Tokyo Olympics: Simone Biles out of individual all-around final

Speaking on BBC Olympics Breakfast about Simone Biles and mental health in sport, 2016 hockey gold medal winner Sam Quek said: “Watching it unfold yesterday I was getting more and more frustrated.

“I’d see headlines popping up saying she was weak, she wasn’t mentally strong enough to deal with the pressure. On social media, people accused her of using it as an excuse to pull out because she wasn’t performing as well. It’s absolute nonsense.

“She said she wasn’t in the right mental frame of mind to go and perform well enough and that she could have caused herself some damage. Every sports person knows that if you go in half-cocked, you’re going to cause yourself an injury, none more so than in gymnastics.

“Even more importantly, she’s laid a foundation for so many athletes and so many people around the world to say ‘do you know what, the amount of pressure, the amount of eyes on me in this moment in time, something doesn’t feel right’. That she had the bravery and the courage to pull out of the event is just huge.

“To the people accusing her of not being a team player and that she just wanted to focus on the individual – in my mind, she could not have been more of a team player.

“Simone could have hid in the background. She could have been in the changing rooms and left the world guessing about it, but she didn’t. She put her tracksuit back on, got out there and stood on and clapped her team-mates. That, to me, is a champion.”