TOKYO (AP) — Simone Biles arrived in Tokyo as the star of the U.S. Olympic movement and perhaps the Games themselves. She convinced herself she was prepared for the pressure. That she was ready to carry the burden of outsized expectations.

Only, as the women’s gymnastics team final approached on Tuesday night, something felt off. And the athlete widely considered the Greatest of All Time in her sport knew it.

So rather than push through the doubts that crept into her head as she’s done so many times in the past, Biles decided enough was enough. She was done. For now.

The American star withdrew from the competition following one rotation, opening the door for the team of Russian athletes to win gold for the first time in nearly three decades.

Jordan Chiles, Sunisa Lee and Grace McCallum guided the U.S. to silver while Biles cheered from the sideline in a white sweatsuit, at peace with a decision that revealed a shift not only in Biles but perhaps the sport she’s redefined.

“We also have to focus on ourselves, because at the end of the day we’re human, too,” Biles said. “So, we have to protect our mind and our body, rather than just go out there and do what the world wants us to do.”

The Americans — fueled by an uneven bars routine by Lee that not even Biles could match — drew within eight-tenths of a point through three rotations. ROC, however, never wavered on floor. And they erupted when 21-year-old Angelina Melnikova’s score assured them of the top spot on the podium for the first time since the Unified Team won in Barcelona in 1992.

The victory came a day after ROC men’s team edged Japan for the top spot in the men’s final. Great Britain edged Italy for bronze.

“The impossible is possible now,” Melnikova said.

Perhaps in more ways than one.

In the five years since Biles and the U.S. put on a dazzling display on their way to gold in Rio de Janeiro, gymnastics has undergone a reckoning. The tectonic plates in a sport where obedience, discipline and silence were long considered as important as talent and artistry are moving.

Biles has become an outspoken advocate for athlete’s rights and the importance of proper mental health. There was a time, there were many times actually, where she felt she wasn’t right and just powered through because that’s what people expected of her.

Not anymore. And the stand she took could resonate far beyond the color of any medal she may win in Tokyo.

Biles is the latest in a series of high-profile athletes, including tennis star Naomi Osaka, who have used their platforms to discuss their mental heath struggles. A subject that was once taboo has become far more accepted and embraced.

U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee CEO Sarah Hirshland applauded Biles for prioritizing her “mental wellness over all else” and offered the organization’s full support. USA Gymnastics women’s program vice-president called Biles’ act “incredibly selfless.”

Biles posted on social media Monday that she felt the weight of the world on her shoulders after an uncharacteristically sloppy showing during qualifying left the Americans looking up at the ROC on the scoreboard.

The tension affected her practice. It affected her confidence. And when she stepped onto the vault runway, it finally found its way to her performance, too.

She was scheduled to do an “Amanar” vault that requires a roundoff back handspring onto the table followed by 2 1/2 twists. Biles instead did just 1 1/2 twists with a big leap forward after landing. She sat down and talked to U.S. team doctor Marcia Faustin, then headed to the back while the rest of the Americans moved on to uneven bars without her.

When Biles returned several minutes later, she hugged her teammates and took off her bar grips. And just like that, her night was over.

“To see her kind of go out like that is very sad because this Olympic Games, I feel like, is kind of hers,” Lee said.

Biles is scheduled to defend her Olympic title in the all-around final on Thursday. She also qualified for all four event finals later in the Games. She said she will regroup on Wednesday before deciding whether to continue.

Biles’ abrupt absence forced the Americans to scramble a bit. The finals are a three-up/three-count format, meaning each country enters three of their four athletes on an apparatus, with all three scores counting.

Chiles stepped in to take Biles’ place on uneven bars and balance beam. The 20-year-old who made the team with her steady consistency pulled off a solid bars routine and drilled her balance beam set two days after falling twice on the event.

Thanks in part to a little help from ROC — which counted a pair of falls on beam — the U.S. drew within striking distance heading to floor, the final rotation.

