This article comes to us from Jason Mehl:
The yips. The twisties. Last week, the theater of sports invited us, through comic imaginary and tragic reality, to participate in the drama of a rare athletic phenomenon and the two quirky words used to describe it. The comedic world of Ted Lasso featured gifted striker Danny Rojas succumbing to and overcoming a public case of the yips, described by Coach Beard as “when, just out of nowhere an athlete suddenly can’t do the basic fundamentals of their sport.” A few days later, Simone Biles experienced the twisties with results that were thankfully not physically tragic, but were visually shocking, emotionally devastating, and personally (for her) tragic. As the Washington Post explained,
When gymnasts have the “twisties,” they lose control of their bodies as they spin through the air … And after experiencing the twisties once, it’s very difficult to forget. Instinct gets replaced by thought. Thought quickly leads to worry. Worry is difficult to escape.