Four-time Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles withdrew from the July 27 artistic gymnastics team final and the July 29 all-around final at the Tokyo Olympics due to her mental health. Following her decision and backlash from a select few individuals (who could not even dream of doing a simple cartwheel, by the way), in solidarity, fans, fellow athletes, and celebrities offered words of support for the gymnast.

“The outpouring love & support I’ve received has made me realize I’m more than my accomplishments and gymnastics which I never truly believed before,” Biles wrote on Twitter in response to the support.

In a time when athletes are told to compete at all costs, Biles’s decision to withdraw — which came not long after tennis champion Naomi Osaka pulled out of interviews at the French Open due to her mental health and was fined $15,000 — proves that prioritizing mental health, particularly in a sport as dangerous as gymnastics, is never a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of strength.

The love, support, and admiration people have for Biles will always override the ignorance of those who feel it’s their right to disagree with such a personal decision.

the outpouring love & support I’ve received has made me realize I’m more than my accomplishments and gymnastics which I never truly believed before. 🤍

— Simone Biles (@Simone_Biles) July 29, 2021

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The Nordstrom Anniversary Sale is back, and we weren’t ready for all these epic deals. Top styles from brands you love like Zella, Alo Yoga, Nike and Beyond Yoga will be discounted for the sale before they return to full price in the fall. There’s nothing better than being able to shop new pieces at a discount, so get your wallet ready.

The sale officially starts on July 28, but those with a Nordstrom card can already shop. Not a cardholder? Not to worry, as today, you can preview all the epic deals available, so you can plan what you’re buying. While others are reaching for dresses and handbags, we’re eyeing leggings, bike shorts, and sports bras. Plus, there are some sneakers we’ve had on our radar for a while, and now that they’re under $100, it may just be time to take the plunge. Keep on reading to shop our picks from the sale!

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Tom Daley’s first Olympic gold medal will be kept safe and sound until he returns home from Tokyo. After Daley and his diving partner, Matty Lee, took home the top prize for their synchronized 10-meter platform diving on July 26, the 27-year-old diver ensured his valuable accolade would have a special home. In fact, Daley created one with his own two hands when he crocheted a cozy little sweater pouch to protect his medal from scratches or dings.

Daley showed off the sweet creation on Instagram on July 27. “Learning to knit and crochet has helped me so much through these Olympics,” Daley captioned his video. The diver picked up his knitting and crocheting hobby during the COVID-19 lockdown, and started sharing his creations on social media through the account @madewithlovebytomdaley.

He’s incredibly talented and has crocheted sweaters, scarves, hats, figurines, baby booties, and place mats, among other things. He has even auctioned off his designs for charity. Daley’s Olympic pouch will likely stay near and dear to him for a long time, as it houses a medal that’s been years in the making. With the Union Jack on one side and the Japanese flag on the other, Daley’s crocheted fabrication represents an unforgettable achievement and the hobby that helped him get there.

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Picture this: You’re flipping with your heels above your head, gravity fighting against you, trying not to break form. You’re twisting, too, all the while making sure you land right side up. That’s just what gymnasts do, and they do it oftentimes on command without blinking. Elite gymnasts specifically perform unthinkable skills that, with one wrong move — one slight miscalculation of speed, air-awareness, or body positioning — could result in serious injury. When Simone Biles bailed out of (aka, backed out of) her Amanar vault in the women’s artistic gymnastics team final on July 27, she executed just one and a half twists instead of the planned two and a half, opening up mid-air prematurely and later calling what she experienced the “twisties.” She subsequently withdrew from the rest of the competition to protect her mental health and to not risk her team’s chances at a medal; then, the next day, she pulled out of the July 29 all-around final.

The “twisties” means that you got lost in the air and the control you always had — or thought you always had — went out the window. “I had no idea where I was in the air,” Biles said when recalling her vault, according to The Washington Post. “I could have hurt myself.” It happens to gymnasts on every level, not just elite athletes, and ask anyone in the sport: it’s terrifying.

Missy Marlowe, a retired American gymnast who took part in the 1988 Olympics, wrote on Twitter, “It’s hard to explain the twisties to someone who doesn’t do gymnastics, but it’s a mental block and it’s real. I had it happen twice, when I was 12 and 20. You cannot fix it quickly — can take months, if at all. It’s like a non-serious stroke, you’re [SIC] brain and body disconnect.”

That’s not to say that Biles can’t bounce back from her case of the “twisties” — every gymnast is different. The point is, experiencing this can not only injure an athlete, but it can also take an exhausting mental toll on said athlete. I personally quit the sport right before college, though I can tell you that, in my decade-plus competing, you rely heavily on muscle memory. And when you rely on muscle memory, you don’t really think about the skills you’re doing.

