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 will require checking all 664 winners of this award and going by way of their delivery years separately. I did precisely that and the reply is:
It’s difficult.
As a lot as I might love for this to have been a “sure or no” query. It is determined by the way you outline it.
Simone Biles is the youngest dwelling recipient of this award.
To make clear so there is no such thing as a confusion, she is the youngest winner who didn’t earn this award posthumously. She can be the youngest to win this award when measuring from the 12 months of her delivery to the 12 months she gained the award.
Moreover, Simone can be the youngest to win the Presidential Medal of Freedom as a person, this consists of each dwelling recipients and posthumous recipients.
At 25 years previous, 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 previous, thereby giving Simone an 11 12 months benefit over these age information. Moreover, to make clear simply how excessive of an outlier these instances are, whereas learning this query I decided that roughly 94% of award recipients have been of their mid-60s or older. The overwhelming majority of recipients have 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 time murders, Andrew Goodman (age 20), James Chaney (age 21), and Michael Schwerner (age 24). The trio of Civil Rights Employees have been murdered in Mississippi in the course of the Summer time 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 previous had they nonetheless been alive. Proper according to the standard age of a recipient for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
What makes this case complicated 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 dwell, was a decade the place their martyrdom continued to be an vital second taught in faculties, made into Hollywood movies, and was finally accepted as one of many defining moments of the American Civil Rights Motion.
Once I began this undertaking, I hoped it will be one thing harmless and enjoyable attempting 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 became as an alternative was a trio of courageous younger males “successful” this distinction in a approach nobody desires to win.
