Anxiety: Better Safe Than Sorry for Simone
By Drew Pelto, aka *censored*

Simone Biles is an absolutely incredible athlete. The feats we have seen her pull off in the last decade have been nothing short of phenomenal. To have one gymnastics skill named for you is a sign of greatness. To have FOUR named for you across three different elements is absolutely unprecedented. She is truly a generational talent.

Anxiety can take on many forms. And it can make itself known to you when you least expect it.

I've worked in careers that have put me in a bit of a spotlight. Radio, TV, and internet broadcaster. Writer. Musician. Elite-level floorball goalie. Aside from having to go in and vomit before every concert I play, I typically am confident in my skills in all these areas.

Simone Biles talking about her feelings the morning of the final team event brought me back to my own experiences with unexpected anxiety. I know what I was capable of as a floorball goalie in my prime. In 2015, I was considered by many to be the best American-born goalie in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and one of probably the top five in the state: not bad for someone who had only played between the pipes full-time for a few months. I backstopped a team to a major tournament championship and led the local league in every goaltending category. I had the only shutout in another major tournament. I stopped the most skilled forward in the state coming in on a breakaway.

And a year later, two days before a tournament, I sat in my office at work, heart pounding, shaking, and feeling sick anytime I thought about playing this sport that I enjoyed and was considered to be quite good at. Self-doubt is a killer, and I didn't even know where it was coming from. And that part-- the not knowing-- is the scariest part.

Simone Biles has been through a lot. She's a survivor of Larry Nassar's crimes. She's been unfairly punished by her sport changing scoring systems because she's just that ridiculously good. She has a legacy of winning that will likely never be matched. And that is a heavy burden to bear. The expectation of greatness can be almost impossible to live up to, and the pressure of that impossibility is immense.

Witnessing that loss of confidence is jarring. I heard about her withdrawing from the team event on Tuesday morning and didn't think much of it. Injury, frustration on not getting a fair shot in scoring, there are lots of possible reasons. But watching on video, seeing it 12 hours later on tape delay was more shocking than I expected it to be. The look on her face didn't show the confidence of a world champion. It was fear. Wide-eyed, stone-faced, an attempt to not show that anything is wrong, but with an overplayed rigidness that betrays the fact that something is in fact quite wrong. And it seemed to come out of nowhere. It was a look I had seen before because it was one that I'd had.

Flash back to 2016. I went into the bathroom breathing heavily, shaking, just wanting to be where no one could see me. Looking in the mirror, I had that same expression of bewilderment of where this came from, while also trying to act like nothing bothered me. I messaged my wife that I didn't know what was going on, that I couldn't calm myself. I didn't want to play in the tournament. I didn't even want to play in the league that was still three weeks away. I couldn't hang my team out to dry, but I knew that if I played I was going to break: it was just a question of whether it would be mentally, physically, or emotionally. I talked to my team's captains and they were able to find a new goalie. And the sense of relief from that was enormous. I was fine the rest of the day, all the way on into the tournament where I coached from the bench. I even suited up to play the final game when there was no pressure.

Simone Biles is a million times the athlete I could ever hope to be. She is far tougher physically and mentally that I will ever be. And if I can be paralyzed from fear of the unknown and fear of failure for something as small as a meaningless local tournament in a sport that no one cares about, then I sure as hell am sympathetic to it hitting her on a stage with the eyes of the entire world upon her. For her to know that something wasn't right and that an alternate would be a better choice in her spot takes a great degree of self-sacrifice and self-awareness.

Time will tell if her withdrawal will be enough to calm things and get her back to the sport that she has dominated. Everyone varies in what they need; there is no basic and standard cure-all. Temporary relief turned out not to be enough for me. A month later, that alluded-to emotional break came when I snapped on a referee and was hit with an indefinite suspension for unsportsmanlike conduct, verbal abuse, and physical assault of a league official. The ban was lifted after three and a half years. I am now at five years since my last game and have not played since that moment. I don't know that I ever will again.

I hope we'll get to see Simone make a triumphant return at the individual events and fight back to defend her gold in the individual all-around. But if we don't and that was her last vault ever, let's all focus on everything that came before it. We got to watch greatness the past decade. Don't let the possible ending overshadow that.

Mental health is important. We're finally seeing it focused on in the world at-large, and no longer looking at it solely as being a point of weakness. I'll be pulling for Simone Biles' return, but won't lose any respect for her if she can't. You shouldn't either.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Drew Pelto is a writer, podcaster, and autograph collector and couldn't even perform a cartwheel if you promised him a million dollars for doing so. He lives in North Texas with his wife and two cats who have medaled in the kitchen counter balance beam.