EFE.- “I just want a doctor to tell me when I’m going to get over this,” said American gymnast Simone Biles, in therapy after retiring from competition due to psychological problems during the last Tokyo Games, which, she admits, should “have resigned ”.
“They operate on you and it is fixed. Why can’t someone tell me that in six months this will be over?“He wonders about his own mental health in an interview with the website of the magazine ‘New York’.
Biles, who is currently participating in an exhibition tour but has not resumed training, an adventure that “probably” will have to deal with his problems “for 20 years.”
“It doesn’t matter how much I try to forget. It is a continuous job ”, he adds.
Read: Lessons from Simone Biles for everyday life
Simone Biles, winner of five Olympic medals at the Rio 2016 Games, revealed months later that she had been one of the victims of sexual abuse by Larry Nassar, the doctor for the US national team.
“If you look at everything I’ve been through in the last seven years, I should not have been part of the Olympic team again“He says about his participation in the Tokyo Games. “I should have resigned much earlier, when Larry Nassar was in the media for two years. It was too much. But I wasn’t going to let him take something I’ve worked for since I was 6 years old. I wasn’t going to let that joy take away from me. So I got over it to the degree that my mind and body allowed me to. “
However, when he arrived in Japan his wish went from “wanting to be on a podium to wanting to go home”.
Do not miss: ‘We are human’, Biles asked to talk about mental health with athletes
“In the moments leading up to it, I got more and more nervous,” she says. “I didn’t feel as safe as I should with all the training we had,” she says.
Biles participated in Tokyo in the qualifying round, but withdrew in the team final after doing only the jumping exercise, in which he suffered an episode of disconnection between mind and body; is what is known in gymnastic language as ‘twisties’.
“It was a miracle that he fell to his feet. Anyone else would have come out on a stretcher. As soon as I landed on that jump, I went and said to my coach: ‘I can’t continue,’ ”he recalls.
After skipping the individual, floor, jumping and asymmetric finals in the following days, he participated in the bar with a modified exercise with which he won the bronze medal.
It may interest you: Simone Biles blames the federation and the ‘entire system’ for abuse of gymnasts
“I was not physically able,” he says in the interview. “Every time we tried, my body would say, ‘Simone, calm down. Sit down. We do not do it’. And I had never experienced that ”.
The gymnast compares her physical inability to do her pirouettes now with a loss of vision.
“One morning you wake up and you don’t see shit, but people tell you to go ahead and do your day job like you still have vision. You would be lost, right? I have been doing gymnastics for 18 years. I woke up and had lost it. How am I supposed to go about my day? ”He wonders.
Biles expresses his wish that everything was as easy as changing the batteries: “Where are the batteries? Can we put them back? We can go?”.
Subscribe to Forbes Mexico