Simone Biles Proves That Taking A Step Back After Tokyo Allowed Her To Return In Peak Form

At 27 years old, Simone Biles is making her Olympic comeback in Paris as the oldest American woman to make an Olympic gymnastics team since the 1950s. After rocking the house down in Minnesota at the Olympic Trials, she has officially qualified for her third Olympic Games, proving to all the haters that despite her shocking decision to drop out in the middle of the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics, she’s still the undisputed GOAT of women’s gymnastics and one of the greatest athletes of all time.

What Happened in Tokyo

Already dubbed the GOAT of women’s gymnastics for years and at the height of her career, Biles was expected to be a sure thing to nab gold at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics for Team USA, where the U.S. had dominated since 2012. However, during the Women’s Team Qualifications, Biles had some uncharacteristic stumbles. In a social media post, she alluded to the mounting pressures of being an athlete of her status: "I truly do feel like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders at times. I know I brush it off and make it seem like pressure doesn't affect me but damn sometimes it's hard.” This is when it became apparent that her issue wasn’t a physical one, but mental. These issues mounted during the team all-around final, where she bailed mid-skill on her planned Yurchenko Double Pike Vault, failing to complete the full number of rotations and coming to the ground with a shaky close call landing. 

Typically a rock solid athlete who outcompetes her fellow gymnasts by entire points thanks to her exceptional difficulty and precise execution scores, she seemed to have gotten shaken up in the air as she was performing her vault. Immediately after the scary incident, she ran over to her coaches and team doctor, then promptly withdrew from the competition out of the blue. Initially, there was speculation that she was injured, but Biles clarified on social media that she didn’t have a physical injury, instead citing mental health reasons. 

After withdrawing from the Team Final, alternate Jordan Chiles took her place, helping Team USA earn silver – a controversial loss to main gymnastics rival Russia. Despite the withdrawal, Biles continued to quietly work through what was revealed to be a mental block she refers to as “the twisties” behind the scenes, and she ended up returning to the competition to compete in the individual balance beam final, where she took home a bronze medal. 

A firestorm erupted on social media, with armchair commentators accusing Biles of selfishly bailing on her team when they needed her most. As Biles got torn apart on social media, new athletes like Suni Lee, Jordan Chiles, and Jade Carey got their opportunity to shine, but there was still an elephant in the room. What mental health problems was Biles facing, and how could the greatest female gymnast in the world appear to have such a downfall?

Understanding the Twisties

There’s a huge misunderstanding regarding Biles’ mental block at the 2020 Olympics. While countless people who can’t even do a cartwheel were trying to gaslight her into believing that she behaved selfishly, they revealed an ignorance of the mechanics of the sport. In gymnastics, a mental block is not purely mental, but inextricably linked to the physical. The mind-body connection is crucial to perform high risk tumbling passes and skills on vault, beam, and uneven bars. When that connection gets out of whack, something known as a mental block, it is nearly impossible to perform the skill and it is incredibly dangerous to attempt the skill anyway. 

At Biles’ level, this can result in paralysis, if not a fatal injury. Not only was Biles right to drop out of the competition, but it was imperative for her safety, the longevity of her career, and for the sake of Team USA’s chances of remaining competitive. As Biles explained to Alex Cooper on the Call Her Daddy podcast, if Biles had competed a second vault and gotten injured, an alternate gymnast would not be able to replace her. Because she dropped out for mental reasons, Chiles was able to step in, giving her the opportunity to compete in her first Olympics and help Team USA earn a medal. Let’s also not forget that Biles helped them qualify for that Team Final in the first place. 

What Biles experienced was not just a mental block but a mental block that arose from experiencing aerial disorientation, or “the twisties” – a dangerous loss of spatial awareness while a gymnast is performing an aerial skill that involves twisting. As an (amateur) recreational gymnast, I cannot stress enough how scary, dangerous, and debilitating this is. Imagine you’re driving a car and lose your ability to control the car. This is what happened to Biles as she was performing the most difficult, high risk vault in women’s gymnastics. She got lost in the air, losing her sense of spatial awareness. In other words, she didn’t know where she was relative to the ground and lost control of the skill as a result, which, thank God, did not end in her landing on her head. When you’re flipping and twisting in the air, losing your sense of up and down is not something you can just “push through” any more than a blind person can just will themselves into seeing. 

As someone who has experienced this first hand, I can tell you that mental blocks can strike at any moment and without warning. Having a close call with a dangerous maneuver that could have resulted in a career-ending or life-threatening injury can make it virtually impossible to even muster up the courage to attempt the skill again, at least for a while. Sometimes your body just disagrees with your mind, unexpectedly failing to put your arms down or complete a certain number of twists, or bailing in the middle of a back flip. 

