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In the past, when she left the gym, she didn’t
allow issues with certain skills to spill over into the
rest of her day. But as Tokyo loomed, “my mind
was racing and I wasn’t going to sleep as easily,”
she says. The pandemic, which had delayed the
Games from 2020, played a huge role in that, she
thinks, since safety protocols meant she was lim-
ited to going to the gym and staying home. For the
gregarious Biles, that meant more time alone with
her thoughts. Things only got worse in Japan. “We
couldn’t hang out because of COVID-19 proto-
cols,” she says, “so things you normally don’t think
about because you don’t have time, now you have
hours on end to think about—those doubts, those
worries and those problems.”
Biles is the only survivor of the Nassar sex-
ual abuse scandal still competing, and pushing
for USAG and USOPC to be held responsible is
part of what’s driven her over the past few years.
“I definitely do think it had an effect,” she says
of that burden. “It’s a lot to put on one person. I
feel like the guilt should be on them and should
not be held over us. They should be feeling this
[pain], not me.”
It took Biles about a year after the first Nassar
survivors came forward to reveal publicly that she
is one of them; her mother Nellie remembers Biles
calling her in tears in 2017, saying she needed to
talk to her. Training every day only served as a re-
minder of what she had been through and the lack
of accountability by USAG. Biles didn’t feel she
could even drive herself to and from her therapy
sessions, so Nellie did, waiting outside in the car
in case her daughter needed her.
That work, Biles felt, mentally prepared her for
her second Olympics, which she attended without
family because of COVID-19 restrictions. She had
stopped going to therapy for about six months be-
fore the Games, Nellie says, insisting, “I’m fine,
Mom.” But after her scare on the vault, she called
Nellie crying. “The only thing Simone kept saying
was, ‘Mom, I can’t do it. I can’t do it,’ ” says Nellie.
In the days that followed, Biles says she got sup-
port from Team USA’s mental- health experts, who
were on-site for the first time at an Olympics. That
helped her make another courageous choice: com-
peting in the balance-beam final. “At that point, it
was no longer about medaling, but about getting
back out there,” she says. “I wanted to compete at
the Olympics again and have that experience that
I came for. I didn’t really care about the outcome.
On that beam, it was for me.”BILES’ aSSurEdnESS In SpEakIng her truth
and taking ownership of her fate offered per-
mission for athletes and non athletes alike to talk
more openly about challenges they’d once kept to
themselves. “Sacrifice gives back way more than it
costs,” says Kevin Love, a five-time NBA All-Star
whose 2018 discussion of his in-game panic at-
tacks helped start to destigmatize mental struggles
in his sport. “I do believe that it often takes one
person to change the trajectory of a whole system.”
Olympian Allyson Felix, who gave birth to her
daughter Camryn in 2018, knows how athletes are
expected to make winning their everything. She
says Biles will have more influence for stepping
back and taking stock of what really mattered than
she would have by snapping up more medals. “To
see her choose herself, we’re going to see the ef-
fects of that for the next generation,” says Felix,