![]() While there is no common cure for "the twisties," many gymnasts benefit from taking a step back mentally in hopes of hitting some sort of internal reset button. "I'm like, 'if I can't do this, then I have a serious problem,'" Dyer said. The full-in had always been "super basic" right up until the moment it became borderline impossible. All he knows is for years he could do a "full in" - a double backflip with a full twist mixed in - and then he couldn't. To this day, Dyer still isn't sure what happened. Maybe it was the stress of being 23 - a time when a male gymnast typically enters his prime - and feeling like he was "on the clock." Maybe it was the fine line he was trying to walk between adding more difficulty in a hurry while refining his "old" skills. I would be like, 'How come you're not doing that?' He'd say 'I just got lost, I'm not doing it today.' Couple days later, 'You figure that out?' 'No, not yet.'" ![]() "He just stopped doing some of the stuff he was doing. ![]() Then in the late summer, early fall of 2021 the basics he'd mastered so easily at a young age essentially vanished. Everything came so easily for so long, he assumed he never would. Sure, he'd heard about "the twisties" but never experienced them. By the spring of 2021, he was an NCAA champion in multiple events. Within five years Dyer had worked his way into a spot at Oklahoma, one of the dominant men's programs in the country.īy 2018, he was competing regularly at national meets. Elements that had come easy to him since he became a gymnast at 13, a unusually advanced age for someone to take up the sport. Still, he knew he needed to ramp up the difficulty of his routines if he wanted to make it to worlds. Solid performances at the 2021 Olympic Trials - where he finished third on vault and fourth on floor exercise - had Dyer's confidence soaring. However this weekend or the next 12 months in the run-up to the 2024 Paris Olympics - if it gets that far - goes, simply making it back to this point is a victory in itself.Ī month or so after Biles raised the conversation about "the twisties" and the mental health issues associated with them, Gage Dyer was training in Oklahoma and eyeing a spot at the 2021 world championships. The 26-year-old Biles is on the start list for all four events, including uneven bars, which she acknowledged on her Instagram stories feed this week has been the most difficult discipline to return to "both mentally and physically" because the routines are essentially 45 seconds of uninterrupted flipping, floating and twisting from bar to bar.īiles could decide at any time what she's comfortable doing and not doing at this point, though the most decorated female gymnast of all time added "I'm fine. That won't be an option on Saturday when Biles competes for the first time since Tokyo in the U.S. She and coach Cecile Landi had just found a way to work around them. It was her seventh Olympic medal, and she called the triumph sweet while also admitting the twisties hadn't really disappeared. ![]() Then Simone Biles said it in front of the whole world two summers ago in Tokyo, after a sudden onset of the condition early in the pandemic-delayed 2020 Olympics forced the sport's biggest star to pull out of several competitions - including the team and all-around finals - to protect herself.īiles returned to win bronze on balance beam while doing a slightly altered routine that removed any twisting elements. "When someone says 'the twisties,' everyone shudders because it's bad." "It's almost like a mythical kind of thing," longtime Oklahoma men's gymnastics coach Mark Williams said. Simone Biles challenges WR Christian Watson to a race: Who is faster? ![]()
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