Psychologist on Biles: "The world on top of a little girl" 4:21
(CNN) -
You can learn a lot about a subculture from the jargon it develops.
Gymnastics has a lot of jargon around fear: the "twisties", the "headcasing", the mental block, the "dancing", the "balking".
Gymnastics is obviously physically demanding with a high injury rate.
But psychologically it is also extremely difficult.
Many of the techniques could kill you.
When Kevin Durant misplaced his foot by 2.5 cm in Game 7 of the NBA Eastern Conference semifinals, his shot was worth two points instead of three, and the Brooklyn Nets lost in overtime.
When Riley McCusker's foot drifted 2.5 cm away on her dismount from the beam at the 2017 American Cup, it fell back against her neck.
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For every perfect, floating jump made in competition, thousands are made in practice, many of which end with unsettling scrapes, crashes and near misses.
When Simone Biles withdrew as the majority of the Olympic team final, she said it was not because of a physical injury, but because of her mental health. This does not mean that you were sad or did not have the mood to compete. It means that her psychological state put her at significant physical risk. If your brain doesn't accept what your body does, you could be seriously hurt.
Horse jumping was the first event for the United States and Russia in the team finals. Biles was supposed to compete in an Amanar, a horse jump that flips back with 2.5 spins. Amanar has hurt a lot of knees, but Biles has been competing spectacularly in horse jumping since she was a 16-year-old with a bridle in 2013. But in warm-ups she retired, doing only 1.5 turns in a jump that was rose quite high in the air. In the competition it was worse: 1.5 turns again, but with less height, which forced a deep step outside.
A Yurchenko with 1.5 spins is worth much less than an Amanar, which is why Biles scored just 13,766.
The United States was one point behind Russia after the horse jump, which is usually where the Americans secure a big advantage.
This made the chance of winning the gold very low, no matter how well Biles' teammates recovered.
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Biles withdrew from the rest of the team competition.
"I don't trust myself as much as I used to," Biles told reporters in Tokyo.
"I'm a little more nervous when I do gymnastics. I feel like I'm not having that much fun either."
Biles later withdrew from individual competition as well, again saying that he wanted to focus on his mental health.
USA Gymnastics said it supported her decision "wholeheartedly," adding in its statement that Biles would be evaluated every day.
ANALYSIS |
Simone Biles' retirement reminds us that she is human and that she remains the best of all time
A case of the 'twisties' ("twists")
He said at morning practice that he had a bit of "twisties."
Twisties are a mysterious phenomenon: suddenly, a gymnast can no longer do a twist technique that she has done thousands of times before.
Your body just won't cooperate, your brain loses track of where you are in the air.
You find out where the ground is when you hit it.
I was a competitive gymnast for 10 years, albeit mediocre. I quit when I gained 17.8 centimeters in height and an attitude problem, in addition to crippling fear and a complete lack of flexibility. Since then, I have followed gymnastics obsessively and covered it from time to time. And in March, I fell for the twisties myself when I dragged a CNN crew to an open gym class in Dallas and threw sad little full spins on foam.
Swiss gymnast Giulia Steingruber had "twisties" in 2014. "When I wanted to twist, especially in horse jumping ... I had no feeling where I was. I was really scared," Steingruber said in a 2016 documentary. "It was quite difficult. for me, because I didn't understand why it was coming and I couldn't stop it. It was weird for me and it was horrible. The feeling was really horrible. "
He had to relearn it, starting with a simple half turn on the floor.
"I started learning the spin again as a little girl."
In 2016, she won an Olympic bronze medal in horse jumping.
Going around and around at the same time can be extremely disorienting;
you cannot just look where you are with your eyes.
You have to feel it.
This is proprioception, a sense of where your body is in space and what it is doing.
In gymnastics, this is called the "sense of air."
And Biles is famous for how good hers is.
"She's always had an incredible sense of air, which is what you need in this sport," her former coach Aimee Boorman told
Houstonia
magazine
in 2015. "She doesn't crash very often. Other girls, you'll just see them crash, or get lost in the air. That does not happen with her. "
His natural talent is the reason why his wrong horse jump was so impressive.
But your decision to step back makes perfect sense.
When the "twisties" start, it's hard to know when they'll go away.
But Biles' decision to protect himself marks a departure from the old way gymnastics worked in America.
Simone Biles: "I didn't want to risk a medal for my mistakes ... I deal with the demons in my head"
"We also have to focus on ourselves, because at the end of the day we are human too," she said.
"So we have to protect our mind and body, rather than just going out and doing what the world wants us to do."
At the 2016 American Cup, I asked then-national team coordinator Marta Karolyi how she dealt with female athletes who felt fear.
She blew me away, saying that at the elite level fear is no longer a problem.
This was obviously not true.
When
asked by
The New Yorker
in 2016 why she wouldn't try a hand spring double-front horse jump, called Produnova, Biles said, "I'm not trying to die."
But many elite gymnasts have described the pressure of never showing weakness under Karolyi.
"Bailing", "balking" and "headcases"
A bit more jargon: "bailing" (which would translate to rescue) is when you stop doing a technique in the middle of it before you've done it all, like doing a single spin instead of a double.
"Balking" (which would translate to rejection) is when you hesitate or stop doing the technique before it actually begins, especially dangerous in back turns, because often the momentum does not stop but slows down and can cause you to crash into your neck or head.
(Baseball also has this term, but it tends to carry less risk to the spine.)
A mental block is when a technique becomes a fixation and you cannot force yourself to do it, even if it is relatively easy.
A "headcase," which is almost an insult in gymnastics, is when a talented gymnast collapses in competition.
At the 2011 national championships, Gabby Douglas turned down the beam disassembly twice: two rear springs in a double pirouette.
After the first "balk", which provoked shouts from the crowd, a coach can be seen pointing to the beam to tell it to climb back up.
At the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Kerri Strug landed a horse jump on one leg as the United States won its first team gold medal in gymnastics.
This is remembered by ordinary people as a glorious moment of sports heroism, but in the world of gymnastics, it is more nuanced.
In reality, the United States did not need Strug's score to win gold.
In Athlete A, a documentary on how former team doctor Larry Nassar was able to get away with his crimes of sexual abuse for so long within elite gymnastics, 1986 national champion Jennifer Sey argues that gymnasts were trained under the Karolyi's system to be perfectly compliant.
About Strug's horse jump, Sey said, "Everyone cheers her on like this heroine, and all she could think was, 'Why are we celebrating this? Don't pretend like she had a choice ... No I was going to do nothing but go do that horse jump. "
Simone Biles withdraws from Tokyo 2020 all-around final to focus on her mental health
Gymnastics has changed since then, and even since 2016. This has been in part thanks to Biles, who has been so extraordinarily cool that USA Gymnastics has had to respond to his complaints.
It has also been through the Internet, where the gymternet has put great pressure on the gymnastics establishment to change.
The most influential gymnastics coverage comes not from NBC broadcasts, but from the Gymcastic podcast, which since 2012 has been relentless in pushing forward radical ideas such as that psychological abuse of female athletes is bad, that taking care of your mental health is important, and that taking care of your mental health is important. Elite gymnasts are not fat just because they have breasts.
"It's the Olympics," Biles told reporters, "but at the end of the day, we want to walk out of here, not dragged on a stretcher."
Simone biles