Does talking about mental health help or hinder athletes?

Watching Simone Biles on her way to winning four gold medals at the Rio Olympics back in 2016 was to see someone having the time of her life. The joy she took from her work, the simple delight in achievement was a pleasure to observe. In her post-event press conferences, her grin illuminated the room. We reporters were charmed off our feet. Mind, it was no surprise she looked pleased. The things she was doing – defying gravity, physics and logic with every leap, bound and somersault – were so remarkable even she was required to stand back and admire.

Five years on and how things have changed. On Tuesday night in Tokyo, as the team gymnastics competition began, the champion looked distracted. Her characteristic verve and spirit was subdued, her light dimmed. Something was clearly wrong, as was evident when she fouled up on her first routine, stumbling, stuttering and scoring the lowest single mark she has ever recorded at the Games. Moments later, she was gone, withdrawing from the fray. The superstar had left the building.

It was an extraordinary moment in world sport. Twenty-four-year-old Biles, apparently destined to be the most watched person on the planet during the 17 days of Tokyo’s Olympics, had walked away in the midst of competition. Not because she was injured physically, she later explained – to protect her mental health; something that has become a focus for a rising number of young sports stars. But is it helping, or hindering, their game?

In the Covid-constrained claustrophobia of the Team USA’s Tokyo headquarters, Biles had felt anxious, confused, weighed down by circumstance, responsibility and a growing fear of the consequence of failure. “I just didn’t want to go on,” she said, when she faced us reporters again after her decision, her smile no longer quite so radiant. In truth, we should have seen it coming. Just 24 hours before her withdrawal, she had put up on Instagram a forlorn post from the lonely isolation of her Games quarters, separated by thousands of miles from the consoling arms of family and friends.

And as she stood back, withdrawing too from her individual floor final, another of the five events that were expected to yield her yet more bullion at these Olympics, the immediate reaction from many was to question what on earth she has to worry about. Piers Morgan led the gathering consensus from the sofa that she should pull herself together, stop whingeing and get on with it; that’s what proper champions do – they don’t succumb to anything, least of all a bit of soul searching. Biles, by contrast, wrote that her decision to exit “shows power in the athlete” – that giving up in order to “protect” her mental health “shows how strong of a person and competitor you are”.

The notion is a marked difference from that of sports stars prior. Callum Skinner, an Olympic gold medal-winning cyclist, admitted that his withdrawal from the 2018 Commonwealth Games was not in fact the result of stomach issues, as his team had relayed, but in fact because he was “terrified”. Biles’s honesty, he said, was a “great step forward for the sport”.

We revere athletes for their resilience and aptitude, their ability to face down the kind of challenges that make the rest of us mortals whimper at the very thought. Real sporting heroes don’t give up the moment things get a little inconvenient; they can access a part of their brains, surely, that are capable of closing off any thoughts outside of those directly pertaining to the game at hand. Yet while issues of this nature once afflicted those whose sporting careers had ended, this now hits significantly earlier for the modern international sports star. Why? The attention and pressure is like nothing previously encountered.

The scrutiny for a practitioner of Biles’s accomplishment is more relentless than it has ever been. There is no escape. Her brilliance has turned her into a figure of assumed public ownership across the globe. We all think we know her. We all think we own her. At every turn she is required to be available to the media, to be the upbeat spokesman for her sport, carrying the expectations of her nation. More than that, she is not merely required to be excellent at her chosen craft, she is positioned in the wider mind as a spokesman for her generation – a previously unthought mix of champion, influencer and advocate for social issues.

Nowhere is that rolling pressure more evident than on social media, the real game changer from the past. Biles is from a generation that is plugged in to 24-hour feedback. Moreover, she is encouraged by her advisers to be on all platforms, on the assumption that it is good for brand awareness. The trouble is, the moment things go wrong, the response buzzes in her hand. Immediate and overwhelming, she is faced with the kind of ferocious critique that plays on the mind, sapping confidence and belief, extracting the joy with every trolling intervention.

And Biles, it needs to be mentioned, is still a young woman, unformed and inexperienced. On medication to calm her ADHD, the nervous energy that she feeds off in competition can, when under stress, act as a wholly counter-productive force – not to mention that, if not mentally on one’s A-game, an athlete could potentially do themselves life-changing damage. Add to this that she, like many of her generation of star American gymnasts, was a victim of the US gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar, a prolific sexual abuser – and subsequently spoke out about the toll this took, and the depression and therapy that followed. She retweeted a message on Twitter suggesting that the abuse left her continuing to struggle. She has spoken too of her parents feeding the cat instead of her and her sister as children, before they were adopted and raised by her grandparents; of the importance of MeToo and Black Lives Matter and other major, harrowing experiences that someone who really only wants to do a triple somersault would never have been expected to before. Under the ceaseless urge for perfection, Biles appears to have cracked.

Biles is not the first to do so – far from it. But does describing her exit as “strong” denigrate those committed to powering through? And isn’t losing something athletes should be au fait with, whatever the reason behind it? Gymnastics in particular is littered with stories of young girls put under intolerable pressure by systems designed to produce winners. For every one who makes it, there are dozens left shattered on the wayside. Now there is a growing sense of being able to speak out. The British tennis player Emma Raducanu pulled out of Wimbledon this year after experiencing breathing difficulties. Naomi Osaka took time off the grand slam circuit. Cricketers like Marcus Trescothick and Andrew Flintoff, footballers like Stan Collymore and Lee Hendrie, many sportspeople have spoken about how their mental health issues compromised their performance.

Biles is, however, easily the most prominent. Poised as she was to win everything this summer, with her decision to walk away she has changed the landscape. She has made it legitimate for any sportsperson to question whether sport is the most important thing on Earth. And from the stadium, admitting the truth about her exit truly felt like the mark of a proper champion.