During the 2024 Olympics in Paris, Simone Biles cemented her place as the greatest gymnast of all time. Biles added three more golds and a silver to her career medal count, becoming the most decorated Olympic gymnast in history with 11 total medals and seven golds.
What makes Biles' career so remarkable is the fact that she did all of that while missing out on at least four more medal-winning opportunities in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics after withdrawing from everything but the balance beam due to the "twisties." The cute name for the affliction undermines the severity of it, as it is a terrifying loss of body control and awareness for a gymnast while in the air, presenting serious risk of injury if you can't place yourself to land while flipping and twisting.
Biles' difficulties with the twisties in 2021 brought it to the mainstream, as her withdrawal from the competition was one of the biggest stories of the Games. However, according to her longtime coach Aimee Boorman, it wasn't the first time she battled the twisties in an Olympic year.
In an excerpt from her new book via ESPN, "The Balance: My Years Coaching Simone Biles," Boorman detailed how she first got the twisties in the lead up to the Rio Olympics in 2016.
"Yep, before Simone introduced the world to the twisties in 2021, she had experienced this proprioception phenomenon in January of 2016," Boorman writes. "When this happens to a gymnast who is flipping ten-plus feet in the air and they lose body awareness in space and time -- not knowing if they're going to land on their back, feet or head -- it's much more dangerous [than the "yips" in baseball or golf]."
According to Boorman, Biles couldn't practice any aerial twisting elements for weeks early in 2016. Eventually, Biles was able to overcome that instance of the twisties in time for Olympic qualifying and went on to win four golds and a bronze in Rio. That was the performance that made Biles a household name and an American sporting star, and it apparently almost never happened.
