Simone Biles Responds To Tom Bergeron’s ‘Smile’ Comment Apology


Simone Biles has offered another response to Dancing With the Stars host Tom Bergeron telling her to smile on Monday night’s show.

After accepting criticism from the judges for her latest performance on Dancing With the Stars, Bergeron asked Biles why she wasn’t smiling from the praise they were giving her. Biles’ pithy response? “Smiling doesn’t win you gold medals.” The comment became viral on social media, and Bergeron issued an apology of sorts.

So, how did Biles feel about Bergeron’s apology? After a full day, she tweeted her response.

Bergeron tweeted back that the “feeling was mutual.”

Bergeron’s “smiling” comment came after Biles’ second dance of the night, a pasodoble, which received better reviews from the judges than her earlier performance. Ironically, after Biles’ first performance of the night, a foxtrot, during which she flashed her trademark smile, judge Carrie Ann Inaba suggested she was smiling too much.

“Your skills are unquestionable. You hit every line with precision and perfection. But once again, I’m going to come back to performance and authenticity about who you are when you perform…. You have this beautiful smile and you are a megastar with your energy, but once in a while, there’s beauty without a smile. There’s beauty in pain and all of the other emotions, and I’d like to see more of that.”

“I don’t know if the smile is authentic because you want to smile, or if it’s just because you rehearsed it that way,” judge Julianne Hough added. “I really just want to see some rawness come out.”

Regardless of the mixed messaging, Biles advances to the Dancing With the Stars Semifinals by the end of the night. She and her Dancing With the Stars partner, Sasha Farber, are among the final four couples left in the competition alongside Rashad Jennings and Emma Slater, Normani Kordei and Val Chmerkovskiy, and David Ross and Lindsay Arnold. Biles received a 36 out of 40 for both of her dances on Monday, putting her in third place among judges’ scores. Ross is behind her with a 36 and a 29, while Jennings has a 36 and 39 and Kordei has a 40 and a 39.

Biles, who is 20 years old, hasn’t had the easiest time with the intense pressures and scrutiny of Dancing With the Stars. The Olympic gymnast revealed in her People blog this week that her past experience couldn’t really prepare her for constantly being under the microscope on DWTS.

“Being in front of a camera and opening up has been a very different experience, something I’m not used to…. On DWTS, there are cameras around all the time and they’re always asking me to share what I’m thinking. To have to be camera ready so much is different, but I’m glad that people are getting to see a side of me that they’ve never seen before. It’s scary in a way, but then I’m glad they get to know me.”

Biles is still excelling in the competition, though, as have many Olympians in past seasons of Dancing With the Stars. Past Olympic champions to win Dancing With the Stars include Apollo Anton Ohno in Season 4, Kristi Yamaguchi in Season 6, Shawn Johnson in Season 8, Meryl Davis in Season 18 and Biles’ Final Five teammate Laurie Hernandez in Season 23. Athletes, in general, had traditionally done extremely well on DWTS, with such winners as Emmitt Smith, Hélio Castroneves, Hines Ward, and Donald Driver. Biles is joined by two other athletes in the final four of Season 24, with Jennings being an NFL running back and Ross being a former MLB catcher.

Dancing With the Stars airs every Monday at 8 p.m. ET/PT on ABC.

[Featured Image by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP]

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