Follow live coverage after Simone Biles returned to action with a bronze medal in the balance beam final at the Tokyo Olympics today.
The four-time Olympic champion hadn’t competed since withdrawing from the women’s team final last Wednesday after just one rotation, citing mental health concerns and a phenomenon called the “twisties”.
Described as a sort of mental block in which gymnasts lose their sense of orientation while in mid-air, it is universally feared and widely experienced.
“It’s honestly petrifying trying to do a skill but not having your mind and body in sync,” Biles wrote in an Instagram story last week, noting that she’d had these kinds of periods before and it had usually taken around two weeks to recover. “Something you literally have to take day by day, turn by turn.”
The 24-year-old went on to pull herself out of the individual finals for vault, floor and uneven bars.
But she returned on Tuesday morning to compete on the apparatus she won a bronze medal on in Rio five years ago and repeated the feat with a stunning routine to take third again.
