After hobbling off the mat in Paris, Biles and her team of coaches and medical experts were forced to make a big decision with little time to spare: Would she continue competing, or would she withdraw from the Games (and face backlash) as she did at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics after battling the “twisties”? Biles considered it an unwelcome “déjà vu” moment. “Ugh. It was so annoying. And I think that’s what irritated me the most,” she recalled. “As soon as I got off the floor, I was like, ‘People are gonna think I’m quitting again.’”
And she wasn’t willing to let that happen. So she pressed on and, for her remaining time in Paris, straddled the line between preparedness and overdoing it. Coaches monitored her stretching, she wore a compression sleeve on her calf, and Team USA Gymnastics’ physician Marcy Faustin, MD, helped manage her pain—which, thankfully, didn’t get worse throughout the rest of the Games. Her coach, Laurent Landi, ultimately told cameras that Biles was diagnosed with a calf “strain slash tear.”
While the extent of the injury may come as a surprise to Netflix viewers, Biles wasn’t exactly shocked. At 27, she is “old for a gymnast,” she said in the docuseries, and her body, she joked, is “a ticking time bomb.” She also shared that she dealt with a few minor injuries while training for Paris, including a hyperextended knee and a calf muscle tear—yep, in the exact same place it tore during qualifications. However, the second time around was worse: “Most of the time, I can still walk normally and do everything,” she explained while receiving physical therapy. “On every single punch and take off, I could definitely feel my calf,” she recalled later. “But we’re doing so much, you can’t really focus on it.”
Somehow, Biles managed to file the pain to the back of her mind and focus on performing, which is exactly what her coaches and “religious” therapy attendance, as she called it, primed her to do. She explained that she uses a mental health technique called visualization—which involves conjuring up soothing images like the sights and sounds of the beach—to calm herself if she’s “having trouble” while competing, which “really helps.” “I knew I could do it physically,” she added as her long-anticipated Olympic return came to a close. “The part that was hard for me was if I could last mentally.”
As we all know, Biles left Paris victorious with three gold medals (for the team all-around, individual vault, and individual all-around competitions) and one silver (for the individual floor). “I truly did try to enjoy each and every moment,” she said of the journey. “But we took it one day at a time, and for that, I’m grateful.”
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