An Olympian Like the Rest of Us
Simona Stallone’s Out-of-Shape Olympics series gives an idea of how the average person compares to elite athletes.
If you’ve ever wondered how a normal, average Jane would measure up to Olympic athletes on the competition field, Simona Stallone is here to help. This summer, the 27-year-old from Toronto, Canada, set out to attempt as many Olympic-inspired feats as possible, despite the fact that she has no athletic background. Over a few months, she and her boyfriend Yandoy Nunez researched Olympic sports, scouted out athletic facilities, hired the occasional coach, and spent hours filming Stallone’s humble efforts at individual events like the triple jump, archery, and gymnastics vault. The resulting videos — each of which end with an onion-ring-adorned scoreboard comparing her achievements to those of the first- (and sometimes last-) place Olympians — have gone viral and won her a following on Instagram, an outcome Stallone did not expect.
The project was the latest in Stallone’s forays into content creation, a hobby she picked up after starting to use TikTok for her real estate business last fall. Stallone’s initial goal was to make the Out-of-Shape Olympics series fun and relatable. It would be easy for the videos to just “be an embarrassing person, me, trying to attempt these things, and nobody’s going to laugh, nobody’s going to get it,” she says, but she and Nunez worked hard to make sure that wasn’t the case.
The videos aren’t just performance art. Stallone really swam full lengths of an Olympic-sized pool and ran the full distance of Olympic track events. She paid for time with a gymnastics coach and took a riding lesson at an equestrian barn. If there’s a video, she gave the sport its dues. Each 60-second Reel is cut down from 20 to 40 minutes of footage, but the filming only started after Stallone spent time warming up, learning, and practicing.
She started with what she knew she could physically do: swim and run.
“We wanted to do everything, but we knew there was a hard limit to what was [possible],” Stallone says. “There’s zero percent chance I’m going to be able to do a pole vault, even if I could find a place to pole vault.”
Early on, Nunez told her she ought to do something really obscure or specific, like fencing or equestrian, to show people that she was trying everything. “But in what world do I have access to go fencing or borrow a horse?” Stallone says. They quickly agreed that those sports probably wouldn’t happen.
Before the Olympics started on July 26, they filmed about 10 videos. Once specific competitions happened, Nunez would add the scoreboards to the video and they’d publish the post. The series quickly garnered attention, especially on Instagram, and viewers started making requests for specific sports, including equestrian.
“I remember commenting back to one of these, saying, ‘If somebody wants to help me find a horse, I’ll get on it,’” Stallone says. “Twenty minutes later, I get a [direct message], and the person says, ‘I can help you find a horse.’ Thirty minutes later, we had a horse, we had a date arranged, and I was going to ride.”
The same thing happened with fencing: A coach from the Toronto Fencing Club commented and offered Stallone a free fencing session. She accepted. What started as an experiment on social media turned into a collaborative project with her followers.
While the hardest videos to film were the swimming videos, complete with underwater shots and a variety of other angles, one of the most difficult feats Stallone tried was the triple jump, a track event where the athlete runs up, hops on one foot, steps with the opposite foot, and leaps into the landing zone.
“If you want to humble yourself, get outside and try and do a triple jump. It is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my entire life,” Stallone says. “The way they swing their leg forward … it’s wild. Just the form of that — absolutely impossible.”
She filmed her effort toward the end of a long day at the track, after trying the long jump, javelin throwing, and running. She was already tired and the triple jump ended up being too much to master in one afternoon (go figure). The video compiled her attempts and joined others — including her tries at the uneven bars and horseback riding — in highlighting how the technical mastery of a sport is as impressive as the strength, speed, or endurance of Olympians.
Stallone says she has the “how-hard-can-it-be gene,” where she sees something she wants to do and assumes she’ll be able to learn it. Making these videos has only encouraged this facet of her personality. She’s dabbled in sports she never considered before and one, gymnastics, that she always wanted to try and now thinks she’ll pick up as a hobby. She’s been a newbie over and over again and failed publicly — not just before her online audience, but before her boyfriend, the coaches she’s worked with, and random people at the places she’s filmed.
“Trying these new things, I look really confident doing it, but that’s because I’m a theater kid and I’m putting on a face,” she says. “Every time I go to do something, I’m scared to look stupid, I’m scared to be doing it incorrectly. But I think getting over that fear is just what you need. … Doing the series and putting myself out there and putting it all on the internet has very much opened myself up to being okay with trying even more new things.”
From the looks of her comment sections, she’s helping others do the same. “So many people have been commenting that what I’m doing is making them want to go try new things,” she says. “I guess people are seeing a regular person trying new things and [realizing] it’s okay to fail, and sometimes you’ll be better at things than you thought you would be.”
What started as a way of gawking at how good Olympians are compared to the rest of us has shifted into a recognition that what Olympians do, we can do too — even if our accomplishments are not at all impressive. The final scoreboard doesn’t matter as much as the attempt itself.
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