Simone Biles: “I should have quit the Tokyo Games much earlier”

American gymnast Simone Biles.
EFE

“I just want a doctor to tell me when I’m going to get over this,” said American gymnast Simone Biles, in therapy after retiring from competition due to psychological problems during the past Tokyo Games, which, she admits, should have “resigned. “.

“They operate on you and it will be fixed. Why can’t someone tell me that in six months this will be over?”

Biles, who currently participates in an exhibition tour but has not resumed training, an adventure that “probably” will have to deal with his problems “for 20 years.”

“It doesn’t matter how much I try to forget. It’s a continuous job,” he adds.

Simone Biles, winner of five Olympic medals at the Rio 2016 Games, revealed months later that she had been one of the victims of sexual abuse by Larry Nassar, the doctor for the US team.

“If you look at everything I’ve been through in the last seven years, I shouldn’t have been part of the Olympic team again,” he says of his participation in the Tokyo Games. “I should have quit much earlier, when Larry Nassar was in the media for two years. It was too much. But I wasn’t going to let him take something I’ve worked for since I was 6 years old. I wasn’t going to let him take me away. that joy. So I got over it to the degree that my mind and body allowed. ”

However, when he arrived in Japan, his desire went from “wanting to be on a podium to wanting to go home.”

“In the moments leading up to it, I got more and more nervous,” she says. “I didn’t feel as safe as I should have with all the training we had,” she says.

Biles participated in Tokyo in the qualifying round, but withdrew in the team final after doing only the jumping exercise, in which he suffered an episode of disconnection between mind and body; is what is known in gymnastic language as ‘twisties’.

“It was a miracle that I fell on my feet. Anyone else would have come out on a stretcher. As soon as I landed on that jump, I went and said to my coach: ‘I can’t continue,'” he recalls.

After skipping the individual, floor, jump and asymmetric finals in the successive days, he participated in the bar with a modified exercise with which he won the bronze medal.

“I was not physically able,” he says in the interview. “Every time we tried, my body would say, ‘Simone, calm down. Sit down. We’re not going to do it.’ And I’ve never experienced that.”

The gymnast compares her physical inability to do her pirouettes now with a loss of vision.

“One morning you wake up and you don’t see shit, but people tell you to go ahead and do your daily work as if you still have vision. You would be lost, right? I have been doing gymnastics for 18 years. I woke up and had lost it. Am I supposed to get on with my day? “he wonders.

Biles expresses his wish that everything was as easy as a battery change: “Where are the batteries? Can we put them back? Can we go?”