Simone Biles cites mental stress after pulling out of Olympics team final

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Simone Biles has cited mental health issues for her shock withdrawal from the Olympic women’s gymnastics team final and cast doubt over whether she would continue her quest for a haul of gold at the Tokyo Games.

During the first discipline of the event on Tuesday, the US athlete — widely considered the world’s greatest-ever gymnast — stumbled on the vault and then quickly left the arena. Deciding to “take a back seat”, she returned to the benches to support her teammates, who settled for silver behind the Russian Olympic Committee, while Britain secured bronze.

Speaking to reporters at the Ariake Gymnastics Centre following the event, Biles said she had yet to decide whether she was in the right frame of mind to compete for the remaining five individual Olympics gymnastics titles, which begin with the women’s all-round final on Thursday.

“I just don’t trust myself as much as I used to,” she told reporters, bursting into tears. “I don’t know if its age, I’m a little bit more nervous when I do gymnastics.

“I also know I’m not having as much fun and I know that this Olympic Games, I wanted it to be for myself. I came in and I felt like I was doing it for other people. So that it hurts my heart that doing what I love has been taken away from me, to please other people.”

The doubt over her continuing participation will cast a shadow over the Games, at which Biles was expected to be among the star athletes, and will renew questions about welfare in sports and the intense pressures of competition.

Biles said the circumstances of the Tokyo Games, postponed from last year and now held amid the continued pandemic and its restrictions, had not helped.

“It’s been really stressful, these Olympic Games,” said Biles. “Just as a whole, not having an audience, there’s a lot of different variables going into it. It’s been a long week. It’s been a long Olympic process. It’s been a long year.”

Prior to the Games, Biles had spoken openly about seeing a therapist after surviving physical and sexual abuse from Larry Nassar, a longtime national gymnastics team doctor. Nasser was sentenced to up to 175 years in prison in 2018 for abusing hundreds of female athletes. 

“Therapy has helped a lot, as has medicine, but whenever you get in a stressful situation you kind of freak out and don’t really know how to handle all of those emotions, especially being here at the Olympic Games,” Biles said.

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Her difficulties will raise further questions over her relationship with USA Gymnastics. She has publicly called for an independent investigation into the abuse scandal at the national governing body.

USA Gymnastics official Annie Heffernan acknowledged that a gap in trust remained between the athlete and the organisation, but that “whatever she needs to succeed is what I will do”.

On Tuesday, Biles briefly left the arena with her trainer following the error on the vault, her first apparatus. She returned to announce the decision to her teammates, Grace McCallum, Sunisa Lee and Jordan Chiles, who performed well enough to earn her a silver.

“She’s freaking Simone Biles,” said Chiles, speaking at the press conference. “She carries the team, basically. When we had to step up to the plate to do what we had to do, it was very hard and stressful.”

Biles had been expected to perform the Yurchenko double pike on the vault, a move so difficult and potentially dangerous that the sport’s authorities decided to score it lower than less complex manoeuvres in an effort to dissuade other gymnasts from attempting it. 

Biles on Tuesday instead attempted an Amanar skill, which she has performed routinely in the past. But she bailed out of the move in mid-air, taking a long step during the landing.

She scored 13.766 for the attempt, the lowest among her teammates. In the minutes afterwards she withdrew from competing on the other apparatus — the parallel bars, floor and beam. 

Biles has taken the sport of gymnastics to gravity-defying heights. She has had four manoeuvres named after her, an honour given to the first gymnast to perform them in competition. She won four gold medals in Rio de Janeiro five years ago, and her attempt to add to that haul has been among the most keenly anticipated of these Games.

“We’re going to take it a day at a time,” said Biles, speaking about whether she would continue in Tokyo. “Tomorrow we have a day for training. It will be nice to have a mental rest day. Injury? No. Just my pride is hurt a little bit.”