Simone Biles Withdraws from Tokyo — and Wins a Different Kind of Gold
On July 27, 2021, the greatest gymnast in the history of her sport walked away from the competition floor at the Ariake Gymnastics Centre in Tokyo. Simone Biles, 24 years old, seven-time Olympic medalist, holder of more World Championship medals than any gymnast who has ever lived, withdrew from the women’s team gymnastics final after completing just one vault. She was experiencing what gymnasts call ‘the twisties’ — a terrifying loss of spatial awareness mid-air that makes it impossible to know, at the point of maximum velocity and height, whether you will land on your feet or your neck. Performing with the twisties, at the level Biles operates, is genuinely life-threatening. She made the right call. The world, initially, was divided.
The reaction illustrated the expectations that elite athletes — and elite Black female athletes in particular — are subjected to. Some media commentators characterised her decision as a failure of nerve, a letting-down of her team. Critics who would never suggest that a surgeon with blurred vision should continue operating had no difficulty suggesting that Biles should have pushed through a dangerous neurological event in the pursuit of a gold medal for America. The criticism was swift, loud, and in many cases deeply gendered.
The response from fellow athletes and millions of ordinary people was very different. Naomi Osaka, who had withdrawn from the French Open just weeks earlier citing her own mental health struggles, tweeted her support. Patrick Mahomes, LeBron James, and dozens of other elite athletes publicly praised her decision. President Biden called to check on her. The outpouring reflected a growing cultural shift in how mental health among athletes was being understood. Biles’s willingness to be publicly vulnerable about what she was experiencing became itself an act of extraordinary courage.
Biles returned to competition later in the Games, winning a bronze medal on the balance beam with a brilliantly adapted routine. She left Tokyo not with the six gold medals anticipated but with something arguably more significant: the role of the person who helped change the conversation about mental health in elite sport permanently. When she testified at a Senate hearing about the USA Gymnastics abuse scandal in September 2021, the same qualities were on display — clarity, courage, and an absolute refusal to pretend that things were fine when they were not.