The greatest gymnast in history, Simone Biles is back for the Paris Olympics
Simone Biles was unstoppable. Until she was stopped cold at the Tokyo Olympics by a myriad of complex psychological issues. After two years away, Paris beckons.
Simone Biles seemed too young, successful and resilient to be singing the blues. But there she was at the Tokyo Olympics, the spookiest and most confronting Games of all, without spectators or atmosphere, with everyone eerily hiding behind their masks, hiding their frustrations and disguising their feelings, all a bit isolating and confronting, really, where nobody was more out of whack than the greatest athlete in town. Suffering the deepest of blues.
I first saw Biles compete at the Rio Games. What a festival of life, colour and revelry. I nearly dropped my caipirinha into my laptop when Biles went airborne and seemed to hang up there for a few extra seconds than anyone else. Like an astronaut floating through space. Like not everything that went up had to come down. She could leap in a floor routine and then bounce, rubberball-like, about two metres higher than a human should. Her individual floor routine was performed to Latin music, and the stadium was rocking and rolling, and it was good to be alive, and she was breathtaking and awe-inspiring while collecting four gold medals. She spoke with passion, enthusiasm and joy and I couldn’t imagine an athlete more glowingly comfortable in her own skin.
Real talk? If this 142cm, 47kg ball of womanly muscle wasn’t born to be a gymnast, who was? There’s megastars in world sport, and then there’s the supermassive megastars, and she was supermassive. Seemingly unstoppable. She’d been sexually assaulted by the US gymnastics team doctor, Larry Nassar, and what could possibly be more harrowing and nightmarish, but she seemed to have overcome even that.
And so I went to the Tokyo Games expecting a repeat of Rio. The unwavering and unspeakable razzle dazzle. And yet troubles were being masked. Crowds were zero and she Biles had no foot-stomping, high-decibel atmosphere to feed off. The Olympic buzz was non-existent in the stands and so as an athlete, you had to search your own soul for motivation. Introspection is a risk. You never know what you might find in there.
Biles made uncharacteristic mistakes in her qualifying routines, lunging clumsily upon landings, stepping one foot off the mat after a vault, making a hash of a balance-beam dismount. Still she qualified for the vault, floor, balance beam, uneven bars, all-round individual and team finals, and you just reckoned she’d come good when the medals were at stake.
Minutes later, in the Olympic bombshell to top all Olympic bombshells, it was announced Simone Biles, the Simone Biles, that Simone Biles, the supposedly indomitable Simone Biles, was withdrawing midway through the team final. Must be injured, we thought. Nothing else could possibly explain it. Why else would you forfeit a guaranteed Olympic medal? Aren’t those things more valuable than life itself?
She pulled up a pew, rather bravely, I thought, and talked us through it. “The mental’s not there,” she said. “I was trying a two-and-a-half and ended up doing a one-and-a-half. Just got a little bit lost in the air, which is really unfortunate. Definitely not my best work. I was like, ‘I think the girls need to do the rest of the competition without me. They were like, ‘I promise you, you’re fine! We watched you warm up.’ And I said, ‘No. I know I’m going to be fine, but I need to call it.’ You usually don’t hear me say things like that because I’ll usually persevere and push through things. I had the correct people around me to do it. They were like, ‘Okay, well, if Simone says this, then we need to take it pretty seriously.”
In a separate interview on American TV, she dived deeper: “I have good senses. And I knew something was going to go wrong. I couldn’t pinpoint what it was, or when it was going to happen, but I just had this feeling deep down of, ‘This is not going to go well.’ My teammates were like, ‘Are you okay? Are you okay? I was trying to convince myself I was okay. But I was thinking, ‘Everything is not okay.’ As soon as I landed I thought, ‘America hates me. The world is going to hate me. And I can already see what they’re going to write on Twitter.”
The real cause? The psychological trauma of the sexual assault. Trying to carry on as per normal. At Nasser’s trial in 2018, Biles had told the US Senate Judiciary Committee: “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”
“It is the power of that statement that compels and empowers me to be in front of you here today. I don’t want another young gymnast, Olympic athlete or any individual to experience the horror that I and hundreds of others have endured before, during and continuing to this day in the wake of the Larry Nasser abuse. I blame Larry Nassar and I also blame an entire system that enabled and perpetrated his abuse.”
In an interview on American TV about the Tokyo Olympics, she said, “Compressing all of this s … t for so many years – you can’t compress trauma. I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. I felt like I held a lot of guilt when it wasn’t mine to hold.”
