‘Simone Biles got the twisties, too:’ Olympian connects with former gymnasts over the feeling of disconnect in the air

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This article was published 28/07/2021 (1551 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Gael Mackie never called them the twisties. But she knew. Within split nanoseconds — the units of time in which gymnasts live their lives — she knew exactly what Simone Biles was talking about.

“They saw it a little bit in practice. Having a little bit of the twisties,” Biles had said Tuesday in Tokyo. “They” were her teammates. The “twisties?” Well, whatever they were, they had terrified the iconic gymnast’s U.S. colleagues. And they had played a part in forcing the greatest to ever do it to step away from doing it at all, on the biggest stage of all.

On the other side of the Pacific, as the world struggled to come to terms with Biles’ withdrawal from the women’s team final and, later, from the individual all-around competition, Mackie was nodding a knowing nod.

“I know exactly what she’s referencing. And every single gymnast knows,” said Mackie, part of Canada’s Olympic team in Athens in 2004. “It’s that proprioception in the air when you have the ability to do three flips, one flip, one half, one full turn, two full turns and then combine them all together in space, in the air, and yet not quite know what you’re doing.

“What people don’t necessarily realize is often you’re not seeing what you’re doing or where you’re going. You’re not using visual cues. Essentially, you’re feeling it and that feeling can sometimes … trick you.”

And not a good kind of trick.

“No, not a fun trick. It tricks you into thinking you’re in a different place in the air than you actually are. Not trusting your brain to take you where it needs to take you can be utterly terrifying.”

Some version of the twisties tricked Biles on a vault attempt early in Tuesday’s team final in Tokyo. She bailed out of one of her vexingly difficult and blurringly dynamic routines. Informed observers said that few athletes — perhaps just Biles herself — could have bailed out and still landed on their feet rather than another extremity, risking life-threatening injury.

“It’s the Olympic Games,” Biles said. “But at the end of the day we want to walk out of here, not be dragged out here on a stretcher.”

As the dust settled in the wake of Biles’ searingly honest interviews at the event’s conclusion, her eloquence in speaking to the importance of mental health captured hearts and headlines. But her reference to the twisties sparked a surge on social media as gymnasts past and present, elite and amateur, spoke of their own brushes with the phenomenon. Like a blurring vertigo, said some. Or a mid-air mental block. A terrifying total loss of what they call air sense.

It all came rushing back to Mackie, now 32 and a burgeoning stuntwoman. She recalled a time at the Canadian nationals when a triple twist unintentionally went too far and became a three-and-a-half. Any time she tried to do a triple afterward, her body went that half step further.

“It leads you to freeze in the air,” she said. “I remember breaking my back six months before the Olympics because I landed on my head. Doing that same movement, there was just a mental block there.”

Mackie mentioned breaking her back as nonchalantly as someone telling you about that time they lost a phone charger. Just another stark reminder of the world these athletes exist in, a world that Biles has redefined.

Kate Richardson, a teammate of Mackie’s in 2004 and also an Olympian in Sydney four years earlier, was equally struck by the cultural gravity of a moment when literal gravity came into such sharp focus.

“It frankly made me sweat — for her and also in memory of me experiencing it myself,” Richardson said. “Your brain getting in the way of your body doing what it has done a million times. Just disconnecting. We used to call it just that — getting lost. Twisties is such a cute term for something so terrible. It’s awful. A terrible, terrible feeling.”

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Richardson, now a physiotherapist and Pilates instructor in Fernie, B.C., had an “almost obsessive compulsive routine of switching on” to help counteract a possible onset. On the flip side, Mackie would chew gum “because when I became so focused on the piece of gum not falling out of my mouth, that let me turn my brain off.” In her new career, she’ll still chew a piece of gum during a particularly testing stunt routine.

Both former Olympians were struck by how, in speaking so openly on issues that gymnasts long kept to themselves — and/or were told to — Biles has again redefined her sport.

“Yes, yes! That’s what I keep thinking,” Richardson said. “We knew that she was coming into the Olympics and going to make history and take the sport to another new level, but who knew it would be in this sense? In a sport that historically has always been ‘suck it and go’ — where it was, ‘Can you walk? OK, get up there and compete’ — this is almost giving so much more to the sport, changing it for the better in such a deeper, more pervasive way.

“When I was a kid and had those moments and it was so terrifying, knowing that Simone Biles went through the same thing, that’s instantly reassuring. It’s OK to have it happen … because Simone Biles got the twisties, too.”

Joe Callaghan is a Toronto-based sports and feature writer and a freelance contributor for the Star. Reach him via email: joecallaghan84@hotmail.com or follow him on Twitter: @JoeCallaghan84