Seconds before she sprinted to the vault to take off for a jump with 2.5 twists, Simone Biles glanced in the direction of the TV camera. There was doubt in her eyes, which was totally out of character. She was arguably one of the greatest athletes in the world, and the only difference between her and Serena Williams, Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, as The New York Times had pointed out, was that Biles did not lose.

But since setting foot in Tokyo for the 2020 Olympics, which were being held in mid-2021 without crowds due to COVID-19, with the aim of setting a record for winning the most Olympic medals, things had seemed off. Biles had developed the “twisties”, a sudden loss of spatial awareness while her body spun through the air. This was how she described it on Instagram: “Literally can not tell up from down. It’s the craziest feeling ever. Not having an inch of control over your body. What’s even scarier is since I have no idea where I am in the air I also have NO idea how I’m going to land. Or what I’m going to land on. Heads/hands/feet/back …“

In training, she had practised the complicated jump she had planned for the finals but only managed 1.5 twists and was lucky not to injure herself. Still, she wanted to push through for her team, just like she had in the team and individual qualifications. And despite making unusual mistakes, she was the only athlete to qualify for all the gymnastic discipline finals.

Biles sprinted to the vault and did a flick before she pushed off to spin around her axis, hands close to her body. Suddenly, she spread her arms to stop the rotations and braced for impact. In her own words, she was “shot out of the air”, and because she had no idea what was up or what was down, the
floor could hit her from any angle. Luckily, she landed on her feet, stumbling but just managing to stay upright. Minutes later, Biles told her teammates that she was withdrawing from the competition.

In the subsequent press conference, she explained that she had “simply got so lost” that her “safety was at risk as well as a team medal”. (Team USA won silver on the vault, behind Russia.) She then said: “I say put mental health first. Because if you don’t, then you’re not going to enjoy your sport and you’re not going to succeed as much as you want to. So it’s OK sometimes to even sit out the big competitions to focus on yourself because it shows how strong of a competitor and person that you really are, rather than just battle through it.”

Biles then disappeared from the world stage to work on her routines. She later revealed that this involved a university outside of Tokyo where soft landings were arranged. She captioned videos of her body dropping like a brick into cushions with comments like “no this was not happening in the USA” and “almost there”. Biles had taken at least two weeks to recover from previous episodes of the twisties, which meant she would miss all the other Olympic finals. She duly pulled out of the individual finals on the vault, uneven bars and floor.

In the Netflix series Simone Biles Rising, she recorded herself at that time, saying between sniffs and sobs, “I’m getting lost on my skills. I just don’t get how. I don’t know if I’m overthinking”, and “I don’t get like why it happens at the Olympics”. In the documentary, it is suggested that the psychological consequences of sexual abuse may have been the reason for her mental block. Biles was one of the more than 300 women and girls who were sexually abused by Larry Nassar, a doctor who was hired by USA Gymnastics – on his conviction for the abuse, he was sent to prison for a term of 175 years. To the surprise of many, Biles returned on the last day of the Olympic gymnastics competition to compete in the beam final.

Biles got through a scaled-down routine on the beam and won the bronze medal. It was perhaps the most prized result her career, having forgone five other medal opportunities to take care of her mental and physical health. Although she had done it for herself, she hoped it would be an inspiration for others struggling with mental issues.

Biles received a lot of praise for her decision to put her mental and physical health above anything else, even gold medals. People like Michelle Obama and Michael Phelps praised Biles for her courage to openly talk about her mental struggles. But there were also trolls worldwide who called Biles ‘selfish’, ‘a quitter’ and mentally weak. ‘The people that were yelling, saying mean things, were way louder than all of the support,’ she said in the Netflix series.

Biles decision not to compete was contrasted with another famous incident involving gymnast Kerri Strug at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Strug suffered damage to an ankle performing a vault, but despite the injury and the pain, she went on to complete another vault – virtually landing on one foot – to ensure gold for the US team. Now that was character. Biles, on the other hand, according to the trolls, was the latest example of a snowflake generation that did not persevere at all costs, that lacked a winner’s mentality to push through the hardest of times. “What happened to fighting through injury? What happened to working through stuff you didn’t really want to do?“ said one talking head, while big letters on the screen read: “Simone Biles keeps giving excuses for quitting.“

There were only two things that trolls and supporters of Biles agreed on: that her feelings got the better of her when things got difficult, and that she showed “vulnerability” by admitting that she struggled with the pressure – whether this was praiseworthy or not. “Biles was widely embraced as the latest active, elite athlete who had the courage to acknowledge her vulnerability,” said a piece in The New York Times titled “Biles rejects a long tradition of stoicism in sports”.

Did Biles’s feelings get in the way? Should she have been “more indifferent to her feelings”, stopped using mental health as “an excuse”, and “powered through and brought home the gold medal”?

