I should’ve quit way before Tokyo: Simone Biles opens up about her mental health during Olympics

US gymnastics icon Simone Biles said on Monday she should have quit “way before Tokyo” but held onto her Olympic dream even though it took a heavy emotional toll on her well-being.

The 24-year-old Biles was expected to dominate at the Tokyo Games but instead caused a sensation by pulling out of the opening event of the women’s gymnastics competition after being plagued by an attack of the “twisties”.

“If you look at everything I have gone through the past seven years,” Biles told New York Magazine in an interview released Monday. “I should have never made another Olympic team. I should have quit way before Tokyo.”

Biles said mental health concerns that led to her dramatic withdrawal had begun even before she arrived in Japan. A survivor of sexual abuse, Biles told the magazine that the Larry Nassar scandal took an overwhelming emotional toll.

“It was too much,” she said of the USA doctor Nassar abuse scandal that played out in public for two years. “But I was not going to let him take something I have worked for since I was six years old. I wasn’t going to let him take that joy away from me. So I pushed past that for as long as my…

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