Nobody understood
It’s one thing to understand your mental’s not there during an Olympic final. It’s another thing to be bold and wise enough to walk away. We promise you, you’re fine! Nobody properly understood except the only person that mattered. Biles.
A replacement was whisked in for the remainder of the team final. The US finished second to Russia. The next day, Biles withdrew from the all-round individual final. And then she was out of the vault final. And the uneven bars. And you suspected she might never compete again. We all blamed the twisties. Now I’d blame Nasser.
Biles said of the day she walked away in Tokyo: “Really stressful. We had a workout in the morning. It went okay. And then just that five-and-a-half hour wait or something, I was just, like, shaking. Could barely nap. I’ve just never felt like this going into a competition before. I tried to go out here and have fun. Warm-up in the back went a little bit better. But then once I came out here, I was like, ‘No. Mental’s not there’, I didn’t do my job. I just needed to let the girls do it and focus on myself.
“It’s okay sometimes to sit out big competitions. It shows how strong a person you really are rather than just battling through it. Get some fresh air and hopefully I’ll get back out there and compete. We’ll see.”
‘Quitter’
An aunt of Biles’ had died while all this was going on. Biles received racist and sexist hate messages. Was called a quitter. She did get back out there and compete for her last final, the beam, an apparatuses four inches wide (10cm) that you land on after three-metre leaps. A place to find your feet. Biles did a scaled-down routine to finish third behind China’s Guan Chenchen and Tang Xijing. Instead of her usual double-twisting, double back dismount, she snuck through a quick double pike.
A favourite for five Olympics golds was leaving Tokyo with a solitary bronze. She smiled, patted her heart and said it was the most meaningful medal of her life. She was fine! Sort of.
“I did it for me,” she said before referencing Nassar. He was found guilty of sexually assaulting at least 265 young women and girls under the guise of medical treatment. He pleaded guilty to a separate charge of possession of child pornography and was sentenced to 360 years in federal prison. “The bronze means more than all the golds because I’ve been through so much the last five years, and the last week while I’ve been here,” Biles said in Tokyo. “I didn’t really care about the outcome. It was just – it was just very emotional. We’re not just entertainment. We’re humans, too.”
Returned from clouds
All well and good. Probably her swan song. Then after a two-year absence, she returned from the clouds at last year’s world championships at Antwerp. She won the balance beam, floor, all-round individual and team gold medals. Came second in the vault. The bloody mind-twistie-ing vault. It made her the most decorated gymnast in history. Thirty-seven Olympic and world medals. Twenty-seven gold. A fan posted on social media that she thought Biles would never make it back. Biles replied, “Real talk? I didn’t think so, either.”
She said in Antwerp: “I wasn’t too worried about medal counts or medal colours. As long as I get out there and did those routines again – that’s a win in my book. I had to prove to myself that I could still get out here, twist, I could prove all the haters wrong, that I’m not a quitter. This, that, the other. As long as I’m out there twisting again, having and finding the joy for gymnastics again, who cares?”
She added: “I really didn’t know if I was ever going to be able to compete again. There were multiple times this year where I was in the gym and I was like, ‘I’m actually terrified of this. Full-on. Like, I’m not doing it again. Never going to do it. And then I was like, ‘You know what? I’m just going to come back another day, another day.’”
Courage award
Biles is a three-time winner of the athlete’s Oscar, the Laureus World Sports Award for Sportswoman of the Year. She’s received ESPN’s coveted Arthur Ashe Courage Award. She’s roundly recognised as the GOAT of gymnastics. She was TIME Magazine’s athlete of the year in 2021. For withdrawing at Tokyo and “starting a global conversation about mental health”.
She’s been given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honour an American civilian can receive, and at this week’s World Sports Awards, she was on the podium again – for Comeback of the Year. She’s full steam ahead for the Paris Games. There’s no athlete I’m more eager to see.
Here’s to real talk. Here’s to another day, another day. Here’s to admitting to achingly vulnerabilities. Here’s to cherishing an Olympic bronze above all others. Here’s to being self-aware and tough enough to understand you don‘t always have to tough it out. Biles has been abused, mocked, written off, but she’s flying again. When the US Olympic team chooses its flag-bearer for the opening ceremony in Paris, I hope it’s Biles who parades the Star Spangled Banner’s reds, whites and primarily the blues. She’s sung them beautifully. What an extraordinary athlete. Even better, what a human.
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