Simone Biles

[HelenaRavenclaw]

She has now withdrawn from 2 of the 4 individual gymnastics finals . I'm sad to think she will probably not participate in the remaining 2 either, given how she has been feeling.
www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/58037479

Wishing you all the best, Simone! You will remain the greatest gymnast of all time. Will never forget your spectacular performance in Rio 2016.

It’s hard to see how she’s going to do the floor with the twisties, I’m surprised she hasn’t pulled from that. Beam, maybe, but that probably feels a bit hollow if that’s all she can do.

It would be nice if she carried on to Paris and didn’t end her Olympic career like this (for her, not us), but I’m not convinced that will happen. She has absolutely nothing to prove though, she’s done it all.

Yep, she said it typically takes her two weeks to be 'right' again, fully expecting her to pull out of the remaining finals 24 hours before each.

She had said a few months ago she wasn't completely ruling out being an event specialist in Paris, her coaches are French and it will be their home Olympics. But she has also said she is done with the sport - how hard it is representing USAG, how devastated she was when 2020 Olympics were delayed as she was ready to retire, and how she is feeling more and more pain. I really can't call it. Sad she may not go out in the blaze of glory she deserves, either way her legacy is incredible, and this may be the most important thing she does for the sport.

Sad she may not go out in the blaze of glory she deserves

Completely disagree. This IS a blaze of glory! It is a watershed moment in sport, in women's lives, for black women. She is saying - I am not your performing robot. I am human and I OWN my body and my mind.

I find it incredibly powerful and inspiring what she is doing.

@Griefmonster

Sad she may not go out in the blaze of glory she deserves

Completely disagree. This IS a blaze of glory! It is a watershed moment in sport, in women's lives, for black women. She is saying - I am not your performing robot. I am human and I OWN my body and my mind.

I find it incredibly powerful and inspiring what she is doing.

But SummaLuvin said immediately after the sentence you cut off her legacy is incredible, and this may be the most important thing she does for the sport.

It doesn't sound like she's disagreeing with you and I'm not either, but it's not as simple as saying that this is a blaze of glory for Simone. It is a huge and significant moment for gymnastics but Simone Biles didn't come to the Olympics to make a stand on mental health and owning her own body. She wanted to win medals. That's why she has still not withdrawn from the remaining two event finals and is training hard to overcome her twisties: because she still wants to compete at the highest level. That doesn't take anything away from how powerful and important her decision to withdraw is, and the lasting impact it will have on the sport.

I am sorry that she is struggling but really glad that she feels empowered to prioritise her mental health and wellbeing. There have been a few high profile athletes speaking out recently about the impact on their mental health of the pressure that they're under. We need to start doing things differently in sport in order to take better care of people. Many of them are still so very young, and it's a huge amount of pressure for them to deal with.

She’s pulled out of the floor final now, and I won’t be surprised if she pulls out of beam too. Such a pity, and she must be so disappointed too

Oh no I didn't know this 😔

I didn't know she'd withdrawn from more. Doubt she sees mumsnet but people with mental health issues do. So good on her for prioritising her health.

Simone is competing in the individual beam final tomorrow!
www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/58054200

Amazing news, I truly thought she would pull out of all of them. This does make sense though, not a lot of twisting skills on beam, and she can switch her dismount without effecting the composition of the routine.

I am concerned tomorrows beam final may turn into a splat fest - Simone is just coming back from 'twisties', then Larisa Iordache, Ellie Black, and Flavia Saraiva all have ankle injuries.

She has won bronze in balance beam!

Well done Simone!

Don't normally agree with this Peirs Morgan guy, but I think he has a point here today:

"Last Wednesday, I wrote a column about the superstar gymnast Simone Biles. She'd just quit on her Team USA teammates in the Tokyo Olympics, and I didn't share the widely held view that this was an act of incredibly inspiring heroic courage. Indeed, she was praised more for quitting than she would have been had she dug deep, battled on and helped her team win Gold rather than the silver medal they ended up with in Biles' absence. And I found that ridiculous, so I said so. Then I discovered something shocking; Google, the tech behemoth at the centre of the internet universe, had quietly put an advertising block on my column eight hours after it was posted on DailyMail.com. This meant they banned all adverts from appearing alongside it, so the Mail would receive zero revenue from the column appearing on Google. This is a big deal. Google and Facebook have a virtual monopoly on online advertising revenue, hoovering up 80% of the entire market between them. Google said the column contained 'dangerous or derogatory content.' How could anything I wrote be considered 'dangerous?' I just said that I didn't find Simon Biles' decision to quit on her teammates to be either heroic or inspiring. Google's punitive action also represents a disgraceful attack on free speech. In a democracy, I'm allowed to say that Simone Biles wasn't a hero for quitting."

