Convenience Big Store: Simone Biles tumbles out

30 July, 2021

Hello,

It never rains but it pours, sang Judy Garland. Too right, said Niall Ferguson on Bloomberg this week. "Poor humanity just can't catch a break these days." Covid continuing to cause chaos, disastrous floods in Europe and China, wildfires in Siberia and Oregon, order breaking down in Afghanistan, Cuba and Haiti, to name just three countries – is it part of a pattern? See The case for civilisation post-2040 in this week's issue of The Knowledge.

One person not fazed by much is Keith Richards (see below). In his time the Rolling Stone has survived a bomb in the Blitz, electrocution on stage, setting fire to his own bed, being crushed by tumbling books and brain surgery after falling from a tree. "All part of life's rich pageant," he shrugs.

All good wishes,

Jon Connell

Editor-in-chief

The Olympics

Simone Biles in action at the Tokyo Games. Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images

Simone Biles tumbles out

After an ill-executed vault on Tuesday, America's superstar gymnast Simone Biles withdrew from the Olympics, citing mental-health issues. Quite right too, says Lindsay Crouse in The New York Times. "Being the greatest means knowing your own variable limits and when to push through the pain – and when not to force it." Take Kerri Strug, the teenage gymnast who competed on a torn ankle to help the Americans win gold in 1996. She was held up as a hero, but aggravated the injury in the process, never competing again.

Biles, too, has endured plenty of struggles. She won a national title with broken toes and a gold medal at the 2018 world championships with kidney stones, and she was one of 150 gymnasts sexually assaulted by the US team's doctor, Larry Nassar. She wasn't shirking her career by pulling out this week, but rather "investing in her longevity".

We might adopt them as "figureheads", but athletes like Biles don't owe us anything, says Lauren Puckett-Pope in Elle. "They can control their own stories, their own destinies." The "fever pitch" of pressure on Biles recalls tennis player Naomi Osaka's withdrawal from the French Open earlier this year. But it ignores the fact that these athletes are "living women with interior lives so rich, we would weep if we knew them".

"Get a grip, my God," says Ben Sixsmith in The Spectator. Biles was well within her rights to pull out – God knows, she's tougher than the average opinion columnist – but why the hell are we celebrating it? Commentators are babbling that her withdrawal might be her "greatest achievement of all", but that just demeans her 31 world and Olympic medals. The only people turning her into a figurehead are the liberal media: Biles and Osaka have been drafted in to represent "black girl magic" and are fetishised as "martyrs" to "modish clichés about pressure and self-care".

One writer even cites EM Forster: "I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." But no one's accusing Biles of betraying her country – bar Piers Morgan, she's had "almost universal" support. Besides, "the sensible response to such an allegation would be 'no, she didn't' rather than 'yes – and it was good'".

Life

Ronnie Wood, Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts and Keith Richards. Dave Benett/Getty Images

Drink and drugs? We'd rather do yoga

Despite a combined age of 309, the four remaining members of the Rolling Stones are fitter than ever, says Guy Kelly in The Telegraph. The rock stars have weathered a lifetime of hell-raising and are touring the US this autumn. So what's their secret?

For Mick Jagger, it's exercise – the 78-year-old still has a 28in waist. On tour he walks 12 miles a night, "tottering from one side of the stage to another". Off stage he's just as sprightly. Jagger trains for up to five hours a day, running eight miles and eating like an athlete – high protein, low carbs.

Charlie Watts, 80, and Keith Richards, 77, settled for going cold turkey. The former quit smoking, booze and drugs in middle age. The latter clung on longer, giving up drugs in 2006 and cigarettes in 2019. "Quitting heroin is like hell, but it's a short hell," said Richards. "Cigarettes are just always there." His one remaining vice is shepherd's pie, which he orders before every gig. "Pure fuel."

That leaves Ronnie Wood, 74, who has survived cancer twice. He smoked more than 30 cigarettes a day for 50 years and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2017. He had part of his lung removed, but made a full recovery – only to find out he had small cell cancer. He has beaten that too, and these days swears by meditation and yoga. But mostly it's good luck, said Wood. "Somebody up there likes us."

