Three years after she dropped out of the Tokyo Games with a mental block, she is back at the Olympics with a defiant attitude - and a sense of where she is in the air.
With a toe-tapping Beyoncé song blasting in the arena, Simone Biles leaped up to the balance beam and wobbled, leaning over and circling her arms like windmills as if she were trying not to fall off a cliff.
A few more times in her routine, she faltered on the 4-inch-wide beam. And when she finished her routine at June’s US Olympic gymnastics trials, it was clear what she thought of her effort.
Instead of just frowning or shaking her head in frustration, which would have been the norm, because the judges were watching, Biles – who ended up winning the meet – let out an expletive.
Fans in the arena loudly gasped.
From a top gymnast on the national stage, showing that kind of emotion is rare, and that particular word may have been unprecedented. But Biles no longer worries about being judged, on or off the competition floor.
At 27, she is the best gymnast in history, by natural talent and also medal count, having transformed the sport with dangerously difficult routines that remain unmatched. For years, she sacrificed both mind and body for gymnastics, competing under psychological torment as a sexual assault survivor and with physical pain that made her feel as if she would need a wheelchair by the time she turned 30.
A broken rib. Bone spurs. She arrived at the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016 – where she won four gold medals and a bronze – with a nagging, yearslong foot injury that turned out to be a toe shattered in five places. A stabbing kidney stone landed her in an emergency room in Qatar during the 2018 world championships, but she still discharged herself in time for the next day’s team qualifying – without pain medication because she might have failed a drug test. She led the field and helped the US team win gold.
But Biles, the 2016 Olympic champion with a record 37 Olympic and world medals, is still picked apart, not only by the judges but by people on the internet who spew opinions on how she can be a better athlete and human.
More than ever, those critics took to their keyboards after Biles withdrew from most of her events at the Tokyo Games in 2021 because a mental block left her disoriented in the air. When she pulled out of the team final for fear of seriously hurting herself, she received heartening messages of support, but she was also called a quitter, a loser and un-American.
Charlie Kirk, a right-wing podcaster, called Biles a “selfish sociopath” who was a “shame to the country.” Piers Morgan, a TV personality and former tabloid editor, posted on Twitter: “Are ‘mental health issues’ now the go-to excuse for any poor performance in elite sport? What a joke.”
The criticism felt terribly unfair, Biles said. After all, she had made a lifetime of sacrifices for her sport. The public also knew that she was one of the hundreds of women sexually assaulted by Larry Nassar, the former national team doctor. Where was the empathy? Instead of dealing with a psychological problem that was invisible to others, she wished that she had broken her leg.
Heading into her third Olympics, Biles said she is expecting those critics to say, “Oh, my gosh, are you going to quit again?”
To that, she shrugs.
“If I did, what are you going to do about it, tweet me some more?” she said last month after dominating at the Olympic trials. “Like, I’ve already dealt with it for three years. But yeah, they want to see us fail.”
Since Tokyo, Biles said, she has regained control of her gymnastics and her self-confidence, having secured armour around herself, plate by heavy plate. Now, after much contemplation and many weekly therapy sessions, she said she will compete at the Paris Games, looking to satisfy only one judge: herself.
A case of the twisties
In Tokyo, Biles had never felt more alone.
Because Covid-19 restrictions barred fans from attending those Olympics, she was halfway around the world without her family. No Nellie and Ron Biles, her mother and father, who had been to every meet in which she had ever competed. No younger sister, Adria, whose shouts of “Go, Simone!” had always resonated above the crowd.
Now, it was just Biles and her thoughts. Thoughts about the phenomenal feats she needed to perform to make people happy. About what she represented as the sole gymnast to return to the Olympics after being abused by Nassar, who had molested his patients under the guise of providing medical treatment and is now in prison.
Biles took anxiety medication and saw a therapist to deal with the trauma. But she stopped going to those counselling sessions against her mother’s advice, saying she would be fine on her own, her mother said.
Her brain had the last say. During the floor exercise of the team qualifying event, she realised in midair that she had no idea where her body was in relation to the ground. On one landing, she flew so far out of bounds that she slid off the competition surface. She had the twisties, an affliction like the yips in golf or baseball, where athletes suddenly forget how to sink a 2-foot putt or throw to first base.
She called her boyfriend and now husband, NFL safety Jonathan Owens.
“The question was, ‘Why is her body failing her? Why is her mind failing her? Why now?,’” Owens said in an interview last month. “She was like, ‘Wait, this is where I was going to make my graceful exit – and this is what happens?’”
Two days later, during the team final, Biles stood at the end of the vault runway, knowing that she could not complete the 2 1/2 twists that she had planned. Instead, she said a prayer and eked out a vault with 1 1/2 twists, stumbling forward on the landing.
She told her coach she could not go on.
Under the stands of the arena, Biles called her mother, who was at home in a suburb of Houston, and said, “I can’t do it.” Nellie was shaken but tried not to show it.
Calmly, as if Biles had called to say that she would be late for dinner, Nellie told her that she did not have to continue if she did not feel safe. Remembering the conversation, she choked up.
“All she needed to hear was that it was OK,” Nellie said.
A ‘clueless kid’
Biles never thought she would still be competing in her late 20s. Or even her early 20s.
Months before the 2016 Rio Games, when she was 18, she told The New York Times that she could not even see herself competing at 20 because “nobody does that.” By that age, most female Olympic all-around champions were long gone from the sport. Before the Paris Games, the last time one was 20 or older was in 1972.
