Simone Biles

Elite gymnastics does not simply train bodies. It selects, from the earliest age, for children who can dissociate from physical signals. Pain tolerance is a prerequisite. The capacity to override what your body is telling you in service of what a coach or score sheet demands is not a side effect of the training - it is the training's central psychological product.

Biles began competing seriously in her early teens, training at Bannon's Gymnastics and later at World Champions Centre, which her parents owned. By the time she reached national prominence, she had spent years in an environment that rewarded the systematic suppression of interior signals. The same psychological capacity that made her exceptional also made her exceptionally vulnerable to abuse. A child trained to ignore her body's protests is a child who has been taught that her own perceptions are subordinate to external authority.

This is the first terrain layer. It precedes Nassar. It is what made Nassar possible at scale.

Larry Nassar was the USA Gymnastics national team physician for nearly three decades. He abused hundreds of athletes under the guise of medical treatment. Biles has stated publicly that she was among those he abused. The abuse occurred over years, spanning her ascent through the junior and senior national programs.

The institutional failure was not incidental. USA Gymnastics received complaints about Nassar as early as 1997. The organization did not report him to law enforcement for fourteen months after receiving a formal complaint in 2015. The USOC, which oversaw USA Gymnastics, conducted its own inadequate investigation. Michigan State University, where Nassar also practiced, had received earlier complaints that were dismissed. The structure that was supposed to protect these athletes instead protected the institution and the abuser.

Biles reached the 2016 Rio Olympics carrying all of this. She had not yet disclosed. She was performing at the highest level of her sport while holding something enormous in a context that had taught her, systematically, not to trust what her body knew.

At Rio, Biles won four gold medals and one bronze, the most decorated American gymnast at a single Olympics. The public record of that performance is extraordinary athletic achievement. The private record, which she has since disclosed, is something else: a person executing superhuman precision while carrying abuse that had not yet been named, in an institution whose protection she could not count on.

"I had to keep it all inside," she said in the Netflix documentary Simone Biles Rising. The containment required to do that, during the most scrutinized weeks of her career, is a data point about her psychological architecture that does not appear in the medal count.

The strength required to hold that much inside while performing that well is not simple resilience. It is what happens when a person has been trained, for years, to subordinate interior experience to external performance. The training worked. That is not a compliment.

In September 2021, Biles testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee alongside fellow survivors Aly Raisman, McKayla Maroney, and Maggie Nichols. Her statement was precise and devastating.

"We suffered and continue to suffer because no one at FBI, USAG or the USOC did what was necessary to protect us," she said. "We have been failed and we deserve answers." She specifically named the FBI's handling of the investigation as a second institutional failure layered on top of the first.

What her testimony revealed about her psychological terrain is this: she did not frame her experience as personal victimhood or private tragedy. She framed it as a systemic failure that required accountability from named institutions. That framing is not the language of someone still caught inside the wound. It is the language of someone who has done enough interior work to be able to hold the institutional dimension without collapsing it into personal narrative. The precision of her testimony was a form of self-possession that Nassar and the institutions that protected him had tried to prevent her from having.

At the Tokyo Olympics in July 2021, Biles withdrew from the team final and then from four individual event finals, citing a condition known colloquially as "the twisties." The term requires explanation, because the public conversation frequently underestimated what it means.

The twisties is a dissociation between a gymnast's spatial awareness and her body's movement in the air. A gymnast performing a multi-rotation vault or a release move on the uneven bars is executing maneuvers that require precise spatial orientation at height and speed. When the twisties occur, that orientation is lost. The athlete cannot predict where she will be when she comes out of a rotation. On floor exercise this is dangerous. On vault or bars it can be fatal.

Biles described losing the ability to tell where she was in the air. She said, "I didn't want to go out and do the competition and possibly get injured." That sentence, delivered publicly in a context of enormous institutional and commercial pressure, is a sentence about listening to the body rather than overriding it. For someone whose entire formation had required the opposite, this was not a small act. It was a fundamental reorientation of which signals get obeyed.

Biles returned to competition in 2023 and went on to win three gold medals and one silver at the Paris 2024 Olympics, becoming the most decorated American gymnast in Olympic history. The media framing was predictable: comeback narrative, redemption arc, proof that Tokyo had been an aberration.

The more interesting terrain question is what it means to compete when you have demonstrated, publicly and at enormous cost, that you are also allowed to stop. The return was not a reversal of Tokyo. It was a continuation of it. She stopped when stopping was necessary. She returned when returning was her choice. Those two facts together constitute something qualitatively different from the invincibility performance that preceded them.

The athlete who competed in Paris was not trying to prove Tokyo wrong. She was proving, by her presence and her performance, that the decision in Tokyo had been correct. The psychological architecture that makes it possible to stop is also the architecture that makes it possible to return on your own terms.

- Biles, Simone, with Michelle Burford. Courage to Soar: A Body in Motion, A Life in Balance. Zondervan, 2016. - Simone Biles Rising. Netflix documentary, 2024. - U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Biles testimony on FBI investigation of Larry Nassar, September 15, 2021. - Biles, Simone. Statement on withdrawal from Tokyo Olympics team competition. USA Gymnastics, July 2021. - Tracy, Marc. "Simone Biles Says Mental Health Caused Her to Withdraw." The New York Times, July 2021. - Ryan, Joan. Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters. Doubleday, 1995. - U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Report on USOC and USA Gymnastics failure to report Nassar abuse, 2019. - Raisman, Aly. Fierce: How Competing for Myself Changed Everything. Little, Brown, 2017. - Denhollander, Rachael. What Is a Girl Worth? Tyndale Momentum, 2019.

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Interpretive opinion based on the public record. Not a clinical assessment or diagnosis of any individual.