Article
Comment
Sport
5 min read

What’s Simone Biles doing today?

How to live with winning and losing.

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate. 

A gold medallist bites her medal.
Simone's gold medal moment.
@simonebiles

I wonder about what Simone Biles is doing today. She is one of the many athletes whose Paris 2024 was about more than gold; it was about redemption. Now the Games are over, what happens to their restoration story?  

The narrative about redemption seemed to dominate the headlines and linger in post-event interviews. Some Olympians came to the Games seeking it. Gymnast Rhys McClenaghan was tipped for gold in Tokyo 2020 but stumbled on the pommel horse, finishing in seventh place. In France, he climbed to the top of the podium.  

Others completed a fall and rise within the two weeks themselves. Sprinter Jeremiah Azu had a faltering beginning to the Games, disqualified for a false start in the individual 100m heat. Just six days later he was clutching a bronze medal for the relay.  

Then there are those like taekwondo athlete, Jade Jones, who also laboured for years and gave their all – but didn’t get the payoff that they sought. What does the story mean when it is unfulfilled? And when the Games are over, how do people live with winning and losing?  

Into our messy, maybe frightening, sometimes ordinary, lives, we love a redemption story to brighten and neaten things up. 

After years of professional procrastination, a few months ago I finally took the plunge and joined LinkedIn. An impressive feat, I know. It was driven by practicality; I was finishing a job as a climate policy advocate and making the leap into consultancy. But I’ve been fascinated to discover how people in my community, and millions of others, are sharing tender and vulnerable ideas and thoughts in this social workspace. They are coming with questions – what does success look like? How are you navigating your purpose in the day to day? What world do you want your children to inherit? – and gentle ideas about their answers.  

People are asking about and reflecting on how to navigate winning, and losing, and living in the murky space in between.  

This feels striking because one of the other prevalent stories many of us believe, maybe unconsciously, is that life will generally be good and any setbacks are the exception. Growing up in the Nineties the message seemed to be: the world is your oyster if you work for it. Put in the effort, and the losses will be few and the trajectory will be up.  

But the last few years in particular – economic volatility, growing exposure of deep inequalities, the worsening climate crisis – hammer home that this is not reliably the case. No matter how much effort you put in, we rarely live through one type of season at a time. Joy and suffering co-exist. And amongst the highs and the lows, there is a whole lot of everyday living. Show up at the desk, the school gate, the supermarket.   

Into our messy, maybe frightening, sometimes ordinary, lives, we love a redemption story to brighten and neaten things up.  

The sting of winning or losing is softened when we stop ascribing all meaning to them, and instead cast them in the context of a wider story. 

But part of the problem with many of the redemption tales we share is that they rely on the person themselves to deliver their own restoration. They’ve had (and are perhaps blamed for) a fall from grace, and now it’s up to them to find it within themselves – their physical, mental and emotional capacity – to achieve restoration. That’s a heavy weight to put on anyone’s shoulders (however broad they may be).  

And any redemption gained is fleeting. Medal winners talk about ‘gold medal syndrome’: the post-competition feeling of depression, loneliness and emptiness. For those athletes who’ve now headed home after fulfilling a salvation arc, is the emotional dip going to be even steeper, harder?  

Most of us won’t be Olympians, despite how expertly we discuss the diving scores every four years, but that sense of deflation after achieving a long-sought goal can be resonant. We’ve strived and risked ourselves for something, only to find the aftertaste is a bit flat. That new job is good but flawed. Winning that award doesn’t stop a rejection landing in the inbox the next day. The house renovations are already showing cracks. Winning and losing are both transient. A redemption made ourselves rarely satisfies or lasts. 

The sting of winning or losing is softened when we stop ascribing all meaning to them, and instead cast them in the context of a wider story. One that goes further than a single person or moment – a birth, a podium, a bonus. Such a story can speak beyond our own lives to the core challenges we face in the world: fairness into a broken economic system; peace instead of violence in our communities; flourishing, not escalating environmental crises.   

During my years of climate advocacy, I have sometimes envied colleagues working on more tightly defined topics with the possibility (only fulfilled through huge amounts of wisdom and graft, of course) of winning. Change a law, solve a problem. As the climate gets warmer and more unpredictable, it’s easy to have a sense that, at best, you are just making things a little less bad. The wins are in the context of a lot of disappointments, and a whole lot more grey space in between. 

