What Happened To Simone Biles

Simone Biles withdrew from the team final competition for the Tokyo Olympics after completing one vault.

What this meant: in Olympic team gymnastics, each team is made up of four athletes, but only three of them compete on each event. This way athletes like Suni Lee, who is the best uneven bars worker in the world, may only compete on one or two events where the US is historically weakest (see: bars) but all-arounders like Biles can compete on all four events.

With Biles withdrawing after vault, the other three athletes – Suni Lee, Jordan Chiles and Grace McCallum – each had to compete on beam, floor, and bars. Suddenly, a group that had contained two specialists (Lee and McCallum) had turned into a group of all-arounders. Not all of them were prepared to do all of those events. Some of them hadn’t even practiced their routines on those events in Tokyo, and had to step up.

Their efforts earned a silver medal for the team.

In the world of athletics, that’s as close to heroic as it comes.

But why did Biles leave?

Her opening vault in the team final competition was one she’d nailed hundreds of times, and had never missed in a competition. She didn’t even technically fall, though her landing was rough, with deeply bent knees and a big step on the landing. But anyone who was watching for her world-famous, rock-solid Amanar vault saw something else entirely. She wasn’t able to complete the requisite number of flips and spins in the air, and barely managed to land safely.

To compare, watching Biles’s vault was like watching someone stutter through an aria mid-opera. It was like watching the best chef in the world forget how to scramble eggs and stumble through an improvisational version that resulted in a mix of eggshells and half-cooked whites. It was as disconcerting as watching a math teacher have to count on her fingers.

Any gymnast who watched her vault in the team finals recognized what happened. You can call it "the twisties," you can call it a mental block, you can call it "getting lost."

But at its most technical, what you saw was a terrifying glitch - a disconnect between brain and body that, in a weaker athlete, might have resulted in a broken neck. At least a broken leg.

Biles does what she does not ONLY because she has the muscular and aerodynamic power to get herself high in the air - she maintains that ability by completing constant micro-calculations that allow her to land safely each time. If you've ever watched a cat or squirrel fall off a roof and land on its feet, you know what I'm talking about.

That world-famous focus, that intensity everyone talks about? It's the speed of doing intuitive physics calculations in your head WHILE IN THE AIR.

We watched the calculator short out.

Without that mental ability, she could hang herself on the uneven bars. She could straight-up miss the beam. She could, as she did in the preliminary competition, miscalculate a tumbling pass that sends her straight off the competition floor.

USA Gymnastics wasn't totally wrong to call it a medical issue (aside from the part where mental health IS medical) because she's experiencing something that could literally, physically kill her if she doesn't step away.

There's no time limit, as someone's already said, on this kind of mental block. Some people stop doing the sport forever once they experience it. It's too mortally terrifying. (I experienced it once, on the uneven bars, and never regained my confidence on that event.) Some people shake it off and go to practice the next day.

There's many many guesses as to WHY Biles is experiencing this right now, but there's no guessing WHAT she's experiencing. And the only person I would trust to tell me when she's ready to compete is Simone Biles.

If that time is never, we'll all still die having seen the greatest of all time.