My take on Simone Biles taking herself out of the Olympics:

Look, none of us are ever going to know what the pressure is like for someone in that situation. Furthermore, she is a professional athlete, and this is what she does, and this is the largest stage to do what she does.

These people are trained to deal with crowd noise, but was she trained to deal WITHOUT crowd noise? I have performed many times in many things, and I recall very well the 2 times I didn’t receive ANY crowd acknowledgement from my performance. I was distraught, confused, doubted everything I had done and ran the entire presentation through my mind…and this was just in front of an audience of FORTY!

Imagine if the Beatles went out to a stadium and performed “I Saw Her Standing There” and no one was in the stands, no one applauded—NOTHING (except for a few grounds people off to the side.) This is just what Simone endured, except she was already under the pressure of none of her family there, a surreal Olympics, and a BILLION PEOPLE WATCHING ON TV!

It was unfortunate timing, and we will never know what was going through her head when she decided to stop, but sometimes being a human being pops up in the worst time when we need to be a human doing, and I believe that is what happened here.