Even at the top of the gymnastics game, Biles is no stranger to mental blocks and has dealt with them on and off throughout her career. What was unusual, however, is that they usually “never transferred to beam & bar,” but at the Olympics, it was happening on every single event. Mental blocks have afflicted most gymnasts at some point in their careers. Biles knew all too well that this is something that takes weeks to go away, not a few days. At the Olympics, you only have a few days of competition. What the public was expecting her to perform was an unreasonable miracle. Explaining to her followers what the twisties feels like on her Instagram story, Biles said she "literally can not tell up from down. It's the craziest feeling ever not having an inch of control over your body" and "what's even scarier is since I have no idea where I am in the air I also have NO idea how I'm going to land or what I'm going to land on. head/hands/feet/back..."

Stop Rolling Your Eyes at Biles’ Mental Health

The most frustrating part for me to witness through this situation was just how bold and loud the most ignorant layman viewers were on social media. People were quick to condemn a gymnast for folding under a series of mounting pressures, all converging into one inescapable weight, which they thought was just her throwing in the towel and refusing to try anymore. Biles went on a bit of a press tour about the importance of athletes’ mental health. This, I believe, is what poisoned the well. People are so burnt out from mental health awareness discourse that the second they heard “mental health,” they checked out, especially the more conservative “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” types. You could feel the unanimous eye-rolling, but there was nothing trivial about Biles’ mental struggles.

Biles’ hype may have felt like a burden she couldn’t live up to. For years, she had been competing against herself, and the constant talk about how she’s unbeatable, a sure-thing for gold, and the gold ticket for Team USA’s third consecutive Team Gold at the Olympics was a lot for her to carry on her own, especially when she was being unfairly penalized for being too far ahead of her competitors. It’s like the public took for granted how much work, composure, and skill goes into reaching such feats; they just became an expectation. 

In the background of these pressures, Biles had suffered from sexual abuse at the hands of the Team USA gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar for years, who she was brave enough to testify against in a Senate Judiciary Committee. In her testimony, Biles said through tears, "I blame Larry Nassar, and I also blame an entire system that enabled and perpetrated his abuse." 

She continued, “USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee knew that I was abused by their official team doctor long before I was ever made aware of their knowledge." 

Biles explained that part of the reason she continued to compete on Team USA was to make sure that her presence was a reminder that these failures needed to be addressed. As the last remaining gymnast on Team USA who was actively sexually abused by Nassar, this proved to be a heavy burden to carry into Tokyo, especially after the Olympic Games had been delayed by a year because of Covid and she was not permitted to travel to Tokyo with her family. All of this percolating in the back of her mind could have contributed to her mental block, as they can be brought on by stress. The point is, it doesn’t matter what caused it, because it was out of her control. She couldn’t have competed if she wanted to, because her mind and body were out of sync. She didn’t merely “give up,” her body went into fight or flight mode because it believed it was in mortal danger. 

Why Simone Biles Is Regarded As the GOAT

Biles’ accolades in women’s gymnastics defies explanation. Her tumbling skills are so difficult, some joke that she defies physics. With 37 combined Olympic and World Championship medals, seven of which are Olympic medals, she is the most decorated gymnast of all time. She won four gold medals at her very first Olympic Games in Rio. She is the first female gymnast in history to do so. Despite dropping out of the Tokyo Olympics, she still earned a silver in the team all-around and a bronze on balance beam. She’s a six time World Champion and won the 2024 Core Hydration Classics by almost 2 points in a sport where winners are often determined by tenths of a point. Part of Biles’ dominance in the sport has to do with her untouchable difficulty scores which are essentially breaking the code of points, combined with her flawless execution, which is why her high scores in the all-around are practically untouchable. 

She has five gymnastics skills named after her in the Women’s Artistic Gymnastics Code of Points for being the first gymnast to successfully complete them in competition. These are The Biles on Floor, The Biles II on Floor, The Biles on Vault, The Biles II on Vault, and The Biles on Balance Beam. For three of these skills, she is the only female gymnast to have successfully performed them in competition, and one of which (The Biles on Vault), she is the only gymnast in the world, male or female, to successfully land in competition. The Biles II on Floor, a tumbling pass consisting of a double backflip with three twists, is the most difficult tumbling pass ever competed on floor, earning an incredibly rare J difficulty score, the highest possible difficulty in gymnastics. It marked the first time a female gymnast was ever awarded a J rating, prompting the International Gymnastics Federation to update its Code of Points. Uplifter speculates, “It wouldn’t be surprising to see this skill stand as the hardest gymnastics skill in women’s gymnastics floor routines for the next 25 years.”

