I can’t go out and do everything they want me to do
Simone Biles
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It’s dark night in Tokyo, in those strange Olympic days of 2021, when we all wore masks to move from here to there, and a lady sits before the journalists and says whatever she thinks.
With Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps retired, it is now Simone Biles who bears the brunt of Olympism.
It is the new myth, only myth.
Simone Biles is 24 years old and speaks very quickly, and in her speech the chronicler catches phrases on the fly.
Biles talks about mental health and fears.
She has just suffered an anxiety attack: she tells us that a couple of hours before she had been lost in the air, during the landing of her team diving exercise, the first of her finals in the Ariake pavilion, and that now she feels fragile :
–I made a bad jump and then I said to myself: ‘I don’t want to go on anymore’. I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders.
Tokyo 2020 has only just begun and yet Biles interprets that, for her, the Games are over. So she retires to the Olympic Village and, from there, she gives up on the finals that follow. She will never repeat that Rio 2016 feat, with her four titles and her five medals.
His story opens debates and gatherings. Analysts, doctors, technicians and chroniclers applaud or question Biles’ blackout: his courage in sharing his crisis is praised and there is also talk that we are dehumanizing athletes.
Then the vertigo of the Games blurs Biles’s voice.
The days go by and new feats are recorded and we stop talking about the myth, which renounces the all-around contest and also the vault, floor and uneven bars finals.
No one is waiting for her in Tokyo anymore.
And then, out of the forecast, Simone Biles reappears: she leans over the balance beam, signs a sober exercise, with few risks, adapted to her circumstances, and starts a bronze that corrects her drift and nuances a bitter story with a happy ending.
(He will leave Tokyo with two podium finishes, the tragic silver in the team contest and bronze on the balance beam.)
And all happy?
Well, not entirely: since then, Simone Biles has not competed again.
(…)
In these two years, Biles has barely appeared on the scene to testify in the Larry Nassar case (the doctor who abuses gymnasts, today a plague man who will never regain his freedom), has married Jonathan Owens, defensive player for the Houston Texans football American, has given conferences in defense of the rights of athletes and has focused on the care of their mental health.
He is now 26 years old and says that this whole rebuilding process has done him wonderfully. And for this reason, a year before the 2024 Paris Games, she has announced that she will return to the pavilions.
It will do so on August 4 and 5 at the stupendous NOW Arena in Hoffman Estates, a multipurpose pavilion on the outskirts of Chicago, home to the US Classic that recruits a range of American superstars, including Sunisa Lee and Jade Carey, and officiating before the United States Championships, already at the end of August in San José, the base camp for the next Olympic Games.
“The current entry list includes twelve members of the Olympic team and 16 members of our world teams,” said a statement from USA Gymnastics. And together, they have won twelve Olympic medals and 48 world medals.
The news hyperexcites lovers of artistic gymnastics: how Hollywood is this happy ending.