Let’s have a look at athletes who experienced mental blocks in other sports and refused to talk about their emotions.

The mental block Biles experienced is quite common in professional sports. Some athletes gradually lose control over motions they have done thousands of times. Others suddenly develop spasms in front of a large crowd. See the numerous videos of tennis players, pitchers in baseball, golfers and
bowlers in cricket who suddenly look completely lost on a big stage. They search for their coach or raise their arms to their teammates mimicking the question: “What am I doing wrong?”

In recent years, neuroscientists have started to dive deeper into the physiological mechanisms that are causing golfers to lose control over their movements. They have found that for some golfers, the so-called yips present as involuntary movements in the hands and arms, like jerks, tremors or freezing, which are called focal dystonias. They can always be there, even in moments that are relatively stress-free, such as during practice, which makes it different to the choking that happens only in moments of pressure.

It’s not just golfers that can develop the yips. The issue has also been reported in baseball pitchers, snooker and darts players, and in shooting and archery. One bowler’s yips ended his cricket career, with his farewell to the game resulting in a YouTube video titled “The Worst Over Ever?” Whether the pressure of the Cheltenham & Gloucester Trophy Cup Final at a sold-out Lord’s Cricket Ground in 2001 caused him to choke, or whether it just exacerbated the yips, the result was that Scott Boswell lost control over a motion that he had done thousands and thousands of times before.

When a journalist visited him more than 10 years later, Boswell remembered the day vividly. His team Leicestershire had made it into the final partly thanks to a man-of-the-match performance by Boswell in the semi-final. The first over in the final went well until Boswell’s sixth and final ball, which presented the batsman with an easy boundary. “It just didn’t come out of my hand right,” Boswell told a Guardian journalist.

Boswell’s next over, the one that would be watched by 1.6 million people on YouTube, started with a huge wide. After the second wide, the noise of the crowd got louder. Like Biles at the Tokyo Olympics, Boswell lost control over his movements. His muscles grew tighter, his fingers more tense. “I just couldn’t let go of the ball. I wanted to get on with it, so I began to rush. The more I panicked, the more I rushed,“ he said.

An over in cricket consists of six legitimate balls. When a ball is considered wide, the batting team receives an extra run and the bowler must bowl the ball again. Normally, this happens only a few times in a cricket match, but Boswell sent down eight wides in a single over, five of them consecutive, leading to a fourteen-ball over. The umpire encouraged him to “keep bowling”, but in Boswell’s mind there was no escape to the never-ending over: “I was thinking: ‘I just want to get this
over, I just want to get this over’, but it kept going and going and going, wide after wide after wide.“

Boswell and his environment were textbook indifferent to his emotions, everyone acting as if nothing had happened. So there was nothing to be upset about when he was dropped for the following game. “We were playing Gloucestershire on the Monday after the final,” said Boswell. “Nobody spoke to me, I just wasn’t playing, that was it. I wasn’t told.” Another cricketer took him out for a pint, but all Boswell could say to him was: ’Yeah, what did happen there?” Boswell didn’t want to talk to a sports psychologist, and two weeks later his club sacked him. He was asked to play one more match for the title in the Sunday league, but after his first over went bad he
feigned cramp and ran off the field, retiring from cricket at age twenty-six.

Even then, Boswell remained stoic and did not talk about how losing his career made him feel. He couldn’t bowl a ball for years, and ended up losing much more than his career. “I put on a lot of weight and was drinking a lot,” he said. “I didn’t socialise, I lost a lot of friends. But I didn’t do anything about it, because I thought: I’m a man and men don’t do those things.”

And here Boswell raises an important point about dealing with adversity and performing under pressure: it is often framed as something one needs to push through, and that when someone shows emotions, let alone talks about them, this is a weakness. Often, this is phrased in misogynist terms. When the pressure goes up, athletes need to “be ballsy”, “not be pussies”. When Biles seemed to crack under pressure in 2021, many thought that she didn’t look or sound stoic at all – she didn’t “man up” and show character like, for instance, the stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius. She was “looking for excuses”. These gendered expectations to push feelings down, to get on with it, to avoid being emotional, compromise mental health, particularly for men in Australia.

When you compare Biles and Boswell’s responses to their mental blocks, the differences couldn’t be bigger. Biles’s way of talking about her emotions – and her rejection of “a long tradition in Stoicism” – got a lot of negative attention. But what faded into the background was how quickly she bounced back: within two weeks of developing the twisties, she was back on the biggest stage doing jumps that could seriously injure her – or worse. Boswell couldn’t bowl, did the stoic thing of suppressing his emotions, and never returned to professional cricket.

This is an edited extract from Nerves of Steel by Ger Post, published by Melbourne University Publishing, out August 12, 2025.

News, results and expert analysis from the weekend of sport sent every Monday. Sign up for our Sport newsletter.