Simone Biles opens up that finally, it became too much, she felt it hours before she took the floor in Tokyo, she says a nervousness she couldn’t explain as she waited to deliver what everyone except her was sure would be a gold medal for the US women’s gymnastics team.
Biles said, “I was just like shaking, could barely nap.” “I’ve never felt like this going into a competition before.”
Simone Biles knew she was carrying a lot when she walked into the Ariake Gymnastics Centre in Tokyo on Tuesday. Being the face of the U.S. Olympic team, she was bearing her country’s gold medal hopes.
As the greatest gymnast of all time, she had expectations for athletic dominance and repeated brilliance. She was carrying around the pressure to make her fans proud being an outspoken advocate for female athletes.
Or, as she put it Monday, she was carrying “the weight of the world” on her shoulders. And she was making it look easy. Until it no longer was. In making the fabulous decision to withdraw from the team final competition on Tuesday, Biles acknowledged the tremendous pressure she had been facing as the “head star of the Olympics” and said she needed to focus on her mental health before anything else.
Five years ago, she came through for her country with a draw of four golds and a silver in Rio. But this time in Japan — with the official coronation of her Olympic greatness at stake she proved one bridge too far that even for the gymnast considered by many to be the greatest ever.
She was going through the pressure of Olympic history while also being tasked with catching all the eyeballs to primetime on Tuesday night TV to help recover the billion dollars or so that NBC spent to land the games. Biles was not only supposed to lead her team to gold but also to start an Olympics that is being largely ignored at home.
However, she failed before and even when he started was as stunning as it was dispiriting. She had not enough mental focus to feel she could compete with her teammates against the Russians and everyone else and had no injury and offered no other excuses before withdrawing after a poor vault in the first rotation. Olympic history is plagued with athletes who for one reason or another couldn’t grow to the occasion.
If it was shocking, it couldn’t have been all that surprising too. Add to that the fact that being the face of the Olympics for an entire nation is hard that is extremely hard.
On the same day Biles found herself unable to continue, Japan’s Naomi Osaka was unceremoniously bounced from the games amid continuing questions about her mental health that prompted her to withdraw from the French Open two months ago.
Like Biles, the tennis player was supposed to be her country’s star athlete, and the intensity mounted when she was chosen to light the Olympic flame at the opening ceremony. It didn’t matter that there were no fans on hand to watch her lose in the third round of the Olympic tennis tournament.
Eyeballs around Japan were focused on her every move, and she felt every one of them. “I definitely feel like there was a lot of pressure for this,” Osaka said. “I think it’s maybe because I haven’t played in the Olympics before and for the first year (it) was a bit much.”
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