“We wholeheartedly support Simone’s decision and applaud her bravery in prioritizing her well-being. Her courage shows, yet again, while she is a role model for so many.”-U.S.A. Gymnastics
“I’m still struggling with some things,” Biles said after the event. “It just sucks when you are fighting with your own head.”
Biles told her coach and a team doctor that she was not in the right “head space” to continue because she was afraid of injuring herself, and also because she didn’t want to jeopardize the team’s chances at winning a medal.
While she had come to the Tokyo Olympics feeling “pretty good,” the weight of expectations on her as Team U.S.A.’s biggest star at the Tokyo Games became tougher by the day, and in the hours before the team final she said she was shaking and couldn’t nap. In the end, the pressure was just too heavy for her to bear, she said.
In the days leading up to the Olympics, Biles had been struggling with a few skills and was trying to overcome a mental block that kept her from easily performing her routines. That mental block is not uncommon in gymnastics, [a U.S.A. Gymnastics coach] said, but it usually happens at practice, not at a competition.
“I think a lot of people don’t realize that it’s such a mental sport,” [the coach] said... explaining that the mental blocks take a while to work through before a gymnast can begin trusting herself enough to perform her skills again. “If you have a week or two to prepare, you could probably get her back to what she needed to do.”
In Biles’s case at these Games, however, she did not have two weeks to spare.
Okay, that is a full, balanced, fair account of the Simone Biles incident, taken from the New York Times. The undersigned will incur a wrathful shitstorm raining down upon his head with his take following, and that is going to be the way it is going to be.
A mental block can be as no-go as a physical block; "not right in the head space", Ms. Biles' words, as not right as not right in the knee space. There is no fault blowing out your knee, no fault in blowing your mind. You can't go in either state. There's no shame in whatever ailment kept you out. But neither is it "bravery" or "courage". You can't go! There's nothing you can do about it.
Hell, Kyrie Irving missed a basketball game because he had been bitten by bed bugs. Justise Winslow missed most of two seasons when his back didn't feel "right"--although team doctors thought Winslow could go, that it was psychosomatic. This is the thing, though: the examples of Kyrie Irving and Justise Winslow do not help make Ms. Biles' quitting more credible, they make Ms. Biles less credible.
But there is more to Simone Biles' situation. Although not in quotation marks as Ms. Biles' words I have no doubt that when the New York Times writes, she said she was shaking and couldn't nap that she said she was shaking and couldn't nap.
Shaking from nerves. That's not a mental block.
The weight of expectations...the pressure was just too heavy for her to bear, she said.
Biles told her coach and a team doctor...she was afraid of injuring herself, and also because she didn’t want to jeopardize the team’s chances at winning a medal.
Didn't want to hurt the team: that is transparent bullshit. You take one for the team, like Willis Reed hobbling out after half-time. Reed was the star, Biles was the star. Stars don't help the team by sitting out. Simone Biles was the best gymnast that ever was. It was not a mental block, like an arterial blockage, something that threatened her "well-being" and forced her to no-go, it was a failure of heart. Simone Biles went woolly in the knees; she spit the bit; she was Devon Loch coming down the stretch to the finish line and belly-flopping. Simone Biles just quit. And not just on herself, on her team. There is shame in that.
