Rising above issues

USA’s Simone Biles during a gymnastics training session in Le Bourget, France. Pics/Getty Images

When Naomi Osaka lifts her racquet on the red clay courts at Roland Garros during the Paris Olympics later this month, it'll represent more than a high-stakes competition for the tennis star.

For Osaka, a four-time grand slam champion, it's an important step in her journey after returning to tennis earlier this year, after stepping away to prioritise her mental health and give birth to her daughter. Osaka will join gymnastics icon Simone Biles and track and field star Sha'Carri Richardson on the Olympic stage.

Sha'Carri Richardson

These Black women athletes at the height of their careers have been vocal about mental health, public critique and other personal struggles. Osaka and Biles needed time away from their respective sports to prioritise mental health.

Richardson returned to competition after a highly scrutinised ban from track and field. They've all bounced back to the world's biggest stage while displaying different levels of vulnerability. Their different yet similar stories give viewers a unique image of Black women.

‘We're humans first'

"I always think about this: We weren't born playing our sport," Osaka recently told The Associated Press. "We were born the same way as everyone else. I wasn't born holding a racquet. We're humans first, and we're athletes as a profession."

Naomi Osaka

That idea is often overlooked when it comes to Black female athletes, who sit in the shadowed intersection of racism and sexism, said Ketra Armstrong, a professor of sport management and director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity in Sport at the University of Michigan. "It is critically important that they're elevated in this way," Armstrong said, "because I think it's helping people to reimagine what Black women are and who they are."

Biles, Osaka create space for women like them. Biles withdrew from the all-around gymnastics competition at the Tokyo Games to focus on her well-being after what she described as feeling the "weight of the world" on her shoulders. After a two-year hiatus, Biles, 27, proved to be just as dominant in her 2023 return to the international stage as she was at her first Olympics in 2016.

Time out is vital

She won the individual all-around title at the gymnastics world championships in October and breezed through last month's US Olympic trials. "Most athletes are wired to win," Armstrong said. "They've been winning all of their lives. And, so oftentimes in their sport, they know how to take a day off. And, I think what we're seeing is they're realising that even as life intersects with sport, it's OK to take a time out."

Osaka and Biles's return to the Olympics is important in creating space for women who look like them to be just as vulnerable, said Victoria Jackson, a sports historian and clinical associate professor of history at Arizona State University, while "also kind of forcing broader culture to accept" them for who they are beyond what they do in their sport.

I'm attacked because I am Black: Schroder

The 2023 FIBA World Champions, Germany, are set to continue their dominance on the international stage at the Paris Olympics. Basketball team captain Dennis Schroder, who was named as the country's flag bearer said: "I am attacked because I am Black, my wife Ellen because she is with a Black man."

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