The concept sounds impossible: execute complex, dizzying moves without actually allowing your brain to realize you’re doing them. Sure, when you’re learning them in practice, you have to focus on the correct technique, but for most gymnasts, once you’ve done the skills enough times, you’re not over-analyzing them. You’re simply performing, and it’s second nature. For instance, in an interview I had with Morgan Hurd earlier this year, the world champion told me, “Unless I had a fall or a major wobble, I don’t remember my beam routine.”

So, when gymnasts suddenly have to think about their skills, it can feel as though reality is crashing in alerting you just how complicated and dangerous those skills are. It’s an out-of-body experience but, at the same time, you are present in your fear. It’s the worst feeling in the world to suddenly not have control, and it can lead to bailing out of a skill, like we saw with Biles’s team final vault.

Mental blocks happen across all sports, and prioritizing the safety and health of athletes often gets lost in the swelling hype of competition. But it should be exactly that: a priority — because even if performing for an audience is in the pro athlete job description, so to speak, they should not be pushing through mental struggles at the cost of their own safety, for the sake of a performance. For the sake of a medal.

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Simone Biles has withdrawn from the women’s artistic gymnastics Olympic team final on July 27. Team USA, rotating alongside the ROC, began on vault with two solid efforts from Grace McCallum and Jordan Chiles, after which Biles bailed out of her planned Amanar. More specifically, she only did one and a half twists out of her Yurchenko instead of the two and a half twists the vault requires. She landed in a deep squat, stumbled, then presented to the judges. Her effort received a 13.766. The ROC led after the first rotation by just over a point.

Biles left the arena with a trainer, returned with a wrapped ankle, and was scratched from the bar lineup. Then, NBC announcers confirmed she would be forgoing the rest of the team competition. Biles, though, stayed on the sidelines with McCallum, Chiles, and Sunisa Lee, cheering them on.

Announcers first reported after the bars rotation that Biles reportedly pulled out due to mental struggles she is having as opposed to an injury, though they later said it was medical-related. USA Gymnastics confirmed this in a statement on Twitter that read: “Simone Biles has withdrawn from the team final competition due to a medical issue. She will be assessed daily to determine medical clearance for future competitions.”

It’s unclear at this time where she stands for the remaining all-around and event finals in Tokyo.

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Gymnasts learn how to “bail” out of their skills when they’re in danger of injuring themselves — or sometimes they do so out of fear. But who’s going to bail them out when they need a mental break from a sport with a longstanding culture of abuse and an impossible standard of perfection?

On July 27, Simone Biles withdrew from the women’s artistic gymnastics team final after competing a watered-down version of her planned Amanar vault. Though USA Gymnastics initially cited her exit as being caused by a medical issue, Biles later revealed it was due to her mental health. She said she wasn’t in the right place mentally to compete and wanted to avoid injury.

It’s hard to fathom the pressure that Biles puts on herself. This burden is only compounded by the mounting pressure from the rest of the world. Fellow 2016 Olympian Laurie Hernandez made a valid point when she stated that Biles should not be expected to carry the weight of the team. Yes, we praise her for being one of the sport’s greatest, but, as Hernandez said on the Today show, “At the end of the day, having to put that much pressure on her to carry the team to gold . . . it’s not fair. This is a team of four, not a team of one.” Biles undoubtedly delivers high scores with skills that no other gymnasts execute in competition, but Jordan Chiles, Sunisa Lee, and Grace McCallum were chosen to represent the United States for a reason. They all have their strengths, and they fought until the end for their well-deserved silver medal.

Not only is Biles the face of gymnastics right now — as she has been for years — but she’s also the face of the Tokyo Games after a trying pandemic that is not yet eradicated. “Coming here to the Olympics and being the head star isn’t an easy feat,” she told the Today show’s Hoda Kotb. Even before she qualified for the Olympics, her name was associated with the 2021 Games, and she booked her own post-competition Gold Over America Tour with ticket sales starting for exclusive members as early as February. That’s four months prior to the Olympic Trials.

Biles is also the sole known survivor of former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University doctor Larry Nassar’s abuse to be actively competing today. She told Kotb in an interview published earlier this year that she wished to stay in the sport so she could remain a voice for those survivors. Five years after Indianapolis Star published the story of Nassar’s abuse that led to hundreds of women coming forward, new details about the way the FBI handled the investigation continue to emerge. And athletes still want answers.

