Gymnastics superstar Simone Biles left Tokyo on Wednesday with her fame intact, but changed from the person she had been before the games.
HOUSTON — Gymnastics superstar Simone Biles left Tokyo on Wednesday with her fame intact, but changed from the person she had been before the games. Suffering from the twisties — a mental condition in which gymnasts lose the sense of where their bodies are in midair — Biles stunned the world by withdrawing from some Olympics events.”I had no idea where I was in the air,” Biles said in an interview on the “Today” show, speaking of her performance in a team event. “You can literally see it in my eyes in the pictures, like I was petrified.”Biles, who won four gold medals and a bronze in the 2016 Olympics, went on to win bronze on the balance beam in Tokyo, a medal that meant “more than all the golds, because I’ve pushed through so much the last five years and the last week,” she said in a “Today” show interview. The experience, she said, allowed her to realize that she is “more than my medals in gymnastics. I’m a human being, and I’ve done some courageous things outside of this sport,” she said in the interview.
