"I just want a doctor to tell me when I'm going to get over this," said American gymnast Simone Biles, in therapy after withdrawing from competition due to psychological problems during the last Tokyo Games, which, she admits, she should "to have resigned"
"They operate on you and it's fixed. Why can't someone tell me what In six months this will be over?", he wonders about his own mental health in an interview with the 'New Yorker' magazine website.
Biles, who is currently on an exhibition tour but has not resumed training, ventures that he will "probably" have to deal with his problems "for 20 years."
"It doesn't matter how much I try to forget. It's a continuous job," he adds.
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 US team doctor.
"If you look at everything I've been through in the last seven years, I shouldn't have made the Olympic team again," she says of her participation in the Tokyo Games. "I should have quit long before, 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 him take away from me. that joy. So I got over it to the extent that my mind and body allowed me to."
However, when he arrived in Japan his desire went "from wanting to be on a podium to wanting to go home."
"In the moments leading up to it, I got more and more nervous," she says. "I didn't feel as confident as I should have with all the training we were going through," she says.
Biles participated in Tokyo in the qualifying round, but withdrew in the team final after doing only the vault exercise, in which he suffered a mind-body disconnect episode; it is what is known in gymnastic parlance as 'twisties'.
"It was a miracle that I landed on my feet. Anyone else would have gone off on a stretcher. As soon as I landed on that jump, I went and told my coach, 'I can't go on,'" he recalls.
After skipping the individual, floor, vault and asymmetrical finals on the following days, she participated in the barre with a modified exercise with which he won the bronze medal.
"I wasn't physically capable," she says in the interview. "Every time we'd try, my body would say, 'Simone, calm down. Sit down. We're not going to do it.' And I've never experienced that before."
The gymnast compares her physical inability to do her pirouettes now with a loss of vision.
"One morning you wake up and you can't see shit, but people tell you to go ahead and do your day job like you still have vision. You'd be lost, right? I've been doing gymnastics for 18 years. I woke up and I had lost it How am I supposed to go about my day?" she wonders.
Biles wishes everything was as easy as a battery change: "Where are the batteries? Can we put them back? Can we go?"
