Listening to yourself and saying stop before the black hole hits.
Easy to say… Simone Biles posed words this Tuesday in New York Magazine on the torments that have shaken her life as a sportswoman and woman for several years and against which she tried to fight to participate in the Tokyo Olympics.
In vain.
Left Japan with a bronze medal, after having given up several events, cracking under the pressure, the 24-year-old American gymnast regrets having reached this end.
“I should have given up long before,” she said.
"If you look at everything I've been through the past seven years, I should never have been on another Olympic team."
Considered the greatest sportswoman in the history of her discipline, Simone Biles revealed in January 2018 to be one of the victims of the former doctor of the American women's team, Larry Nassar, sentenced to life in prison for sexual assault committed over two decades on more than 250 gymnasts, most of them minors.
“When Nassar was in the media, it was too much.
But I wasn't going to let him take something I had worked for since I was 6 years old.
I wasn't going to let him take that joy away from me.
So I pushed beyond what I could, for as long as my mind and body would allow, ”she explained.
"One morning, you wake up, you can't see anything"
In Tokyo, the young woman was to be the superstar of the Olympics.
But when she began her medal raid, she had suddenly stopped, the victim of "twisties", a potentially dangerous phenomenon which makes gymnasts lose their sense of direction when they are in the air.
She ended up competing in an event, gleaning bronze on the beam.
To read alsoJO: "I have no idea where I am in the air", the star of the gym Simone Biles facing her loss of bearings
“Let's say that up to the age of 30, you can see perfectly. And one morning you wake up, you can't see nothing. But people tell you to keep doing your job like you still have eyesight. You would be lost, wouldn't you? Biles said. “I did gymnastics for 18 years. I woke up - lost. How am I supposed to continue? Continued the one who won a total of 32 medals at the Olympic Games and the world championships. “It will probably be something that I will work on for 20 years,” she said. “I just want a doctor to tell me when I'm healed. Like when you have an operation and it's fixed. Why can't nobody tell me that in six months it will be over? "
Biles, who had previously said his anxiety problems came before Tokyo, hopes to help end any stigma, so people can be diagnosed faster and treatments can improve.
A subject on which more and more athletes are engaging, also like tennis player Naomi Osaka.