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9856467/PIERS-MORGAN-Free-speech-dying-woke-Google-helping-dig-grave.html

If she had gone home, when she first pulled out of the team gymnastics (citing MH reasons) I'd not have thought him right sticking the boot in. But when she popped up on my TV this morning in the individual beam event I thought maybe he had a point, she did let her team down last week and he should be free to say it, anyone should be free to say it, if they believe it.

She didn't let anyone down

She didn't let anyone down. Her dropping out probably ensured the team did win a medal, as well as making sure she didn't fall and recieve a career/life changing injury. While she qualified she had a few unusual falls/steps out. Then her vault wasn't the one she had planned to do due to the twistes and a much lower score than usual. I think she knew that the rest of the team would still be able to medal even if she dropped out. Where if she stayed they may not have made the podium with how she was feeling.

Yes she did.

Piers is free to say that if he believes it, but others are also free to point out he lacks any sort of expertise in the subject matter. Every gymnast who has spoken on this, including notoriously rude Khorkina, has been supportive of Simone actions, and expressed fear of what could have been.

Simone scored the 4th lowest vault score in the whole team final, for someone you would expect to get the top one, that is pretty disastrous, not a simple mistake. She was lost in the air, called the 'twisties', and to correct that can take time, it's a mental disconnect between mind and body, for her to then throw more skills and have it happen again would be downright dangerous, she was lucky she landed on her feet after that vault, she might not be as lucky if she continued. Gymnastics is an inherently dangerous sport, if it goes wrong people get paralysed, people sustain life changing injuries, and sometimes people die.

She didn't let her team down, in fact her continuation could have lost them the silver medal they got if she felt the need to 'prove herself' and made major mistake again. She knew the other 3 women are great all arounders so would be able fill in for her, not quite as high as her usual scores, but they are all very talented. Let's not pretend the rest of the USA team were incapable, that's frankly rude considering they are some of the top gymnasts in the world.

The routine she performed today was changed from her normal one, removing all twisting skills, she has been able to practice this since last week in a safe training environment to ensure she could do them without risking her health - competitions don't have big crash mats and foam pits which give gymnasts soft landings.

Would you really rather Simone have continued in the team competition only to sustain a horrific injury, or further damage USAs score? If either of those things had happened all the headlines would be "Why did Simone keep going" "Warning signs ignored" "Avoidable disaster".

I, for one, am delighted I didn't watch her break her neck on live TV, just so people not at all interested in gymnastics two weeks ago wouldn't call her a quitter.

I think it would have maybe helped if someone had explained the twistes rather than just saying it was for mental health reasons. I have suffered with bad mental health for a long time and sometimes things like this don't help the cause of having it treated like the actual medical problem it is. As to lay person it just looks a bit like picking and choosing the bits she wanted to do. From what I have read about twistes it isn't a mental health condition.

She quit because she didn’t want to risk literally breaking her neck in pursuit of a medal. The twisties, as it’s called, is a term gymnasts use when they get lost in the air whilst performing skills that involve vertically rotating their body (and bear in mind a lot of the skills SB has become known for involve rotating horizontally and vertically at the same time, multiple times over) and when it happens, it is terrifying. It’s like being plunged into a stormy sea and not knowing which way is up. It’s not a mental health condition but it is a mental issue, and it’s very difficult to come back from (certainly not after a few days), and makes performing even the simpler skills much more dangerous.

You’ll notice her beam routine today had plenty of backward and forward somersaults, but not a single twist. She even changed her usual dismount to one that didn’t involve twisting. She wouldn’t have been able to adapt a floor/bar routine or a vault in the same way, without making it so low-scoring in difficulty that entering at all would have been completely pointless. She even posted training videos where she’s trying to execute skills she’s been doing since she was a child and just not managing it. It’s shitty timing, but there’s nothing she could have done about it.

It’s not about “digging deep” and “battling on”.