The Biles II on Floor was recognized for its exceptional difficulty because of the incredible amount of power that needs to be generated for the necessary air time required to complete the number of flips and rotations, as well as the complexity and precision needed to execute the number of flips and rotations without getting seriously injured. This is no problem for 4’11” Biles, however, who may be small but packs a punch, gaining so much momentum that she flies through the air with ease. She manages to give the illusion that a skill so difficult not even male gymnasts can attempt it, is easy. Biles has pushed the boundaries of what was previously thought possible in this sport, for better or worse. Despite Biles’ undeniable dominance of the sport and her recognition as one of the greatest athletes of all time, controversy surrounding her artificially lowered scores precipitated before she even performed in Tokyo. 

Yes, even for all her contributions to the sport, the accolades, the record breaking skills which have rewritten the Code of Points, she is still not being rewarded to the full extent of her talent. Some of her scores for her most difficult maneuvers have been underrated, such as the Yurchenko Double Pike Vault (The Biles on Vault), which has earned a difficulty rating of 6.6, far lower than was anticipated for its exceptional difficulty. The second underrated skill is her double twisting double back dismount on beam (The Biles on Beam), which was expected to earn a J, but was relegated to H. Not only were these scores lower than anticipated, but they also didn’t even make sense based on set precedents for scoring principles. Biles spoke out against what she saw as unfair targeting of her innovation as a way to close the gap between her and her competitors. 

In response, the International Gymnastics Federation explained their reasoning for assigning a lower value for one of Biles’ beam dismounts, citing safety concerns in a statement that read: "There is added risk in landing of double saltos for Beam dismounts (with/without twists), including a potential landing on the neck.” Gymnastics experts aren’t buying the safety card, especially in a sport based on inherent risk. It’s like, as Vox writer Alex Abad-Santos put it, “penalizing figure skaters for landing quads.” The real reason they’ve undervalued Biles’ original elements is because the gymnastics world was starting to feel like she was unbeatable, and she was. But that’s on the other gymnasts to step up, not for Biles to worry about. This is a competition, after all, not a charity. This is what makes some of the criticism of Biles feel so tone deaf. She has dealt with so much suffering and unfairness, yet has always persevered, but it’s never good enough for people.

Road to Redemption

Despite all the speculation post-Tokyo that Biles would retire, she’s come back better than ever. Before figuring out if she was done with gymnastics, she took a two-year break from the sport. For all the backlash surrounding her prioritizing her mental health, they’re really eating their words now, because this mental health break proved to be invaluable. She has credited going to therapy for two hours a week for being able to return to the sport. She said it’s helped her heal and work through trauma. Her much-anticipated return to competition after her lengthy hiatus was at the 2023 US Classic, where she won by a whopping 5 points. Following the classics, she set a new record by winning her eighth national all-around title in the U.S. National Championships. She won the all-around title at the 2023 World Championships, making it her 20th World Championship gold medal. During that competition, she became the first woman to land the Yurchenko Double Pike Vault (the one she didn’t get to compete at the Olympics). In 2024, she won the Core Hydration Classic, which made her the first gymnast to win all nine all-around titles at the competition, and she won her ninth national title at the U.S. National Championships.

The dominance didn’t stop there. After qualifying for the Olympic Trials, Biles led the all-around competition for both nights. After winning the all-around, she earned the one guaranteed spot on the Olympic team, as the rest of the spots are determined by a selection committee. After qualifying for her third Olympics, this makes her the fourth American female artistic gymnast to compete at three Olympic Games, and at 27 years old, she’s officially the oldest American woman to compete on the U.S. Olympic team in 72 years. Biles says being in a good mental spot is what led her back to her Olympic journey, explaining that “gymnastics is not [her] whole life, just part of it.” She got married in 2023 to American football player Jonathan Owens and can now confidently say she’s doing gymnastics for no one but herself. 

In the olden days of gymnastics, it was considered an act of heroism to sacrifice your mind and body in pursuit of gold. Thank God those days are over. Simone Biles’ withdrawal from the Tokyo Olympics was an important step to prevent the sport from having any more Kerri Strugs. For all the backlash Biles has received for prioritizing her mental health, she’s certainly having the last laugh by proving that taking a step back can enable you to come back stronger than ever. It’s perfectly reasonable to need a break after revolutionizing the sport and dominating for so many years that you lose your spark for what you once loved. Biles has overcome more in her 27 years than most people will in a lifetime. She’s not only the GOAT of gymnastics, but a survivor of sexual abuse, an advocate, and a mentor. There’s no telling just what she could do in the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympic Games, but it will certainly be on Biles’ terms.

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