Being heavily traumatized made a gymnast regretting her play in the Tokyo games. American gymnast Simone Biles has recently revealed her belief that she should have quit way before the Tokyo Olympics 2020.
- Biles dropped out of five of her six finals in Japan in order to focus on her sanity. She mentioned that she did not want to let the former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar take something away from her that she had worked hard for from the age of six.
- “If you looked at everything, I’ve gone through for the past seven years, I should have never made another Olympic team. I should have quit way before Tokyo when Larry Nassar was in the media for two years. It was too much”, said Simone Biles in a recent interview.
- “But I was not going to let him take something I’ve worked for since I was 6 years old. I wasn’t going to let him take that joy away from me. So, I pushed past that for as long as my mind and my body would let me”, she added.
- In a note back in 2018 that she had posted on her official Twitter handle she called out Nassar and revealed that even she was also one of the ‘many survivors’ who was sexually abused by the former USA Gymnastics doctor, who is now serving a life sentence in jail.
- She had also written that it was ‘impossibly difficult’ to relive those experiences and it broke her heart, even more, to think that as she works towards the dream of competing at the Tokyo Olympics 2020, she will have to continually return to the same training facility where she was ‘abused’.
- While explaining her decision to withdraw from events, she said, ‘Say up until you’re 30 years old, you have your complete eyesight (then) one morning, you wake up, you can’t see s**t, but people tell you to go on and do your daily job as if you still have your eyesight.’
After the traumatic event occurred to her Biles had been seeing a therapist in the run-up. As an effect of that incident, she even experienced “the twisties”, a phenomenon that temporarily affects an athlete’s spatial awareness.
