CHENNAI: Gymnastics superstar Simone Biles was forced to withdraw from the women’s team final ‘to focus on my mental health and not jeopardise my health and wellbeing’.
In a heartfelt, tearful post final mixed-zone exchange with the world media, Biles, widely tipped to be the face of the Games, became candid.
“At the end of the day, I have to do what’s right for me and focus on my mental health and not jeopardize my health and my wellbeing,” she said.
“Because at the end of the day, we’re human too so we have to protect our mind and our body rather than just go out there and do what the world wants us to do... there is more to life than gymnastics.”
Coming into the Games, Biles was expected to debut the hard to master Yurchenko Double Pike on the vault.
Instead, she preferred to open with the Amanar, her first and only routine in the final before she walked off backstage with the US team trainer.
However, while mid-air, she dumped the routine. She didn’t stick the landing. She was awarded a score of 13.766, the worst among the six athletes who did the vault in the first rotation.
She did come back out to the arena in a few minutes but soon withdrew from the rest of the event.
USA had conceded an advantage in the vault to Russian Olympic Committee (ROC), an advantage that ROC did not relinquish for the rest of the night to win their first ever gold in this event. This is the first time US didn’t win gold since 2008.
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That, however, became a sidenote as the four-time Olympic champion took the media through the pressures that an athlete goes through.
“I just don’t trust myself as much as I used to,” she said, flanked by her US teammates.
“I feel like I am also not having as much fun. That just hurts my heart that doing what I love has been taken.”
She was visibly in tears when she said this.
Even if it sent shockwaves across the sporting fraternity, the 24-year-old has been relatively open about these issues.
After completing the preliminaries on Sunday, an Instagram post revealed the pressure she was feeling.
“It wasn’t an easy day or my best but I got through it,” 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 doesn’t affect me but damn sometimes it’s hard hahaha! The Olympics is no joke. But I’m happy my family was able to be with me virtually they mean the world to me.”
Voice for change
In fact, she had contemplated retiring from competitive gymnastics before staying on ‘to be a voice, to have change happen’.
In an interview she gave in April, she had said: “I just feel like everything that happened, I had to come back to the sport to be a voice, to have change happen. Because I feel like if there weren’t a remaining survivor (she was one of the victims of the horrific abuse at the hands of US Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar) in the sport, they would’ve just brushed it aside. But since I’m still here, and I have quite a social media presence and platform, they (US Gymnastics) have to do something. So I feel like coming back, gymnastics just wasn’t the only purpose I was supposed to do.”
As for her immediate future at the Games — the women’s all-around final on Thursday — the US athlete is undecided.
“We’re going to see about Thursday (the women’s all-around final). We’re going to take it a day at a time and see what happens,” she said.