In my fast response to Simone Biles being honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, I challenged myself to find out if Simone was the youngest individual to ever win this award. That might require checking all 664 winners of this award and going by their beginning years one after the other. I did precisely that and the reply is:
It’s difficult.
As a lot as I’d love for this to have been a “sure or no” query. It depends upon the way you outline it.
Simone Biles is the youngest dwelling recipient of this award.
To make clear so there isn’t any confusion, she is the youngest winner who didn’t earn this award posthumously. She can also be the youngest to win this award when measuring from the yr of her beginning to the yr she gained the award.
Moreover, Simone can also be the youngest to win the Presidential Medal of Freedom as a person, this contains each dwelling recipients and posthumous recipients.
At 25 years outdated, Simone doesn’t narrowly maintain these age information, she completely shatters them. The subsequent youngest was Megan Rapinoe who gained this award at the very same time as Biles did. Rapinoe is 36 years outdated, thereby giving Simone an 11 yr benefit over these age information. Moreover, to make clear simply how excessive of an outlier these circumstances are, whereas finding out this query I decided that roughly 94% of award recipients had been of their mid-60s or older. The overwhelming majority of recipients had been no less than 70 years in age. Solely about two dozen examples went to these of their early 50s or youthful.
As for who was youthful than Simone Biles after they gained the award? It was the victims of the Freedom Summer season murders, Andrew Goodman (age 20), James Chaney (age 21), and Michael Schwerner (age 24). The trio of Civil Rights Employees had been murdered in Mississippi through the Summer season of 1964. It wasn’t till 2014 that their legacy was honored within the type of a Presidential Medal of Freedom. They’d have been 70, 71, and 74 years outdated had they nonetheless been alive. Proper according to the standard age of a recipient for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
What makes this case advanced is how one needs to interpret why they got the award. Do you deal with them as martyrs and emphasize their younger ages? Or do you deal with this recognition as a lifetime achievement award? Recognizing that every decade they didn’t reside, was a decade the place their martyrdom continued to be an necessary second taught in colleges, made into Hollywood movies, and was in the end accepted as one of many defining moments of the American Civil Rights Motion.
Once I began this challenge, I hoped it will be one thing harmless and enjoyable making an attempt to determine if Simone Biles was the quickest individual to win the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Jokingly highlighting how a gymnast ended up being the one to beat out quite a few Presidents, Senators, Nobel Prize winners, NFL Gamers, Hollywood celebrities and such. What it changed into as a substitute was a trio of courageous younger males “profitable” this distinction in a manner nobody needs to win.
