Simone Biles’ battle with the “twisties” at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics wasn’t her first encounter with the condition, her former coach Aimee Boorman reveals in a new book.
According to Boorman, Biles first experienced the disorienting and dangerous phenomenon—where gymnasts lose their air awareness—back in 2015, just months before the 2016 Olympics.
“Simone couldn’t twist — on basically anything,” Boorman, who worked with the Olympian from age 7 to the Rio Games in 2016, writes in The Balance: My Years Coaching Simone Biles, according to The Guardian.
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The gymnast “would physically stop herself from twisting during her routines because she was afraid of getting lost in the air,” Boorman continues. “Simone would never crash; she would just stop herself before ever attempting a twist.”
After undergoing therapy and consulting with her family, Biles overcame the twisties in time to resume twisting skills before the 2016 Olympic Trials ahead of the start of the Rio Games, The Guardian reported.
“Thankfully the twisties had passed without injury,” the coach wrote, according to the outlet, “and in the process, we demonstrated that an elite gymnast can avoid training elements for weeks without losing their skills.”
The most decorated gymnast managed to conquer the twisties for the 2016 Rio Olympics, winning four gold medals.
However, the condition resurfaced at the 2021 Tokyo Games, prompting her to withdraw from the team competition amid intense media scrutiny.
The ordeal led Biles to seek therapy and step away from international competition for two years. Her current coach, Laurent Landi, said he sensed something was wrong in Tokyo after witnessing her struggle with a warmup landing.
“I look at her face, and she pretends, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ “ Landi said in the Netflix documentary, Simone Biles Rising. “But when you get lost in something, no, you’re not fine.”
“I knew from that very moment it wasn’t like one time and done. You can feel it in your head,” Biles said. “I knew it wasn’t just like, ‘Oops, sorry.’ How am I supposed to tell them that this is bad, bad?”
Biles went on to describe the consequential moment. “To me it felt silent, almost like death,” she said. “And if I could have ran out of that stadium, I would have. But I was like keep it cool, calm, collected, don’t freak anybody out. Let’s go over and be like, ‘We’re done here.’ ”
In a later confessional, Biles opened up about her struggle with the twisties, candidly sharing her confusion and efforts to make sense of the unsettling experience. “Having these mental blocks in the gym recently has not been fun, it’s been scary,” she said.
Despite the setbacks at the Tokyo Olympics, Biles made a triumphant return at the Paris Games three years later, capturing four medals — including three gold — and reaffirming her status as the most decorated gymnast in history.
