2023-10-04 22:51:00
Antwerp (Belgium) (AFP) – American Simone Biles, back at the top after a two-year hiatus, has overcome the trials of life, especially a mental health problem at the Tokyo Olympics, to be reborn at the World Gymnastics Championships in Antwerp.
First modification: 05/10/2023 – 00:51Last modification: 05/10/2023 – 00:49
3 min
This Wednesday, less than ten months before the Paris Olympic Games, he further cemented his legendary status in his sport with a 20th world title, thanks to Team USA’s victory in the team competition.
Already considered the ‘GOAT’ (‘Greatest of all time’, the best of all time) at the start of the Tokyo Olympic Games in the summer of 2021, Simone Biles, queen of acrobatics, thrilled the world of sports by Show your physical and mental health problems on the Japanese date.
Harassed by ‘twisties’, a term that refers to the mental block caused by the loss of spatial orientation, she gave up several tests before bravely winning a bronze medal on balance beam.
His transparency on the subject opened the debate on the until then taboo topic of mental health in high-level sport.
Return from the ashes
At only 26 years old, Biles, who explained that she is still in psychological therapy, has returned from the ashes on several occasions.
Since her difficult childhood, the gymnast has jumped over numerous obstacles to become a powerful voice against abuse in sport and has unapologetically assumed her historical dimension as an athlete.
Born in 1997 in Columbus (Ohio), little Simone and her three siblings had to be sent to a shelter due to her mother’s alcohol and drug problems, who spent time in prison.
“I could never count on my biological mother. I remember that I was always hungry, afraid,” the gymnast said in a television interview in 2017.
“My grandparents saved me,” she said about Nellie and Ron Biles, whom she considers her parents and who changed the destiny of her life, adopting her and her little sister, while the other two were welcomed by other family members.
Biles discovered gymnastics at the age of six by chance during a school field trip. On a visit to a gymnastics center, she began to imitate the athletes, immediately attracting the attention of one of her coaches, who gave her a letter asking her family to allow her to enroll.
A year later she met Aimee Boorman, the coach who lifted her to the top and whom she considered her “second mother.”
Under his wing he burst into his first World Cup like a storm, in 2013 in Antwerp, establishing his almost absolute dominance of this sport with his first two gold medals.
Three years later, she amazed at the Rio Games with a marvelous performance that earned her four golds (team, all-around, vault and floor) and a bronze (bar).
Biles has just won her 26th World Cup medal in Antwerp, her twentieth gold, in six participations.
With a smile
In January 2018, Biles herself revealed that she was one of the around 200 victims, most of them minors, of the national team doctor Larry Nassar, sentenced in 2018 to between 40 and 125 years in prison for hundreds of sexual assaults committed during Two decades.
Biles raised her voice to denounce the passivity of the sports authorities in the face of abuses, committed over two decades, and demanded an independent investigation to determine if there were other authorities responsible.
“We did everything they asked of us to achieve the objective and they only had one damn job, which was to protect us, and they didn’t do it,” she stressed through tears.
Away from competitions for two years, Biles showed the happiness of her union with American football player Jonathan Owens through a sumptuous wedding in May 2023.
Biles, who claims to have always loved the “feeling of flying” that gymnastics gives her, flies again with a smile on her lips and with gold medals around her neck.
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