But by being able to root my day to day in a bigger story, I can move forward with hope. Understanding our lives as part of an even greater narrative – the story of this world that God loves and sustains and restores – saves us from the pressure and heartache of trying to redeem our own lives. Instead, we can live them – the wins, the losses, and all the mundane moments in between – in light of that bigger story.  

Looking at the world through the lens of God’s redemption story helps us to stay clear-sighted: celebrating the successes and not make them our whole world; naming the problems and still acting with hope and grit. 

A redemption arc is a beautiful one. I want to hold onto that longing, but find it in a story that’s deeper, longer and richer than I can see. A story that lasts.  

Article
Belief
Community
Creed
Football
Sport
7 min read

Liverpool's title win shows us that we’re built for community

Answering the question of who do we belong to.
Amid celebrating football fans, one stands on top of a kiosk with outstretched arms.
Liverpool fans celebrate outside their stadium.
Jonathan Rowlands.

“A Liverbird upon my chest 

We are men of Shankly’s best 

A team that plays the Liverpool way 

And wins the Championship in May” 

This is the song that has thundered around Anfield this season. A prophecy willed into existence amidst the departure of Jürgen Klopp, Liverpool’s Shankly for the twenty-first century. Surely not? 

But then.  

Arsenal drop points and Manchester City drop points and Liverpool don’t drop points. Again and again and again, until Liverpool needs just one more point to make the song a reality. The next game? Spurs at Anfield. At Anfield. As fate would have it, my wife and I had front-row tickets, thanks to my father- and mother-in-law booking a fortunately timed (for us, anyway) holiday and not being able to use their season ticket. (Thanks, Jeff and Janet). 

As we got to the stadium the place thrummed with anticipation. Liverpool is a city that loves to sing, and to dance, and to cuddle; a city built for joy and for love. And here is Liverpool in all its splendour, drenched in glorious, league-winning sunshine, as people sing and dance and cuddle. Most people here won’t have a ticket; Anfield only holds 60,000. People are here just to be here, to be present; around for when it happens. 

The game kicks off and the noise is deafening. Liverpool only needs to avoid defeat in the next ninety minutes and the league is theirs. Spurs, inconsistent all season, surely haven’t got the mettle to get anything from the game. Have they? 

But then.  

Spurs score. An unmarked header from a corner. As simple as it gets. Former Liverpool player Dom Solanke, no less. It was never going to be easy. 2025 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Miracle of Istanbul; if any club knows how to make a game of football difficult for themselves, it’s Liverpool. The ground turns from jubilant to tense. 

But then.  

Salah passes to Szoboszlai who passes to Diaz who scores. Three short passes and Spurs are carved open and all our wildest dreams have come true. 

But then.  

Flag’s up. Offside. No goal. Doesn’t count. Was it Szoboszlai or Diaz offside? Was it close? Doesn’t matter. The ground turns from jubilant to tense. 

But then.  

VAR – which I’ve always said was really good, actually, I promise – overturns the flag. Goal. Liverpool are level. The ground erupts. But there’s still work to do. While a draw would see Liverpool over the line, there’s a lot of football left to go before the ninety minutes is up  

And so Liverpool press and press and press and press. They hound Spurs, hassle them, harass them. Ryan Gravenberch has the ball on the edge of their box and is almost certainly fouled. The ref – who, to his credit, did his utmost to try and ensure a game of football didn’t break out because we wouldn’t possibly want that – decides otherwise. Nothing to see here. Play on.  

But then. 

Alexis Mac Allister picks up the loose ball, takes a touch, and thumps it – properly wallops it – right into the top corner. Anfield shakes and I’m being hugged by someone from somewhere unseen. Now is the time when it happens, when we win the thing we’ve waited so long to win. Being a football fan doesn’t get better than this. 

But then.  

It does. Liverpool have a corner. The ball comes in, Cody Gakpo collects, wriggles, turns, shoots, scores. No coming back for Spurs now. Bedlam. Pandemonium. Carnage. He runs to the corner nearest us, top off, a message on his vest underneath. Daylight.  

