“It’s the craziest feeling ever, not having an inch of control over your body,” Biles went on. Other gymnasts have said that the twisties can be exacerbated by stress or difficulties out of the gym but that they can also strike for seemingly no reason at all. “Could be triggered by stress I hear but I’m also not sure how true that is,” she added. “My mind & body are simply not in sync.” The twisties had struck her before, she explained, though this was the first time she had lost her ability to twist on every apparatus. “I didn’t quit,” Biles wrote, on Instagram, as she documented her difficulties performing skills that had been, to her, second nature. People can do a lot of things if they think they don’t have a choice. In fact, we now know that some of those who were most often called fearless-young female gymnasts, flying and tumbling in astonishing ways under extreme pressure-were trapped in a system that cultivated fear. “Fearlessness” doesn’t necessarily mean a free mind. “Perseverance” without considering the conditions that one is enduring can be arrogance, or recklessness. But the climate has been shifting, and the connotations of terms that we associate with great athletes have been changing. They have not always had the support, publicly or privately, to address these problems. Athletes have always been prone to alcoholism, anorexia, and other manifestations of mental illness. She has, as the sportswriting cliché has it, overcome every kind of adversity: the long odds of a difficult childhood overt racism from envious competitors and their coaches and, horrifically, sexual abuse at the hands of Larry Nassar, a team doctor whose predatory behavior was enabled by the very organizations that she continued, painfully, to represent-in part, she said, to hold it to account.Īthletes have always had bouts of the yips. Biles has won national and world championships with kidney stones and broken toes. The connection between the body and mind can be mysterious. Read The New Yorker’s coverage of the Games in Tokyo. I feel like I’m also not having as much fun, and I know that.” And I don’t know if it’s age-I’m a little bit more nervous when I do gymnastics. ![]() “I just don’t trust myself as much as I used to. “At the end of the day, it’s, like, we want to walk out of here, not be dragged out here on a stretcher,” she told reporters. Given her loss of air sense-her case of the “twisties,” as gymnasts evocatively call it-she knew that continuing in the competition could be dangerous. Initially, she said later, she was worried about her body as much as her mind. A woman whose name has become synonymous with pushing the limits of the body and mind had hit hers, and she had the strength to say so. It also seems fitting that the second defining moment of the Games came when Biles recovered in an unexpected way, moments later, by telling her coaches and teammates that she was pulling out of the team competition. ![]() It would have felt strange to watch any gymnast vault so awkwardly, but it was especially shocking to see it from Biles, who, normally, has unparalleled body control, and an unerring sense of herself in the air. ![]() ![]() Her body torqued, her head going one way while her legs went another, and then pitched forward, stumbling and lunging into a landing. Having performed one and a half of the planned two and a half twists of her vault, she suddenly flung her arms open to stop her spinning. It seems fitting that the first defining moment of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics-held not in 2020 but in 2021, in a bubble meant to separate it from Tokyo-was also its most disconcerting: Simone Biles, high in the air, looking lost.
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