Biles shared a tweet with her survivor story in January of 2018, and in it, she said that having to return to Karolyi Ranch, a place where so much of this abuse occurred, was “heartbreaking” for her to think about. Three days after Biles shared the tweet, the Ranch was permanently shut down, as documented in her Facebook Watch series. Even though Biles wouldn’t go on to train for Tokyo 2020 at the Ranch, she still had to return to a sport under a national governing body that she felt did not, and could not, protect its athletes.

On top of all of this pressure and adversity, Biles is competing in a sport that is dangerous and, yes, extremely difficult. As someone who did gymnastics for over a decade, I know what it’s like to be fearful of performing skills. During a high school gymnastics meet, I didn’t let go for my bars dismount and, instead, crashed on top of the bar. The emotional scar from that competition lasted until the end of my gymnastics career. So if I, a probably-average, not-so-great gymnast could fall victim to mental blocks and bouts of uncertainty, one can only imagine what Biles, who does some of the most complicated, high-level skills in the sport, feels (she admitted in a different Facebook Watch docuseries episode, for instance, that every time she’s preparing to do her Yurchenko double pike, she’s at the end of the runway with nerves).

So what actually happened today? Biles chose to err on the side of caution and honor her mental health. According to the GymCastic podcast crew, Biles made the same type of mistake we saw in competition during the warmup where she opened up too soon and bailed out of the vault (she “balked,” as the gymnastics community calls it).

Gymnasts, like many elite athletes, are told to power through the pain. To perform at all costs. For example, when Biles exited the team final, a conversation quickly took shape on Twitter about 1996 Olympian Kerri Strug performing a vault through injury to help secure the team’s gold medal. On the surface, it was viewed as heroic; however, documentaries like Athlete A have since challenged that notion to unveil how problematic it really was. Being an athlete on the world stage means you have immense “mental toughness,” but learning your limits both mentally and physically is not a practice often preached. And, as highlighted by tennis’s Naomi Osaka this year, taking care of your mental and overall wellbeing needs to be prioritized.

Biles’s decision to forgo the rest of the team final was one that many gymnasts before her couldn’t, or wouldn’t, dare make. She is proving that sometimes strength is recognizing when you’ve reached your limit. As Spencer Barnes accurately stated on the GymCastic podcast, he spent so long thinking mental blocks equated to failure growing up; I’m in the same boat.

“If it wasn’t for [Biles], we wouldn’t be here where we are right now,” Chiles, Biles’s club gym teammate and close friend who made her Olympic debut this summer, said via the Associated Press. “We wouldn’t be a silver medalist because of who she is as a person.”

Though Biles wrote on Instagram post-competition that her three teammates “stepped up when I couldn’t” — which they absolutely rose to the occasion for — she did step up, all while cheering them on. She stepped up for herself.

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Aly Raisman is “completely devastated” for her former teammate Simone Biles, who withdrew from the team final at the 2021 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. On July 27, Biles did not complete the vault she had planned on doing, and her subsequent exit from the team competition came as a complete shock to viewers of the international sporting event. The gymnast later said she had not sustained a physical injury, but was “not there” mentally.

“I feel sick to my stomach. It’s horrible. I know that all of these athletes dream of this moment for their whole entire lives, and so I’m just completely devastated,” Raisman told the Today show in an interview shortly after news broke. “I am obviously so worried and just hoping that Simone is OK.” Raisman and Biles competed together in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, where they made up the famous Final Five along with Gabby Douglas, Laurie Hernandez, and Madison Kocian.

At the time of the interview, Raisman didn’t have any inside insight into why Biles withdrew, but she speculated that Biles got disoriented or “lost in the air,” which she said is very common when executing advanced skills. Raisman also cited the immense pressure Biles is under as a contributing factor. “I am also thinking of the mental impact that this has to have on Simone,” she said. “Sometimes people forget Simone is human. She has pains like all of us. She has stress like all of us. Simone has more pressure than any other gymnast I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.”

Raisman retired from the sport last year, but she has remained an outspoken critic of USA Gymnastics, especially since coming forward about the sexual abuse she and many teammates, including Biles, faced from former team doctor and convicted sex offender Larry Nassar. In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Raisman said she had no confidence in USAG’s ability to protect the physical and mental health of its athletes. “None,” she added.

Raisman also spoke to her own mental state during the height of her career. “When I was competing, I was so tired. I was so stressed. We didn’t understand much about mental health. I didn’t have tools to cope with my own anxiety or things that I was dealing with personally,” she told The New Yorker. “There’s definitely a better way. We’re not saying that we don’t want to work hard. We love working hard. We recognize the passion and the dedication it takes. But there’s a better way.”