Without Biles and her otherworldly tumbling, the U.S. needed to be near perfect to close the gap. It didn’t happen. Chiles stumbled to the mat at the end of her second pass, and any chance the U.S. had of chasing down ROC went right along with it.

Not that Chiles or the rest of the Americans particularly cared. The gold might be gone, but something more significant may have happened instead. It’s a tradeoff they can live with.

“This medal is definitely for (Biles),” said Chiles. “If it wasn’t if it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t be here where we are right now. We wouldn’t be a silver medalist because of who she is as a person.”

Chiles then turned to her good friend. Biles helped convince her to move to Houston to train alongside her two years ago, a decision that turned Chiles into an Olympian. In an empty arena in the middle of Japan with the world watching, Chiles did for Biles what Biles has done for so many for so long. She had her back.

“Kudos to you girl,” Chiles said. “This is all for you.”

Story: Will Graves

TOKYO (AP) — The beloved American gymnast Sam Mikulak flipped off the parallel bars, stuck the landing and blew a kiss toward the camera. Those watching the men’s Olympics gymnastic competition on television back home knew they’d seen magic.

“Beautiful!” the broadcast announcer exclaimed. “Wow, that was fantastic!”

But all around Mikulak, the stretches of wooden benches meant to seat thousands sat mostly empty. Cheers erupted from a far back corner of the stands, where Simone Biles and the rest of the women’s team screamed as loud as lungs could muster to cut through the eerie quiet of the pandemic Olympic venue.

In arenas across Tokyo, athletes accustomed to feeding off the deafening roar of the crowd are searching for new ways to feel Olympic enthusiasm.

They’re rooting for each other as loudly as they can. Some are trying to envision fans at home in their living rooms, leaning into TV screens. They’re blasting playlists in backstage training rooms. The lucky few permitted to compete with headphones keep their phones in their pockets, tuned to songs with a beat to replace the thrill of applause.

But others were surprised to find the silence motivating — like another day at the gym rather than the most prestigious competition on Earth. For them, the emptiness numbs the nerves and lets them fully focus on their sport.

“It’s kind of nice,” said Mikulak, a three-time Olympian whose parallel bar routine helped usher him to finals. It barely feels like an Olympics to him, he said, but when he stuck that landing and heard his own team cheering, that felt like enough.

“We created our own bubble. We had our own cheering section,” he said. “We created our own atmosphere. That’s what we thrive in, having each other’s backs.”

The next day, they returned the favor. The US men’s gymnastics team stood in the back waving an American flag and screaming for their female counterparts before the stadium fell quiet again, like the others scattered across Tokyo.

At the Sea Forest Waterway rowing venue, grandstands that stretch for nearly 2,000 meters (yards) are empty all the way to the finish line. The events are so quiet, rowers can hear the ripple of their own wake and the flap of hundreds of national flags whipping in the breeze on the shoreline. What is typically a swelling crescendo of chants and rush of adrenaline over the final 250 meters to the finish line replaced by the labored breathing wracking their lungs.

“When you cross the line and you’re hurting, and you feel like you are going to pass out and you don’t hear the ‘USA! USA!’, chant it hurts a little bit more,” said ÚS women’s rower Ellen Tomek, competing in her third Olympics and reminding herself that people are rooting from her from home. “Everyone is cheering us on, but when you are hurting and sad and you can’t look up for you mom in the stands, it sucks.”

Other athletes, too, are trying to capture the energy of those fans at home, absent here but still somewhere in the world cheering them on.

Japanese gymnast Mai Murakami said she was thrilled that her home country hosted the Olympics because she hoped many of her admirers could see her perform in person. When even Japanese citizens were barred from attending, she was devastated.

“I get influence from the crowd, and that motivates me,” she said through a translator. The silence rattled her, she said, and she made a mistake in her bars performance. “This is my first experience without crowds, so I haven’t had that experience before. I couldn’t imagine how it would be, so I tried to have no emotion.”

