Simone Biles: I Should Have Quit Before Olympics

In an extensive profile at The Cut, Simone Biles says she should not have competed in the Tokyo Olympics—but that she refused to let abusive team doctor Larry Nassar have that impact on her. "If you looked at everything I’ve gone through for the past seven years, I should have never made another Olympic team," a tearful Biles says. "I should have quit way before Tokyo, when Larry Nassar was in the media for two years. It was too much. But I was not going to let him take something I’ve worked for since I was 6 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 mind and my body would let me."

She describes the "twisties," calling them a "life or death" situation and saying that if she were any other gymnast, her vault performance would have left her "on a stretcher." "My perspective has never changed so quickly from wanting to be on a podium to wanting to be able to go home, by myself, without any crutches," the 24-year-old says. That doesn't mean the aftermath has been easy: "Sometimes it’s like, yeah, I’m perfectly OK with it. Like, that’s how it works. That’s how it panned out. And then other times I’ll just start bawling in the house." See the full profile here. (More Simone Biles stories.)