At press time, it’s not known if Biles will compete in the remaining all-around and event finals. “Coming here to the Olympics and being the head star isn’t an easy feat,” Biles told Hoda Kotb of Today. “We’re just trying to take it one day at a time and we’ll see.”

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If you’ve been tuning in to watch softball in the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo, you’ve probably noticed that they’re playing on fields that are about 95 percent synthetic turf. The infield is all green “grass” with small patches of dirt for the pitching mound and batter’s box. That’s noteworthy, because softball fields traditionally have all-dirt infields — and that’s not the only awkward-looking thing about the Olympic softball fields. The pitching circle sits in front of the mound, second base is smack dab in the middle of the infield, and the players don’t even have a dugout; you can see them hanging out behind chain link fences with folding chairs for seats.

The reason for the weirdness? They’re playing on softball fields converted from baseball fields, and which are set to switch back once the softball tournament is over. In Tokyo, the two sports are sharing accommodations for the purposes of financial sustainability, a “cost-effective model” meant to appeal to the International Olympic Committee and make the sports easier to include in the Games. Softball and baseball haven’t been in the Olympics since 2008, so compromises like this were necessary if athletes wanted to play again. It makes sense from that standpoint, and to their credit, the players and coaches aren’t complaining.

“The turf is fantastic,” said U.S. softball coach Ken Eriksen, according to USA Today. “It’s really probably one of the best venues we’ve played in.” Infielder Amanda Chidester called the field “immaculate,” adding, “I wouldn’t even know [it’s a baseball field] – you can’t even tell the difference out there. It’s just great to be out there and be able to play the game.”

The field situation is understandable, but as a fan, it’s undeniably disappointing to see, especially from a host country as supportive of softball as Japan, which fields one of the top professional leagues in the world. And because softball fields are smaller than baseball, it’s hard not to feel like softball is getting the short end of the stick; if one has to fit inside the other, it’s obvious which it had to be. Athletes who have spent years fighting to be re-instated in the Olympics again had to make a compromise to come back, and they’ve done so without complaint and for reasons that make sense. But for softball fans, who have long known that Olympic leadership doesn’t see their sport as a priority, this just feels like the latest bitter pill to swallow — that athletes don’t even get a facility designed for their sport.

There might be a glimmer of hope. After 2021, softball won’t be played at the Olympics until 2028 at earliest — and in the US, a softball- and baseball-saturated country that should be able to accommodate facilities for both, should the sports be back. Softball players have done their job, creating an intense and competitive tournament filled with walk-off wins and lights-out pitching. It’ll be up to Olympic leadership to do the same.

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The Tokyo Olympics will finally provide long-awaited recognition to Paralympic athletes. After the 2018 Winter Olympics, the US Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) announced Paralympians and Olympians will earn the same pay for the medals they win. Paralympic athletes will now receive $37,500 for each gold medal earned at the Paralympic Games, $22,500 for silver, and $15,000 for bronze. Previously, paralympic athletes received $7,500 for gold medals, $5,250 for silver, and $3,750 for bronze.

“Paralympians are an integral part of our athlete community and we need to ensure we’re appropriately rewarding their accomplishments,” USOPC Committee CEO Sarah Hirshland said back in 2018, when the change was implemented. Paralympic athletes who competed in the games three years ago were retroactively awarded fair pay, but Tokyo marks the first time they’ll earn this increased compensation in real time.

This is a step in the right direction, but the Paralympic Games still lack appropriate accommodations for its athletes. Swimmer Becca Meyers, who is deaf and blind, recently withdrew from the competition because the USOPC denied her a reasonable and essential accommodation: a “trusted personal care assistant” (PCA). In an Instagram post, Meyers expressed disbelief at this lack of progress. “In 2021, why as a disabled person am I still fighting for my rights?” she continued. “But enough is enough. I need to speak up for the next athlete who is deaf-blind or disabled in another way. As Paralympians, we train as hard as our counterparts, the Olympians. We deserve the same quality and safety nets that our able-bodied teammates will receive in just a few days’ time.”

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Part of the excitement of watching the Olympics is seeing the gorgeous gymnastics uniforms! If you practice gymnastics yourself, or you’re just Simone Biles‘s biggest fan, you can buy official replica leotards inspired by the Games. So far there are just two worn during podium training, but there should be nine total — eight women’s and one men’s leotard. Ahead, check out what the US Women’s Gymnastics team has been sporting so far for the Tokyo Olympics.

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