Simone Biles twisted out of the last Olympics. Could it happen again?
The superstar gymnast withdrew from the team final in Tokyo experiencing a phenomenon called the twisties — and here’s the science on why it could resurface
As Simone Biles hobbled through qualification on her return to the Olympic stage on Sunday, it raised doubts about her ability to return to the top step of the podium. But ahead of Tuesday night’s team final, there’s another, more pressing question hanging over the superstar gymnast’s gold-medal prospects than whether she can power through a lower leg injury.
Could Biles again be struck by the mysterious phenomenon that torpedoed her last Olympics?
In 2021, global audiences were stunned to see Biles withdraw from the team competition without an obvious injury — and even more confused by the subsequent explanation. It would later emerge that Biles was suffering from something called the twisties, a phenomenon that gymnasts describe as an inability to understand where their body is in the air as they rotate.
It was baffling to almost everyone — and generated questions that haven’t been properly answered all the way through Biles’s comeback: What triggers it? Will it happen again? How is it fixed? Can it be fixed?
The good news is the twisties can be overcome. The bad: once it’s etched on the brain, there’s always a possibility that it could resurface — at any time.
Nobody in the world has more expertise on the subject than Annamari Maaranen, a gymnast-turned-clinical psychologist working for the U.S. Army. She immediately identified what Biles was experiencing as being akin to something she has spent years researching, except she doesn’t call it the twisties. Instead, she has a different word for it.
Flikikammo.
Maaranen has spent her life becoming the foremost expert on this incredibly obscure, little-discussed subject that suddenly had a singular case study playing out on global television.
She’s a retired elite gymnast who competed on the world stage. She had a parallel version of the twisties herself, a sudden-onset inability to flip backward that is known as “flikikammo” in her native Finnish. And since retiring, she has authored two papers and a book chapter on it.
So as everyone else struggled to process how an athlete could rapidly lose the ability to do something they had done thousands of times before, it took one look at Biles for Maaranen to understand what was unfolding.
“You can see it in the moment,” Maaranen says. “You can almost feel it.” Maaranen’s research found that flikikammo is a mental block affecting highly automatized movement patterns. In plain English, that means it affects athletes who perform the same exact skill over and over. Gymnasts and divers, for instance, practice certain movements so many times that by the time they’re doing it in competition it’s essentially automated — until suddenly it isn’t.
“There’s no choice made and there’s no explanation,” Maaranen says. “It came out of the blue, like somebody else took over your body and your brain, and you did not have any control over what happened.” The twisties, she says, are “absolutely the same phenomenon” as flikikammo, in just a slightly different form. In Biles’s case, as millions of people saw, she was meant to twist 2 1/2 times on a vault but lost track and only ended up doing 1 1/2.
When that happens, the first time a gymnast misses a twist, or baulks at a back handspring, it establishes an abnormal movement pattern that their brain starts to follow, beyond their control. The brain learns those negative connections fastest, she says.
And unlike a golfer suffering the yips, where the downside is slicing a ball into the woods, someone vaulting high into the air risks breaking their neck.
The more a gymnast thinks about it, the harder it becomes to access the old movement pattern again. That’s why Maaranen knew Biles couldn’t have just pushed through in Tokyo. The mental block meant it physically wasn’t an option — even to visualise.
Maaranen first experienced flikikammo when she was 11 years old — and she had it for her entire career. She regained the ability to tumble backward, and then lost it again. In the end, she all but stopped backward tumbling, using very basic backward moves to fulfil competition requirements — and in one case, inventing a new move that now bears her name. Innovating through the problem was successful enough for her to qualify for the 2008 Olympics.
In Tokyo, Biles followed a similar blueprint of working around the twisties. When she was cleared to return to compete in the individual balance beam final, she deployed a pared-down routine that eliminated twisting moves, subbing in a dismount that Biles said she probably hadn’t done since she was 12 years old. Her difficulty score took a hit, but she still managed to emerge with a bronze medal.
“I don’t think there could have been a better solution,” Maaranen says. But Simone Biles isn’t Simone Biles because she can somehow medal without twisting. It’s because she can twist better than anyone in the sport. And now she’s back to doing it again.
Which means that the question of what triggers the twisties is relevant all over again. And so is the question of how to mitigate it.
It’s not entirely clear to Maaranen what causes that first baulk or missed twist. Biles herself has said she’s heard that there’s a stress connection, and other researchers agree. It’s surely no accident, they reason, that the twisties happened for her at the Covid-disrupted Tokyo Games, which was the most stressful meet of her life.
What’s clearer is that having experienced the twisties can itself become an incredible source of stress, and that thinking about them and trying harder to perform the skills only makes the problem worse.
Maaranen says that some gymnasts develop coping techniques: pinching themselves, hitting themselves, spinning in circles or listening to really loud music, because “when you’re distracted and not focusing on what you’re doing, you’re able to access that movement pattern.” In the same way, a coach screaming or pleading for a gymnast to back tumble or twist is never going to make it happen.
Now, the leg injury introduces a whole new factor to the equation. It might make for an additional distraction that helps Biles stave off the twisties. At the same time, if the injury adds additional stress, then that could also potentially worsen the situation.
It would be entirely reasonable for anyone who has watched Biles since her comeback to think she’s completely past the issue. And she very well might be. After all, she was the highest-scoring gymnast in Sunday’s qualifying — and that was with a bum calf, one that’s apparently healthy enough for the team on Monday to list her in the line-up for every event.
Still, Maaranen says that nobody can guarantee there won’t be a recurrence of flikikammo or the twisties.
“When something is learned you can’t unlearn it,” she says. “Sometimes they flare up for no reason.”
The Wall Street Journal
