Simone Biles Turned Adversity Into Her Advantage

The great Simone Biles is human. That revelation gives the rest of us mortals permission to falter as well—especially for those of us who tend to be driven, really about anything. On July 27th, the New York Times reported that Simone Biles dropped out of the U.S. Gymnastics Olympic team competition, citing a mental block and the need to take care of herself. Yet, even in that very public moment of vulnerability, while the competition was still in progress, Biles stood out as a leader and a spokesperson for the imperative of mental health among elite athletes and, by extension, for all of us.

Novel circumstances can upend even the most practiced and accomplished level of function.

Of two main points, the first is that the most accomplished individuals, even those known for their consistency and reliability as Biles was, can flounder under novel circumstances. In her research on the factors that influence athletic performance under pressure, Dr. Sian Beilock (in Hidden Brain), psychologist, cognitive scientist, and President of Barnard College, found that working memory processes (for athletic and, by extension, all cognitive processes) are interrupted when elements consistent with past practice(s) are removed, therefore causing high levels of unwanted stress and altered perception and therefore judgment. Take, for example, when parents attend practice and then suddenly do not attend. Or when the reverse happens.

Beilock also found that practice is important for developing fluid and automated processes during a performance. However, in order for a practice to impress upon muscle memory and other forms of automatic performance so important to athletes (and all forms of high-level performance, including the practice of therapy, artistic performance, etc.), the practice must take place under the same conditions as the ultimate performance.

Background

The fact that Biles had suffered some unsettling setbacks in the years leading up to the 2021 Tokyo Olympics left her vulnerable to the disruption caused by the novel circumstances of these Olympics—isolation, mask-wearing, Covid testing, and worst of all, the absence of her family. Biles was known to have valued the continual presence of her cheering and supportive family at her competitions.

Biles had a rough life starting in early childhood when she was raised by her single mom, who suffered from substance abuse. She went into foster care and later experienced sexual abuse at the hands of team doctor Larry Nasser. From a young age, Biles was exposed to the relentless pressure of gymnastics training and harshness at the hands of coaches.

Because of her early and prodigious talent, Biles was seen as an Olympic hopeful and the carrier of prestige for Team USA. She is widely quoted as saying that “she felt the weight of the world on her shoulders” and that she might only be remembered for her medals. One wonders whether she ever felt that she could be loved and valued for herself as an individual apart from her accomplishments and what they meant for those who might benefit from them.

Consistency makes perfect

While it would be presumptuous to maintain that anyone outside of her inner circle can really know what caused her to withdraw from the competition on July 27th, it seems safe to speculate that the strange circumstances of the Tokyo Olympics deprived Biles of the conditions that she had come to depend upon during practice and ultimately performance. Those conditions, according to Beilock, are what enable an accomplished athlete like Biles to prevail over the distractions that arise during the actual competition and to rely on the aspects of performance that need to be automatic.

There is a lesson to be learned for all of us in Biles’s courageous withdrawal. The pressure created by the novel circumstances of the pandemic when our worlds turned upside-down provided an opportunity for reframing and taking stock of what matters to us. I write about this phenomenon of using the pandemic as an opportunity for positive change in my book, How Are You? Connection in a Virtual Age.

How many of us lost our bearings or even felt disoriented during the months of the pandemic, as Biles did in the air that day as she catapulted over the vault? How many of us felt our old routines, work and personal alike, upended, and our functioning impaired? While few of us need to perform at the level of an Olympic athlete with its demands for intense and sustained concentration combined with enormously high levels of energy and precision, we all need to perform in more ordinary and quotidian ways in our personal relationships, school work, professional work or hobbies, and self-care.

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An opportunity for a new kind of leadership

Second, in her moment of surrender to the forces of gravity and the rattle of her own inner turmoil, Biles emerged as a leader. Other competitors might have persisted in the competition regardless of their concerns because they worried that teammates, coaches, and important others in their life would be angry or disappointed with them. Biles made an important statement to the world by listening to her inner compass (and body), prioritizing them, and then acting on them. Her public statements were brave in their raw honesty.

As an athletic hero who is now a living legend, Biles used her own personal experience to advance the cause of mental health and showed that top athletes could generalize their leadership beyond sports. She delivered a blow to the institutionalized stigma of mental health. Her assertiveness is built on the challenges mounted by such outspoken athletes as Michael Phelps, Naomi Osaka, and Carl Nassib, all of whom have publicly come forth with their personal travails and advocated for the centrality of mental health. Phelps and Osaka decried the unbearable pressures imposed by their competitions. Biles became a winner in the competition between the humanization of high-performance athletics on the one hand (or high-level performances in any field) and the competing interests of institutions on the other. When it comes to the prioritization of mental health, everyone wins.