Simone Biles

The Story

Tuesday evening, July 27, 2021: Simone Biles hit the springboard at the Ariake Gymnastics Centre in Tokyo, flew into her Amanar vault, and came down a full rotation short of where she intended to land.

She had done this vault thousands of times. It required 3.5 twists in the air before her feet touched the mat. What she managed was 2.5, with an awkward stumble to catch her balance. She paused at the mat's edge, looked at her hands, and walked toward her trainer.

Within twenty minutes, USA Gymnastics released a statement: Simone Biles was withdrawing from the team final due to a medical issue.

The medical issue, she clarified herself that night in a brief conversation with reporters, was her head. "I have to focus on my mental health," she said. "I just think mental health is more prevalent in sports right now." She said it matter-of-factly, not as a declaration. Like someone saying they have a bad knee.

The world responded as if she had thrown a grenade into gymnastics.

She had grown up in Spring, Texas, in a house her grandparents Ron and Nellie bought when they took her in at age six. Her mother Shanon had struggled with addiction for years. Simone and her younger sister Adria had spent time in Ohio foster care before their grandparents drove the nine hours from Texas and brought them home. Simone called Ron and Nellie "Mom and Dad." Nobody corrected her.

She found gymnastics at six, during a day-care field trip to a local gym. A coach watched her copy the older kids' drills from across the room and sent a note home suggesting she enroll. She never left.

By nineteen, she had four Olympic gold medals from Rio 2016. By her early twenties, she had four skills named after her in the international gymnastics code of points — moves rated at higher difficulty because she performed them first, moves that most elite gymnasts weren't attempting. Going into Tokyo in the summer of 2021, the conversation wasn't whether she would win. It was how many golds, and by how much.

In the years before Tokyo, she had publicly named USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar as one of her abusers — one of hundreds of women who eventually came forward. She kept competing through the legal process, through the media coverage, through the Senate testimony, through all of it. She won five medals at the 2019 World Championships, four of them gold, eight months after her public statement. The world read that as inevitability. She knew it was cost.

By the time she arrived at the Ariake Centre, she had been carrying the sport's reckoning on top of its expectations for years. In the weeks before the vault, she had started waking at 3 a.m. and lying there until morning. She had lost the internal calibration that gymnasts call spatial awareness — the precise, automatic knowledge, in mid-air, of where your body is relative to the floor. When spatial awareness fails suddenly, gymnasts call it the twisties. The name sounds like a children's word for something manageable. It isn't. A missed rotation from four meters in the air is not a deduction on a scoresheet. It is a broken spine.

On the springboard, she felt the signal drop. On the mat, she trusted what she felt.

What followed was loud. A British columnist wrote that her withdrawal was brave, but not in the way she thought. A former Olympic athlete said on television that quitting is not what champions do. Online, the debate split cleanly: half the people saying she had done the right thing, half saying she had abandoned her team when it mattered most.

Her team finished the final without her. Sunisa Lee, Jordan Chiles, Grace McCallum, and MyKayla Skinner won silver. Simone watched from the stands and cheered.

She scratched from the individual all-around. Then vault. Then uneven bars. Then floor exercise — the event she had dominated for a decade.

On August 3, seven days after the vault, she walked back onto the competition floor for one event: the balance beam final. A four-inch strip of padded wood, 1.25 meters off the floor, demanding every ounce of the spatial awareness she had been slowly recovering. She mounted, she stayed on, she dismounted cleanly. She won bronze.

Not gold. Bronze. She stood on the third step of the podium in a moment nobody had scripted, holding a result that felt nothing like the story the world had written about what she owed them.

Paris 2024. Three years later. She was twenty-seven — which in elite gymnastics is the age at which the sport usually thanks you for your service and suggests you consider coaching. She had spent those three years in therapy, restructuring her training schedule around one decision: she would return to gymnastics only if she still wanted to, not because she owed anyone a comeback.