She tried to picture her fans watching on TVs and computers, applauding her from across the city. That brought comfort.

Ágatha Bednarczuk, a Brazilian beach volleyball player, won a silver medal in front of her home country in 2016. This Olympics, she said, feels very different.

“In Brazil, we had the biggest support. There were many, many people cheering for us, and here we had silence,” she said, drawing a flat line with her hand. “We need to put our emotion in the game, because we can’t receive emotion from them. For me, it’s very important to play with emotion so I had to bring it from inside.”

Many say they are reminding themselves that they made it here — to the Olympics, a lifelong dream for many despite extraordinary odds including a pandemic that has killed millions and postponed the Games, and for a time threatened to sink them entirely.

“I think that Olympic Games is enough of its own,” said Greece men’s water polo goaltender Emmanouil Zerdevas. “It’s a bit sad, but it is my first time in the Olympic Games, so I’m still happy to be here.”

At the silent skateboarding venue, U.S. skater Jagger Eaton found a mood booster in the phone he occasionally fished out of his right pocket while competing to change the music. Skateboarders, unlike other athletes, are able to shut out the quiet by wearing headphones as they compete. Eaton chose the aptly named “Rollin N Controllin” by rapper Dusty Locane as his soundtrack to launch himself into the first-ever Olympic skateboard event, men’s street.

“It got me right in the groove,” said Eaton, who struggled to skate for an empty crowd. “That’s why I am wearing headphones. When I wear headphones, I can create my own hype.”

But others have been surprised to find peace in the silence — and a stronger connection to their sport than they tend to feel when the pressure is on.

“Normally, coming into the finish line, when qualification is on the line, it’s deafening,” said U.S. women’s rower Michelle Sechser. “It’s the hardest part of the race. Your heart is pounding, your legs are pounding, your breathing is rapid. And it’s absolutely silent. It makes it almost like Nirvana.”

Story: Claire Galofaro. AP Sports Writers Jim Vertuno, John Leicester, Jay Cohen, Josh Dubow and Jimmy Golen contributed to this report.

TOKYO (AP) — The host country’s superstar is out of the Tokyo Olympics.

Naomi Osaka lost to former French Open finalist Marketa Vondrousova of the Czech Republic 6-1, 6-4 in the third round of the Tokyo tennis tournament on Tuesday.

The second-ranked Osaka, who was born in Japan and grew up in the United States, struggled with her usually reliable groundstrokes while the 42nd-ranked Vondrousova produced a series of drop-shot winners and other crafty shots that drew her opponent out of her comfort zone.

Osaka, who lit the Olympic cauldron in Friday’s opening ceremony, won her opening two matches in straight sets following a two-month mental-health break. But conditions were different Tuesday with the roof closed because it was raining outside.

Shortly after the match was over, organizers said that Osaka had left the venue and would not be talking to the media.

Vondrousova came out with her entire game clicking from the start and quickly ran out to a 4-0 lead in the first set as Osaka hardly had time to gather herself.

Osaka then broke Vondrousova’s serve in the opening game of the second set but almost immediately handed the break back when she double-faulted to make it 2-2.

After Osaka lost her serve again to end the match by hitting a cross-court backhand wide, she shook hands with Vondrousova at the net, walked to her chair, zipped her racket up in her bag and followed Vondrousova off the court.

While both players produced 22 winners, Osaka hit 32 unforced errors to Vondrousova’s 10. But it wasn’t simply an off day for Osaka; it was also an outstanding performance from Vondrousova.

Osaka got a decent 64% of her first serves in play but won only 49% of the points off her first serve.

During one point midway through the second set, Vondrousova hit an underspin, scooped forehand approach shot that landed right on the line — prompting Osaka to stare at the line for a few seconds in apparent disbelief.

Osaka had break points to take a 4-3 lead in the second but Vondrousova hit consecutive drop-shot winners to get back in the game and then held.

About 10 minutes later, the match was over.

Story: Andrew Dampf