Four-times Olympic gold medallist Simone Biles told New York Magazine that she should have quit gymnastics “way before Tokyo,” where she suffered from a case of “twisties” that derailed her attempt at a record haul of six golds.
The 24-year-old American dropped out of the opening event at the Summer Games, the team competition in July, after just one vault and later said she was struggling with the “twisties,” a serious mental block in which gymnasts lose their sense of orientation.
In an interview released on Monday, Biles told the publication that she struggled with anxiety after arriving in Tokyo.
“If you looked at everything I’ve gone through for the past seven years, I should have never made another Olympic team,” said Biles, citing the time former Team USA doctor Larry Nassar spent in the media before he was given two prison sentences of 40 to 125 years and 40 to 175 years for molesting gymnasts.
“I should have quit way before Tokyo.”
The 19-time world championship title-holder told lawmakers earlier this month how the FBI and U.S. gymnastic and Olympic officials failed to stop the sexual abuse that she and hundreds of other athletes suffered from Nassar.
Simone Biles condemns U.S. Olympic Committee, FBI for sex-abuse crisis
Biles held back tears on the 15th of September, as she told lawmakers how the FBI and U.S. gymnastic and Olympic officials failed to stop the sexual abuse that she and hundreds of other athletes suffered from former doctor Larry Nassar.
“To be clear, I blame Larry Nassar and I also blame an entire system that enabled and perpetrated his abuse,” she said before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee alongside fellow gymnasts McKayla Maroney, Aly Raisman and Maggie Nichols.
Biles added that USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee failed to act while the FBI “turned a blind eye.”
The emotional hearing painted a damning picture of FBI, which botched the Nassar investigation so badly that he was able to continue abusing more victims for over a year before he was finally arrested.
FBI Director Chris Wray made no excuses and said the bureau had fired one of the agents who had falsified the details of Maroney’s 2015 interview about the abuse.
“On no planet is what happened in this case acceptable,” he said, later adding that the conduct of the agents who botched the case “was beyond the pale.”
With anger in her voice, Maroney recalled how in 2015 she spent three hours on the phone telling the FBI the details of her story that her own mother had not even heard, including accounts of sexual abuse she endured during the Olympic games in London by Nassar, whom she described as “more of a pedophile than he was a doctor.”
