award-winning journalists new york times bestsellers no topic out of bounds no opinions left unsaid an institution for sports talk and information this is the sports reporters here's mike lupica mitch album and bob ryan i am bob ryan of the boston globe and es. I'm Mitch Album of the Detroit Free Press.

Yeah, sure, like I'm supposed to believe that.

This is Mike Lupica, MLB.com, New York Daily News,

welcoming you to the Monday morning edition of the Sports Reporters podcast.

We got a lot to Olympics and baseball and basketball and all that stuff.

But we will start with the big breaking news out of Tokyo. And that is

that Simone Biles, who many people thought would not compete again at these Olympics because of

everything that she was going through is now going to compete on the balance beam. And guys, I don't

know how she's going to do um i don't know how what went

into this thinking whether she couldn't leave the olympics with her brand uh in its current state

but here's what i do know guys when she gets up on that beam the mbc announcers are going to treat her like she's Joan of Arc.

They already have.

And this is, in all the years that I've covered the Olympics, and I go back to 1984, this has been the weirdest, most awkward story to try to comprehend or write about because you are

trying to get into somebody's head that from the outside appears perfectly fine you know we're

used to dealing with athletes who have injuries trying to decide should they go or not. We see them wince.

We see them make faces when they try to step on it or move the shoulder.

But she sits night after night looking perfectly fine, cheerleading for her teammates.

And yet the whole time, she's not out there.

I mean, remember, her entire Olympics have consisted

of just the prelims for the team event and then one vault in the actual team event and then

done. Everything else, all these other individual events, the team thing and everything,

she's just set out. And now all of a sudden, she's okay to do this one, which is the last one.

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