Simone Biles is not “cured.” Let's start there. (More Sports News)
A cure implies finality. An ultimate and decisive victory. If the gymnastics superstar has learned anything in the three years since those strange, uncertain days in Tokyo when she put her mental health and personal safety ahead of her pursuit of more Olympic glory, it is that the battle to protect yourself is never really over. Never fully won.
It's a lesson she learned in front of the entire world in Japan, where Biles arrived as the face of the Summer Games only to withdraw from multiple competitions, including the team final, when her body simply stopped doing what her brain was asking it to.
At that moment, Biles blamed it on “ the twisties." On the surface, she was right. Yet they sprang from something deeper and harder to define.
“She can't even explain it (and) the doctors she sees probably can't even explain it to her,” said Laurent Landi, who along with his wife Cecile has coached Biles since 2017. “It's a trauma that happened to her and that came at a bad time and she could not handle it. It's as simple as this. She could not function. She could not be a gymnast at that time.”
She can now, though the road to this moment — Biles will compete for the first time in 2024 at this weekend's U.S. Classic — has been difficult. It has required a new mindset, at times a literal mother's touch and constant vigilance to work on herself, work she now understands has no expiration date.
Biles tried to take all the outsized attention before Tokyo in stride. She projected a sense of normalcy. It was a facade. At some point, the pent-up emotions and aggressions she felt caused her to “ crack.”
Biles was in therapy before Tokyo but had paused treatment before heading overseas. With millions watching, she walked off the floor at the Ariake Gymnastics Center after one wayward vault in the women's team final and called her family, who had remained home in Texas because of COVID-19 restrictions put in place for the games.
Nellie Biles picked up the phone and heard her daughter on the other end saying over and over through tears “Mom, I really cannot do this. I'm lost, I cannot do this.”
And so she didn't. Biles pulled out of a handful of finals before returning to earn a bronze on the balance beam, a medal the most decorated gymnast in the history of the sport has called one of the most important of her career. As painful and frightening as the experience was, it needed to happen because it made Biles realize mental health isn't something she could ignore.
“I couldn't run away from it, you know,” Biles told The Associated Press. “I just owned it and said Hey, this is what I'm going through. This is the help that I'm going to get."
Help that has propelled Biles back to a familiar spot: atop her sport with another Olympics in the offing. Help that presents itself in different ways and sometimes comes from unexpected places.
Biles firmly believes she's in a better place this time around, thanks in part to weekly Thursday meetings with her therapist that have become an intractable part of her schedule.
Last fall in Antwerp, Belgium, Biles walked into a nearly empty arena during podium training before the world championships, her first team competition since Tokyo. Something about the scene evoked, as Nellie Biles puts it, “a PTSD moment.” Biles ran off the floor to gather herself following a trigger she never saw coming.
There were more tears. More anxiety. More calls. More reassurance.
“She almost didn't go back out there,” Nellie Biles said.
After being “a little bit hesitant," Biles pushed through thanks in part to the decision to have a meeting with her therapist, something she rarely did close to competitions before beginning the practice ahead of the U.S. Classic in Chicago last summer.
The U.S. women were given the afternoon off and some of them headed off to a chocolate factory. Biles chose to stay behind to FaceTime her therapist instead.
“I know how important it is for me to stay present, mindful and not be too anxious,” she said. “So yes, we will keep that up.”
There were other comforts of home in Belgium. Namely, her family.
Every day, Nellie Biles made her way to Simone's hotel room and spent 30-45 minutes braiding her daughter's hair, a first.
“My daughter is (27) and I know (she) can braid her own hair,” Nellie Biles said. “But it's just that touch, that togetherness. It's that bonding. It's what she needed and it worked.”
The meet ended the way so many have during Biles' decade-long run at the top: with a fistful of medals stashed in her luggage for the return flight home and the stage set for a potentially historic Olympic year.
