The “Unstoppable” Simone Biles

I watch, entranced, as the mes­mer­iz­ing and grav­i­ty-defy­ing Simone Biles vaults 12 feet and nine inch­es in the air, exe­cut­ing a near-per­fect Yurchenko dou­ble pike. The cam­era cuts away to show the face of Brazilian gym­nast Rebeca Andrade, Biles’ clos­est com­peti­tor for the gold medal. Andrade is vis­i­bly thrilled for Biles, lift­ing both hands to get a dou­ble high-five from the GOAT as she walks by. Everyone knows they just wit­nessed gym­nas­tics history. 

“Wow,” the com­men­ta­tor breathes. “The GOAT is unstoppable.” 

The next day, my Instagram feed is inun­dat­ed with #unstop­pable con­tent show­ing bits of Biles’ Paris per­for­mances. A video of Biles on the bal­ance beam set to Sia’s hit song Unstoppable goes viral. Every arti­cle and com­men­ta­tor has the same thing to say. “Biles is an unstop­pable force.”

But this doesn’t acknowl­edge the obvi­ous. She’s unstop­pable now only because she did stop.

Biles famous­ly pulled out of most of her sched­uled event per­for­mances at the Tokyo Olympics in 2022 when she devel­oped a bad case of the twisties. Despite the charm­ing-sound­ing name, the twisties refer to the psy­cho­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­non a gym­nast expe­ri­ences when they encounter a dis­con­nect between body and mind. This gym­nas­tic ver­sion of the yips caus­es an ath­lete to lose mid-air spa­tial aware­ness, which could result in seri­ous injury. “We’re not just ath­letes. We’re peo­ple . . . At the end of the day, we don’t want to be car­ried out of there on a stretch­er,” she said.

Biles’ anx­i­ety was exac­er­bat­ed by the pres­sure of the Olympics – so many heavy expec­ta­tions on the shoul­ders of the diminu­tive 4’8” ath­lete – and the iso­la­tion of the COVID pro­to­cols dur­ing train­ing. She was either at home or the gym, and always alone, fer­tile men­tal ground for some­one with a his­to­ry of depres­sion and sui­ci­dal thoughts (Biles was one of the hun­dreds of women who were sex­u­al­ly assault­ed by for­mer USA Gymnastics doc­tor Larry Nassar). 

So she stopped. And she breathed. And she healed. 

While many peo­ple cel­e­brat­ed Biles’ choice to pri­or­i­tize her men­tal health, plen­ty of oth­ers called her a quit­ter. But Biles under­stands that one can­not have a strong body with­out a strong mind. 

The idea that stop­ping equals quit­ting is an espe­cial­ly tox­ic one. When in con­stant motion, our ner­vous sys­tem gets stalled in a fight or flight state. And a stressed body doesn’t lend itself to opti­mal performance. 

We could all ben­e­fit from learn­ing to lis­ten more to the ani­mal needs of our bod­ies, slow­ing and stop­ping more often than we do. Stopping cre­ates space for heal­ing, for bounc­ing back a more resilient and ground­ed us. Resilience isn’t about how quick­ly you get back up after falling. It’s about how ful­ly you show up when you stand up. Overcoming adver­si­ty takes time. If we want to be unstop­pable, we must learn to stop too.