It’s about losing your spatial awareness and not knowing where you are in the air.

Google these athletes who were made to “battle on:

Elena Mukhina- fell on floor after telling her coaches she would hurt herself on a particular skill. Quadraplegic, died from complications aged 46.

Julissa Gomez- hit the vault wrong after her coach insisted she could do it. Broke her neck, Paralysed, died shortly after.

Jennifer Sey- she’s written a very good twitter thread including video of the accident. Fell on bars, broke her femur. Nobody went to see if she was ok, just waited for her to get up. Only when she didn’t/couldn’t, did someone approach.

PM and those who agree with him clearly have no idea.

Good on Simone! I doubt with a life time of competition, and often genuinely risking her life she just chucked in the towel for a trivial reason.
She is a role model for gymnastics, for women and for the neuro-diverse. I hope it’s the start of a change in the culture of gymnastics that has been built for too long on the broken backs of little girls pushed too far in pursuit of the coaches glory.

Yes I've been watching several documentaries and podcasts over the past few days about the culture in gymnnastics - things like the wrong vault setting at Sydney, and seeing how close so many of them came to life changing injuries - and yet, it taking 18 competitors before someone was able to question things, partly because of the culture of just doing what they were told, being blamed for things going wrong, being forced to carry on whatever the circumstances, etc.

And then going back to the Nadia years where it all started, watching the nadia (fictional) film, but also things like The Gymnast and The Dictator, which shows how involved the state was in it all, how the culture of cruelty became normal, and how that transferred to the US when the Karolyis did, and paved the way for further abuse by Nassar.

Really worth anyone interested watching and listening to Athlete A, but also some of the previous documentaries and podcasts that show how the whole environment was created. They couldn't say no, to anything, and the pain and abuse, and potential life-threatening injuries, that resulted are horrific. It was huge for Biles to say 'no', and be heard.

Piers Morgan and all the other armchair critics seem to have no idea about any of this. 'Battling on' and 'digging deep' are such dismissive words to use for the sort of difficulties she was going through - they aren't things that can be overcome by 'digging deep' - it could have paralysed her. And she wouldn't have won her team a gold; she might well have lost them any medal at all. It's not letting them down to give them the chance for that silver.

I can see why Simone had so much grief and aggro at least initially because it could / did look to the untrained eye as though she bailed directly because she didn't manage to pull off the vault but to me, the ideal would have been if she'd used that specifically to say to every other athlete at the games, others working their arses off and aspiring to be there and be as great as her “You can't be perfect and put yourself under pressure to pull off perfection all the time. Everyone – even the greatest of all time will at some point screw up, get an inexplicable wobble on and do something arse up and out of place but it happens and when it does, you deal with it as it comes and don't let it weight you down or make you think less of yourself and knock your confidence”

The twisties and other issues she's had to contend with are no joke and absolutely did have a huge bearing and whilst I'm not suggesting she should have played that down any, I think she did miss a perfect opportunity to be even more inspirational by going “See? We all make mistakes and even those of us considered the greatest in the world have moments when things don't go right. Doesn't make you any less of an athlete or a person it just makes you a human being. I'm not up to remaining in the competition unfortunately but that's not to say I'm skipping out on the team or giving up – I'm just smart enough to know the difference and know my own limits. I'm staying to support the team I have every confidence will do us proud and I'll be back”

When she rocked up to do the beam my heart went out to her because of the weight she must have carried on her shoulders and the pressure I can't even imagine.

She performed brilliantly and was humble, decent and showed true sportsmanship to the 16yr old that took the gold. That's how it's done

But it did knock her confidence, and from the sounds of it, it wasn't an inexplicable wobble on one vault, but a specific problem that continued to affect her. It may initially have looked like a reaction to performing badly on a single vault, but that was very quickly cleared up by her statements and interviews. Sadly some of the critics that abused her online didn't watch/read anything further (Piers Morgan, looking at you) and just assumed she was being a sore loser.

I don't think she needed to be any more inspirational than she was. She did say that she had confidence in her team and that she was giving them the best opportunity to get a medal and that she wasn't giving up - she said that she knew her limits and wasn't going to risk a life-changing injury in that state.

Thanks for explaining why she could do the balance beam but not the other disciplines. I was really confused by that choice because to my uninformed eye it looks so much more dangerous to an athlete who’s lost her orientation, but now I understand.