s not enough just to be physically fit for these Games. You have to be mentally fit for these Games. One doesn’t work without the other. And the pressure that is put on these athletes has to be enormous,” Jones told the New York Times in a story published Wednesday. “The way that they attacked Simone Biles, I was ashamed of our country because, first of all, most of the people that complained were sitting on their fat asses on the couch. You’ll never do a cartwheel and you have the nerve to talk about someone and tell them that they let the country down? We have to start taking accountability that they are not actually superheroes. They do make it look like they’re superheroes, but they are humans.”
The former Saturday Night Live star and actress explained that she’d watched the Olympics all her life. Live tweeting them came to her much later, after she’d gotten her start posting commentary on a popular drama.
“[Live tweeting is] a blessing and a curse at the same time, because I’m going be honest with you — I didn’t actually think people were going to catch on to it. The first time I live-tweeted might have been Breaking Bad. It had already been off the air for about five years, but it was so good that I was like, ‘I’ve got to tell people about this,'” Jones said.
“So it really did start off as fun. Now it is a job. The politics [commentary] started during Covid and sitting on the couch watching TV, and I don’t think people were paying attention to their backgrounds. I was like, ‘Does she know she’s in front of — what the [expletive] is that?’ I’m always trying to find a way to make people laugh when things are bad. It’s relief,” she said. “That is what a comic’s job is. We’re jesters.”
Jones faced a challenge in covering the big events happening this year in Tokyo, when some of the videos she posted were blocked on social media. She said that she might give it up.
However, NBC, who owns the broadcasting rights, said it was not the fault of the network, and it endorsed her coverage. “She’s free to do her social media posts as she has done in the past,” an NBC Sports spokesman told the Times a day later. “She’s a super fan of the Olympics and we’re super fans of hers.”
