On July 27, 2021, Simone Biles walked off the floor of the Ariake Gymnastics Centre in Tokyo and withdrew from the women's team gymnastics final, citing mental health and a dangerous disconnection between her brain and spatial awareness that gymnasts call the twisties. In a sport where competitors soar eight meters into the air while executing multiple rotations, the twisties are not a mental weakness — they are a genuine safety emergency.
The global reaction was immediate and polarized. Some commentators — predominantly from media traditions that equate sporting toughness with the suppression of psychological difficulty — criticized the decision as weak, selfish, or a betrayal of her team. Others recognized it as an act of profound courage: the courage to prioritize safety and truth over the performance expectations of an enormous and watching world.
What Are the Twisties?
The twisties is the informal term gymnasts use to describe a loss of aerial awareness — a disconnection between conscious intention and the body's spatial orientation during airborne skills. For elite gymnasts performing triple twists and double tucks, the twisties represent a genuine safety emergency. Without reliable awareness of body position in space, gymnasts cannot land safely — the risk of catastrophic injury from a mistimed landing is real and documented.
The condition has a neurological basis: under significant psychological stress, the mechanisms of implicit motor control that execute complex learned skills can become inaccessible, leaving the athlete consciously aware but unable to access the automatic processes that their skills require. It is not a choice, not a weakness, and not something that can be overcome by simply trying harder. It is a physiological reality of how stress affects expert motor performance.
The Abuse Context
To understand the full context of what Biles was managing in Tokyo, it is essential to know that she is one of the survivors of the abuse perpetrated by USA Gymnastics team physician Larry Nassar, who was convicted and sentenced to over 175 years in prison for sexual abuse of over 150 gymnasts across three decades. Biles was competing at an Olympic Games organized and run by the same institutional ecosystem that had failed to protect her for years.
The psychological demands that Biles was managing in Tokyo were therefore not simply the demands of elite athletic competition. They included the ongoing weight of processing significant trauma, advocating publicly for institutional accountability, and representing herself and hundreds of other survivors in a global spotlight. That she performed at the extraordinary level she did before experiencing the twisties — and that she returned to win a bronze medal on beam later in the Games — speaks to her extraordinary character.
The Legacy: Changing the Conversation
The broader significance of Biles's decision in Tokyo extends far beyond gymnastics. Her willingness to publicly articulate what she was experiencing — and to prioritize it over the expectation of performance — gave permission to athletes across every sport to acknowledge psychological difficulty without shame. In the years since Tokyo, discussions about mental health in sport at every level have expanded dramatically, athlete wellbeing programs have been strengthened at major sporting organizations worldwide, and the cultural expectation that athletes simply absorb psychological damage in silence has been materially weakened.
At the 2024 Paris Olympics, Biles returned to the gymnastics floor and delivered one of the greatest individual performances in Olympic history, winning gold medals and performing skills that bear her name in the Code of Points. She did this having taken the time she needed, having received the support she deserved, and having maintained the honesty about her own experience that is the foundation of sustainable elite performance. Her story is not a story of weakness. It is a story of what genuine courage looks like in elite sport.
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