Simone Biles at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. PHOTO:

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Simone Biles’ experience with the “twisties” derailed her performance at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but it wasn’t the first time she’s dealt with the disorienting condition, her former coach revealed.

In a new book, Biles’ longtime coach Aimee Boorman reveals that the 28-year-old gymnast was affected five years before she competed in Tokyo in 2021. The twisties, as they’re called (and feared by gymnasts everywhere), causes people to lose their orientation while in the air, and jeopardized her appearance at the 2016 Olympics, Boorman said, according to The Guardian.

The debilitating condition hit Biles three months after the World Gymnastics Championships in 2015, during which she took home four gold medals.

“Simone couldn’t twist — on basically anything,” Boorman, who worked with the Olympian from age 7 to the Rio Games in 2016, writes in The Balance: My Years Coaching Simone Biles, according to the outlet. The gymnast “would physically stop herself from twisting during her routines because she was afraid of getting lost in the air,” Boorman continues. “Simone would never crash; she would just stop herself before ever attempting a twist.”

Simone Biles in Paris in 2024.

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After therapy and consulting with her family, Biles was able to do twists again in time for the 2016 Olympic Trials, one month before the start of the Rio Games, T reported.

“Thankfully the twisties had passed without injury,” the coach wrote, according to the outlet, “and in the process, we demonstrated that an elite gymnast can avoid training elements for weeks without losing their skills.”

Biles was able to overcome the twisties for the international competition in Rio de Janeiro and took home four gold medals. But she battled the same dilemma in 2021. This time, she was forced to bow out of the team competition at the Summer Games in Tokyo. The move subjected the Olympic medalist to a media firestorm, which forced the athlete to question herself, seek out therapy and take two years off from international competition.

Biles’ current coach Laurent Landi said he knew something was wrong in Tokyo when he saw the gymnast awkwardly somersault her landing during a warmup.

Coach Aimee Boorman’s new book.

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“I look at her face, and she pretends, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ “ Landi said in the Netflix documentary, Simone Biles Rising. “But when you get lost in something, no, you’re not fine.”

“I knew from that very moment it wasn’t like one time and done. You can feel it in your head,” Biles said. “I knew it wasn’t just like, ‘Oops, sorry.’ How am I supposed to tell them that this is bad, bad?”

Biles went on to describe the consequential moment. “To me it felt silent, almost like death,” she said. “And if I could have ran out of that stadium, I would have. But I was like keep it cool, calm, collected, don’t freak anybody out. Let’s go over and be like, ‘We’re done here.’ ”

Later, in a confessional, the athlete elaborated on the experience, as she tried to understand it herself. “Having these mental blocks in the gym recently has not been fun, it’s been scary,” she said.

Despite the devastating results of the Tokyo Games, Biles competed at the Paris Olympics three years later with flair. She won four medals, three of which were gold, further cementing herself as the greatest and most decorated gymnast in history.