She still wanted to.

At the Bercy Arena in July 2024, she won gold in the team final, the individual all-around, the vault, and the floor exercise. She competed the Yurchenko double pike — a vault so technically demanding that gymnastics's governing body had rated it below its real difficulty, reportedly to discourage other athletes from attempting it. Biles had submitted the skill for the code of points herself, years earlier, when she was the only person on earth reliably landing it. They scored it low. She competed it anyway. At twenty-seven.

She became the most decorated American gymnast in Olympic history.

She did not do it despite Tokyo. She did it through Tokyo — through what she said no to, and why she was able to say it.

What this proves

Stopping and quitting are not the same thing. When Biles walked off the floor in Tokyo, she wasn't abandoning gymnastics — she was refusing to perform a 3.5-twist vault with a broken signal, four meters in the air, in front of the world. The balance beam bronze that came a week later, when her spatial awareness had partly returned, was not consolation. It was proof the decision was working. She stopped the thing she couldn't safely do. She kept the thing she could. Paris was built on that distinction.

Treating the setback as data is how you outlast the critics. The loudest voices after Tokyo lasted about forty-eight hours. Biles lasted three years, rebuilt her training environment, started therapy, and returned with four gold medals. She treated the twisties as a signal to investigate — not a verdict to accept. Every ambitious person has a moment when the internal instrument stops working reliably. The question is whether you push through the wrong rotation, or land, check the equipment, and go back up when the signal is solid. She went back up when the signal was solid. That is what Paris looks like.

The moves they tell you to lower your rating for are sometimes the only ones worth doing. Gymnastics's governing body scored the Yurchenko double pike below its real difficulty to protect other gymnasts from attempting it. Biles competed it anyway, in the biggest meet of her career, at twenty-seven. What institutions undervalue for mass adoption is sometimes exactly what you've actually earned the right to do. The moves they underprice are sometimes the ones that only you can land.

Do this today

This afternoon, before your next meeting or check-in with your manager or a trusted colleague, take eight minutes and write one sentence that names the actual thing making the work harder right now. Not "I'm a bit stretched." Something with a noun: the specific project, the specific dependency, the specific constraint you've been managing quietly. Then say that sentence out loud in the meeting — or send it in a message — without softening it first. Say it once, then stop. Let the other person respond. You don't need a solution ready. Biles didn't walk off the mat with a plan. She just told someone what was actually happening.

Send this to someone

This story is for the person in your life who always says they're fine, keeps performing, never asks for help, and you can feel — just slightly — that something is off underneath. They're not looking for permission to walk away from their goals. They're looking for permission to be honest about the weight without losing your respect.

Try this message:

"Read something about Simone Biles today — the Tokyo story makes more sense than I'd realised. Thought of you."

Sources

• Netflix — Simone Biles Rising (2024): https://www.netflix.com/search?q=Simone+Biles+Rising — A four-part documentary filmed with direct access to Biles and her team before and during Paris 2024. The most detailed first-person account of what she experienced in Tokyo and how she rebuilt after it, in her own words.

• Time Magazine — "Simone Biles Is TIME's 2021 Athlete of the Year": https://time.com/athlete-of-the-year-2021-simone-biles/ — A long-form profile in which Biles speaks directly about the twisties, the criticism she received after Tokyo, and why she still wanted to come back. Primary source for her own framing of the decision.

• Simone Biles with Michèle Burford, Courage to Soar: A Body in Motion, A Life in Balance (2016): https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Courage+to+Soar+Simone+Biles — Her memoir, written before Tokyo, covering the foster care years, her adoption by Ron and Nellie Biles, and the early decades of training. The foundation for understanding the person who walked off that mat.

This is a dramatized editorial narrative created for personal inspiration, drawn from publicly available sources listed above. It is not a biography, does not claim to represent the subject's exact views or experiences, and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the person or their estate. For a fuller picture, we recommend exploring the sources linked above.

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