Simone Biles is looking back at her road to healing ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Ahead of her third Olympics, the world’s most decorated gymnast reflected on her struggles at the 2020 Olympic Games—including withdrawing from several events citing mental health concerns and a case of the “twisties”— that almost derailed her career.
“It’s a trauma response of everything that has happened,” Biles said on the Netflix docuseries Simone Biles Rising, released July 17, “just being like, a survivor and all of the other things.”
In 2018, former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University doctor Larry Nassar was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison for sexually abusing scores of young female gymnasts, including Biles and other Team USA gymnasts, under the guise of medical treatment.
“Everything that has happened, I’ve just like, I’ll push it down, shove it down, wait until my career’s done, go fix it.’ And something like this happens and unfortunately, to me, it happened at the Olympics,” Biles, 27, said about her struggles in Tokyo. “I didn’t get the proper care before because I just thought I was OK.”
