Biles’ withdrawal an act of preservation
TOKYO — There’s no net. No spotter. No harness on the Olympic stage. Just an athlete and their own psyche.
And the mental pressure is intense. So intense it is dangerous.
Simone Biles, the face of the Tokyo Olympics, withdrew from team competition on Tuesday because she wasn’t right. Turns out she’s not a windup doll that can automatically flip high in the air and land on her feet on demand.
“It just sucks when you’re fighting with your own head,” she said after her team finished with the silver medal without her. “I was fighting demons.”
The shocking move overshadowed pretty much everything else that is happening in these Games, an Olympics that feels increasingly cursed.
Biles is the star, the one that NBC has been pushing for five years. The personification of the multibilliondollar investment in these Games and one of the primary reasons that there was no way in hell the network was going to allow the COVID Olympics to be canceled.
Think that’s some pressure? Damn right it is. “I just don’t trust myself as much as I used
to,” said Biles, 24. “I don’t know if it’s age. I’m a little bit more nervous when I do gymnastics. I feel like I’m not having as much fun. This Olympic Games I wanted it to be for myself ... I
was doing it for other people.”
Biles said she knew her head wasn’t right at the beginning of Tuesday’s competition, and that she was afraid she might injure herself. She was afraid she would hurt the team by competing. She said she is taking the rest of the Olympic competition day by day. Individual events begin Thursday with the allaround: Biles has won every allaround world championship since 2013, including the Rio Olympics.
There have been clues that the pressure was beginning to get to the normally ebullient Biles. She looked slightly vulnerable, a bit frustrated in qualifications on Sunday.
In an Instagram post following that event, she wrote “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 hahahaz”
In the first rotation on Tuesday, Biles left the floor, reportedly in tears, after first reducing the difficulty in her initial vault and then struggling to land a vault that is routine for her.
Without Biles, the Americans faltered. The Russian Olympic Committee team won gold, ending the U.S. team’s streak of two consecutive golds in London and Rio.
The last thing that any athlete doing incredibly difficult, risky and dangerous feats can have is selfdoubt or hesitation. One splitsecond pause can mean a serious injury. A broken neck. No one knows that better than the world’s most talented gymnast, one of the greatest athletes on earth.
So Biles’ decision to withdraw was a move of selfpreservation. And also, an indication of just how much mental pressure the fourtime gold medalist and other Olympians are under.
Hours before Biles withdrew from competition, Naomi Osaka was defeated in a thirdround singles match. Osaka has been forthright about her struggles with mental health and pressure, missing both the French Open and Wimbledon to deal with those challenges. Biles said she was inspired by Osaka’s willingness to be honest.
Fourfooteight Biles has been carrying an enormous burden for years. She has absolutely dominated her sport for eight years. But ever since Rio, the spotlight has been blinding. That’s when, at 19, she wowed the world with her amazing skill, buoyant personality and compelling personal story. She instantly became the biggest star to focus on for Tokyo.
But the past five years have been uniquely stressful. She has dealt with things that no other superstar has had to face. She went public as one of Larry Nassar’s abuse victims and wielded her individual power as her sport’s most important athlete, calling out USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic Committee for failing to protect their athletes.
It was Biles who continued to give the sport relevance and legitimacy in the wake of the horrifying scandal. It was Biles who demanded accountability from the powerful and caused change. It was Biles who has been the face of the Olympics ever since Rio. All the while, she was pushing herself, working constantly, layering on more and more difficulty to her spectacular routines.
And then the pandemic hit, and all that pressure was prolonged by yet another year. She said she contemplated retiring but didn’t. All those expectations only ramped up, with all the nonsense about the Olympics healing the world, about the Olympics returning us to normalcy, with Biles being the face of all those cliches and breathless takes. And she was doing it without her family in the stands for the first time in her competitive career. Without a safety net or a harness.
The little athlete who defies the rules of gravity could not escape the weight of being human.