“What does his shirt say?” my wife asks. I strain, trying to see, but I can barely remember my own name at this point so I can hardly be expected to read now, can I? 

But then. 

There he is, just meters from us, walking back with his top still off, the message clear: 

I belong to Jesus 

There are two more goals in the second half and the game finishes 5-1 and Liverpool are champions. But honestly, it was all over bar the singing at half-time. And there was a lot of singing still to do. Each player worthy of their own song, the club’s past eulogised over in verse and chorus. And Liverpool’s past means they are no stranger to success. This league title means they are now indisputably, by any metric going, England’s most successful football club. (Hiya, Sir Alex, if you’re reading this). 

But the Premier League has remained oddly elusive: this is only the second time the club has won the competition since it formed in 1992 (although they had won eighteen top-flight titles prior to this; there was, I’m told, still football before the early 90s). And the last league win came at the start of lockdown.  

What’s the point of winning if I can’t be there to hug you and you and you and you?

Look: I celebrated that Covid League title; of course I did. But it felt odd, and the oddness has only increased as normality has gradually returned to life since the pandemic. My wife has a picture of me opening a bottle of champagne in our otherwise empty living room. The players life the trophy in an otherwise empty stadium. With hindsight, there’s an unavoidably melancholy tinge to the whole thing. You spend your life imagining what it’ll be like to win the Big Shiny Thing and then it happens when it’s illegal to leave your house (or something; lockdown is just a big blur to me at this point). 

But then.  

2025 rolls around and we get to do it again. Together. Even the ones who don’t have tickets are there. Everyone is there. Together. And all the while I can’t stop thinking about Cody Gakpo with his top off. I Belong to Jesus.  

Gakpo’s a weird footballer, truth be told. He’s unbelievably technically gifted, rapid, and yet somehow enormous, too. He’s scored hugely significant goals for Liverpool. And yet, he’s unlikely to be anyone’s favourite player. He lacks the unflappable brilliance of Rolls-Royce Centre Back Virgil Van Dijk, the sheer inevitability and perfection of Mo Salah, or even the outright gets-you-on-your-feet electricity of Luis Diaz. He's unlikely to be named Player of the Year or to have a statue outside Anfield when he retires. But there he is: 60,000 feral scousers wrapped around his finger, the eyes of the footballing world on him. And what’s his message to them? I belong to Jesus

I don’t know much about economics, but I’m told often that things are only worth what people are willing to pay for them. This is certainly true of footballers, anyway: one player might be worth significantly more to one club over another. But, in Christ, His infinitely valuable perfect Son, God declares that you and I are of infinite value. The One who’s judgement is perfect and faultless has decided you are worth the incalculable cost of His perfect and faultless Son. And so you are. It’s just a matter of simple economics.  

I forget this so often, that I am Jesus’ gift to Himself. I find it so hard to imagine myself as a gift. But there I am. I belong to Jesus. I didn’t know what to expect when we turned up to Anfield, but it certainly wasn’t a reminder of the worth Christ has placed on my very existence. But there I am. I belong to Jesus. And so does Cody Gakpo.  

The reason the Covid title feels so melancholy is that we couldn’t celebrate together. What’s the point of winning if I can’t be there to hug you and you and you and you? Liverpool’s League win, the euphoria that came with being able to share that win together with other people, gives us some slight sliver of a glimpse into the value Jesus Himself places in sharing His life with us. I reckon Cody Gakpo knows this, too. Because he knows he belongs to Jesus. He knows that he is the prize Jesus has won for himself. He is Jesus’ Premier League winning win at Anfield. Jesus wants to spend eternity with Cody Gakpo more than 60,000 feral scousers want to win the League. He wants to spend eternity with me and with you and with that person you find deeply annoying.  

It’s really easy for this all to sound saccharine and trite. “Ooh I went to a football match and it was like a big party in heaven, isn’t that nice?” But there is some truth to the glibness here. Football is better together because humans are made for togetherness. And this is seen no clearer than in Jesus’ desire to win togetherness with us, through his faithful and obedient life of sacrifice. 

As Cody Gakpo would say: I belong to Jesus. Or, as the Kop sang on repeat: Liverpool! Hallelujah, Hallelujah! 

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