I can’t go out and do everything they want me to do.
Simone Biles
It is a 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 in front of the journalists and says everything she thinks.
Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps retired, now it is Simone Biles who carries the weight of the Olympics.
It is the new myth, the only myth.
Simone Biles is 24 years old and speaks very quickly, and in her speech the reporter hunts sentences on the fly.
Biles talks about mental health and fears.
He has just suffered an anxiety attack: he tells us that a couple of hours earlier he had been lost in the air, during the landing of his team jumping exercise, the first of his finals at Ariake Pavilion, and that now feels fragile:
-I executed a bad jump and then I said to myself: “I don’t want to continue forward”. I feel the weight of the world on my back.
Tokyo 2020 has barely begun, and yet Biles interprets that, for her, the Games are already over. So he retires to the Olympic village and, from there, he gives up on the finals that follow each other. He never repeats the feat of Rio 2016, with his four titles and five medals.
His story opens debates and social gatherings. Analysts, doctors, technicians and journalists applaud or question Biles’ blackout: their courage is praised for having shared the crisis and they also say that we dehumanize athletes.
Afterwards, the vertigo of the Games blurs Biles’ voice.
Days pass and new feats are recorded and we stop talking about the myth, which renounces the entire competition and also the vault, floor and uneven bars finals.
No one is waiting for him in Tokyo.
And then, unexpectedly, Simone Biles resurfaces: she goes out on the balance beam, completes a sober exercise, with few risks, adapted to her circumstances, and wins a bronze that corrects her drift and shades a bitter story with an ending happy
(He leaves Tokyo with two podiums, the tragic silver in the team competition and the bronze in the balance beam.)
And everyone happy?
Well, not entirely: since then, Simone Biles has not competed again.
(…)
These two years, Biles has barely appeared on the scene to testify in the case of Larry Nassar (the doctor who abused gymnasts, today a plague that will never regain freedom), she has married Jonathan Owens, defensive player of the Houston Texans of American football, has given lectures in defense of the rights of athletes and has concentrated on the care of their mental health.
He is now 26 years old and says that this whole rebuilding process has gone very well for him. And for this reason, a year before the 2024 Paris Games, he has announced that he will return to the pavilions.
He will do it on August 4 and 5 at the formidable NOW Arena in Hoffman Estates, a multi-purpose arena on the outskirts of Chicago, home of the US Classic, which recruits a range of superstars from the United States, including Sunisa Lee and Jade Carey, and which acts as an anteroom for the United States Championships, already at the end of August in San José, the base camp for the next Olympic Games.
“The current list of entries includes 12 members of the Olympic team and 16 members of our world teams – says a statement from USA Gymnastics -. And together, they have won 12 Olympic medals and 48 world medals”.
The news excites the lovers of artistic gymnastics: how Hollywood is this happy ending.
