Simone Biles won gold at the Paris 2024 Olympics women’s gymnastics individual all-around finals Thursday—a milestone that took as much mental health work as it did physical training.
Today, the three-time Olympian shared an image of herself meditating on the athlete bench ahead of her floor routine at yesterday’s finals—a moment that was streamed live on television and captured fans’ attention as the world awaited her latest grand performance.
She finished with an overall score of 59.566.
“Mental health matters,” she wrote on Instagram alongside the touching image.
Biles has long been open about her mental health journey. At the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, Biles famously dropped out of the team final and women’s individual all-around to focus on her mental wellness.
On her Instagram Story after the fact, the Team USA gymnast told fans why she’d decided to gracefully exit. “For anyone saying I quit. I didn’t quit my mind & body are simply not in sync,” she wrote. “As you can see here.”
She further explained that she felt disoriented in her own body during her exercises—a phenomenon known in gymnastics as “the twisties”—and therefore did not feel confident enough to compete.
“I don’t think you realize how dangerous this is on hard/competition surface,” she added of the twisties. “Nor do I have to explain why I put my health first. Physical health is mental health.”
As the Cleveland Clinic explains, the twisties are an abrupt breakdown in communication between an athlete’s body and brain, rendering a gymnast dangerously unable to sense where their body is in relation to the ground.
Despite having faced criticism for her withdrawal in Tokyo, Biles has since called it the best decision she ever made for herself. And if her two Olympic gold medals at this year’s Paris Games are any indication, she was absolutely right.
Yesterday, gymnastics’ Greatest Of All Time held up a diamond-encrusted goat necklace while up on the Olympic podium, a big smile on her face and her latest gold medal around her neck. “It’s a little ode—I mean, a lot of people love it. They always call me the GOAT, so I thought it would be really special if I got one made,” she told the BBC. “And the haters hate it, so I love that even more, and it’s just a special part of me that I have here, as well as in the [Olympic] Village I have like a stuffed goat, just to get a reminder: ‘You can go out there, you can do it, you’ve done it before, so let’s go.’ ”
Rosa Sanchez is the senior news editor at Harper’s Bazaar, working on news as it relates to entertainment, fashion, and culture. Previously, she was a news editor at ABC News and, prior to that, a managing editor of celebrity news at American Media. She has also written features for Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, Forbes, and The Hollywood Reporter, among other outlets.