The Twisties

July 27, 2021, the Ariake Gymnastics Centre, Tokyo. Simone Biles, twenty-four, the most decorated American gymnast in history, withdraws from the team final of the postponed 2020 Olympics after a vaulting attempt in which she experiences a phenomenon the gymnastics community calls 'the twisties' — a sudden loss of in-air spatial orientation that can be fatal in elite competition. She withdraws from four of her remaining five events. The decision, which she explains in real time as a matter of mental health, becomes the most-discussed moment of the Tokyo Games. She returns to competition at the 2023 U.S. Championships, wins her eighth all-around national title, and leads the U.S. team to the gold medal at Paris 2024 — her second Olympic gold and her eleventh Olympic medal overall.

Roland Mercer's biography opens earlier — in Columbus, Ohio, where Simone Arianne Biles was born in 1997, the third of four children of a young mother who was deemed unfit to raise them — and follows the arc through the foster-care years, the long Spring, Texas adoption by Ronald and Nellie Biles, the Bannon's Gymnastics academy under Aimee Boorman, the 2013 World Championships at fifteen, the long 2013-2016 perfect run, the 2016 Rio four golds and one bronze, the long 2017-2020 Larry Nassar testimony years, the 2021 Tokyo twisties, the 2022 Jonathan Owens marriage, the 2024 Paris team gold and the Yurchenko-double-pike vault now called the Biles II, and the long second post-Paris year in Spring, Texas.

What emerges is a portrait of the most decorated American gymnast in history, the Nassar survivor whose Senate testimony produced the Empowering Olympic, Paralympic, and Amateur Athletes Act of 2020, and the elite athlete whose decision to withdraw from competition in Tokyo for her mental health rewrote what an elite athlete was permitted to say.