This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
At the Olympic Games in 2021, one athlete arrived in Tokyo with a mountain of expectations on her four foot, eight inch frame.
Five medals in Rio, four of them gold, and could do even better than.
That this time around here in Tokyo.
If you don't think that that's hard, then you really don't understand gymnastics.
People didn't just expect her to win gold medals in gymnastics.
They expected magic.
She has just set herself so far apart from the rest of the field, and not just on the competition.
And biles pursuit of history starts tonight.
Four days into the games, Simone Biles pulled out of the competition.
I've just never felt like this going into a competition before.
And I tried to go out here and have fun and warm up in the back, went a little bit better.
But then once I came out here, I was like, no, mental's not there.
The world was stunned.
An athlete with seemingly otherworldly powers was struggling from the outside looking in.
It seemed hard to understand.
And it raised a if a world champion can be toppled by these emotions, what does it mean for the rest of us?
This week on hidden brain.
In the latest in our success 2.0 series, we examine the voice inside our heads that says, the world may think you are amazing, but you're really a fraud.