❤️ 🐴 💣 ⚡️ 🌴 During their 59 years together, Jagger and Richards have displayed an uncanny ability to dodge near-death experiences. The Stones frontman has survived an assassination attempt, a car crash, heart surgery and almost falling off a galloping stallion. He thumped the horse's forehead to make it slow down – he had never ridden before. Richards is even jammier. In 1944 he and his mother were evacuated from London. When they returned, they found a V-1 bomb had dropped on his cot. In 1965 he was electrocuted on stage: he was saved by his rubber-soled boots. In 1971 he fell asleep with a lit cigarette, sending his bed up in flames. In the 1990s he was crushed by falling books, breaking three ribs. And in 2006 he had brain surgery after falling 7ft from a palm tree. Well, said Richards: "All part of life's rich pageant."

Property

THE HIDEAWAY This six-bedroom villa in Fiesole has views of the Tuscan countryside and nearby Florence. Reached via a narrow lane from the town's main square, it has eight bathrooms, balconies, terraces, a pool, pergolas, olive groves and orchards. There are two smaller houses in the 2½ acres of grounds. €3m.

Quirk of history

In Frederick Forsyth's 1971 thriller The Day of the Jackal, the fictional assassin who tries to kill President de Gaulle assumes a false identity – that of a dead child. I did it myself to prove it was possible, Forsyth tells Marcus Scriven in The Mail on Sunday. The author scoured a graveyard near London to find the name of a child who had died, obtained the boy's birth certificate, then applied for a passport in his name: James Oliver Duggan, as in the novel. He even invented a false witness, a church minister in Wales. Off went the application with the fee; back, two weeks later, came a fat package containing a passport. "I never used it," says Forsyth. "I just tested the system and it worked." The loophole has since been closed.

Love etc

Kim Kardashian's look is seen as "buchona". Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

The gangsters' molls going under the knife

The drug cartels in the Mexican state of Sinaloa are so powerful that they are driving a generation of young women to alter their appearance, says the BBC's Linda Pressly. Plastic surgeon Rafaela Martinez Terrazas describes the "narco-aesthetic" as "a smaller, defined waist, wider hips with bigger buttocks… and [the breasts], they're generally large". The look is known as "la buchona" and accessorised with flashy clothes and designer handbags. One narco has sent about 30 women to Martinez for surgery, telling her: "Doctor, you know what I like." They pay in cash, with liposuction alone costing almost £5,000. Martinez justifies taking the work by saying that drug money is unavoidable in the state's economy.

Pedro, a local drug trafficker who has paid for two women to have plastic surgery, says narcos typically have a wife and children at home. Their girlfriends "are more like trophies". It's often a business transaction: "A woman might say, 'OK, my body's yours for six months if you pay for the operation.'" But it's a dangerous life. In Sinaloa, twice as many women are killed by firearms as in other Mexican states. When one narco's girlfriend was murdered, her breasts and hips were riddled with bullets – "the parts of her body the narco had invested in". In the meantime, the girlfriends have to make the most of their precarious lives. As one says of her gangster boyfriend: "For now he treats me like a goddess."

Long read shortened

How Beijing hunts down its enemies

Hu Ji has hunted Chinese fugitives "from Fiji to France", say Sebastian Rotella and Kirsten Berg in ProPublica, becoming a "star" back home in Wuhan for bringing enemies of the Chinese Communist Party to justice. He's part of Operation Fox Hunt, a shadowy global "fugitive apprehension programme" that claims to have caught more than 8,000 international runaways. The targets aren't murderers or drug lords; for the most part, they're public officials and businesspeople accused of boring financial crimes. Some have high-rolling lives overseas, with "lush mansions" and "millions in offshore accounts". But others are whistle-blowers, "minor figures swept up in provincial conflicts" – or dissident Hong Kongers, Tibetans and Uighurs.

In places such as Vietnam and Australia, Chinese agents abduct their prey and spirit them home covertly. But in the US kidnappings are more difficult. When Fox Hunt operatives confronted rogue billionaire Guo Wengui at his penthouse overlooking Central Park after he made allegations about high-level corruption in Beijing, they were intercepted by the FBI and booted out of the country. But when agents can't kidnap their targets, they resort to threats against family, recording "hostage-like videos" of relations being subjected to "harassment, jail, torture and other mistreatment". China is brazenly "defying other nations' laws and borders". And, beneath the surface, a "little-known cloak-and-dagger battle" rages between Chinese and American agents on US soil.

Read the full article here.