In a candid interview with her mother, Nellie Biles, the gymnastics great opens up about her Olympic fate and what she's learned along the way.
Team USA fans had high expectations for Simone Biles going into the Tokyo Olympics this summer. After all, she was women’s gymnastics team captain, she was the returning champ after picking up four gold medals in Rio five years earlier and she remains the most-decorated athlete competing in the sport., with all the vulnerabilities that come with that.
It’s a fact that fans were reminded of when the woman known as the GOAT stepped away from several Olympic events as she struggled to maintain her physical performance in the wake ofAnd in a new interview, the 24-year-old explains that was the first time she ever felt as though she was viewed as a normal person.
“Over the years, obviously since I’ve been so dominant, everybody supported the gymnastics and praised me for what I’ve done in the gym — and not really outside ,” she said inSo when she experienced what gymnasts refer to asa state in which one loses awareness of their mid-air position during routines, and then spoke out about her mental health amid the Games, she felt few could understand her — at first.
Simone Biles was congratulated by her coach as it became evident she would earn a medal in the women's balance beam final in Tokyo on Aug. 3.“I spoke to my coaches a lot,” she recalled. “I had conversations with Team USA’s sports psychologists. Justin Bieber reached out and messaged me, so did Demi Lovato, because it’s different and nobody kind of understands the platform that we’re on. ... We’re not seen as normal people walking around.
But when she stepped back from the competition at the Ariake Gymnastics Centre in July, she discovered that while she expected to face “a lot of backlash and embarrassment,” something else happened.Those people who only viewed her as an elite athlete before suddenly related to the person who was speaking up about her mental health.
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