Before Rio, before Nassar’s abuse and before the FBI’s bungling of the case plunged her into depression and anxiety, Biles was a bubbly teenager with a giggle so genuine she often couldn’t contain it. She lived with her parents and had a purple bedroom decorated with a life-size cutout of her celebrity crush, Zac Efron. Her most daring adventures were trips to the mall or to get mani-pedis with her sister. Biles says now she is jealous of that “clueless kid.”
The unwritten rule in gymnastics was that athletes were to be silent and obedient, but the bubbly Biles ignored it, sometimes skipping national team camps because she didn’t want to comply with the strict coaching of the fearsome national team coordinator, Martha Karolyi.
Samantha Peszek, a 2008 Olympian who is now a gymnastics analyst for NBC, said, “I think it has motivated a lot of other gymnasts to be like, ‘OK, well, if Simone is going to be so open and fully herself, like, I can be myself, too.’”
Biles – 4 feet, 8 inches of tornadolike power and speed – long ago figured out that she did her best gymnastics when she wasn’t thinking about gymnastics. The air was her safe place, and she flipped and twisted so fast that she didn’t have time to ponder a thing. She had an uncanny ability to know how her body was oriented in space, her coaches say.
Facing harder and harder gymnastics moves, she told the Times, she found ways to fight the terror she felt in her chest: She told jokes, helped other gymnasts with their events, talked with them about boys and looked for her family in the stands.
Before stepping onto the competition floor, Biles had to know where her parents were sitting. She always exhaled with relief when she found them.
In Tokyo, empty seats looked back.
‘Absolute courage’
One night a few months after the Tokyo Games, at a charity fundraiser in Houston, nine-time Olympic track-and-field gold medalist Carl Lewis asked Biles about her future.
When she said she might retire because of her mental block, he was surprised. “Don’t worry, it will come back,” he told her, recalled Owens, who was there. “If you still can do it and you didn’t go out how you wanted to — you never want to have regrets.”
While she checked off some of life’s boxes, Biles kept his words in mind – “Give it another shot when you’re still good, you know?”
She began seeing a therapist regularly for her past traumas, which included going into foster care because of her birth mother’s substance abuse. (Nellie and Ron Biles, Simone’s grandparents, adopted her and her sister when Simone was 6 and Adria was 4.)
She stopped at the White House, where she became the youngest American to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. President Joe Biden said, “When she stands on the podium, we see what she is: absolute courage to turn personal pain into greater purpose. To stand up and speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.”
She planned her wedding. She and Owens were married in May 2023 and celebrated with 144 guests in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Biles wore four different custom dresses, and Vogue documented it.
And she continued to be a social 20-something. She went out with girlfriends for margaritas, hosted pool parties, threw axes at a bar with Owens, ate pizza. Normal things, but things that gymnasts at her level hadn’t shown to the public before.
One place she didn’t go was the World Champions Centre, the gym her parents own in Spring, Texas.
“I thought Simone was dead in gymnastics,” Nellie Biles said.
Months after the Olympics, from her glass office overlooking the gym’s training floor, she saw Simone, jumping on the trampoline and chatting with her teammates.
“I’m like, OK,” Nellie said, “This is how she wants things to end.”
On one day, her daughter would do nothing but flip on the trampoline. On another, she’d swing on the uneven bars. Some days, Simone would have flashbacks to Tokyo and the twisties, and she would disappear for weeks. Many times, she thought about never returning to her sport.
She thought America didn’t want to see her again anyway: As soon as she landed her vault in Tokyo, she said she thought, “‘Oh, America hates me. The world is going to hate me.”
Yet, she came to the gym again and again, and her coaches slowly began to ask her to do more. Step by step, with a safety net that included her therapist and teammates, she began to trust herself to do the risky moves that had made her famous.
One afternoon, her leotards showed up, and she found her name on the roster for the US Classic in August 2023, two years after the Olympics. She won easily.
But her goal had not been to win. She had just wanted to turn back time and remember her mom’s advice. Before every meet, Nellie had told her, “Just go out there and be the best Simone.”
The clueless kid who could fly.
Because she can
Going into the world championships last fall in Belgium, her first international meet since Tokyo, Biles still was worried that fans would shun her. But when her name was announced they went bonkers, greeting her with high-pitched, little-girl screams, leaps and waves.
Among them were fans in sparkly, bright T-shirts with her face on them and handmade signs that said, “Because I can.” That’s what Biles said when asked in 2021 why she did the perilous Yurchenko double pike vault when the judges wouldn’t give her the extra points it deserved.
She had planned to do the vault in Tokyo so that the International Gymnastics Federation could name it after her. It’s a round-off onto the springboard, a back handspring onto the vaulting table and then two full flips in the air in a folded position – like a dive from a platform but with no water to soften the blow.
At the world championships, Biles launched herself so high off the vaulting table that people on the floor had to crane their necks to see her.
“People, I hope, realise that’s maybe one of the last times you’re going to see a vault like that in your life from a woman gymnast,” said Laurent Landi, one of her coaches. “So, I think it’s time to appreciate it.”
The vault was the fifth signature move Biles has had named after her.
“I had to prove to myself that I could still get out here, twist, I could prove all the haters wrong, that I’m not a quitter,” Biles said, explaining that she was thrilled to be there, rediscovering the joy of her sport.
Biles won a record sixth world title in the all-around and she led the United States to the team gold. The world’s best gymnast was back. But much more important was seeing her impact on the sport.
The gymnasts were older than they’ve been in generations, and, for the first time in history, three Black women were on the podium for the all-around: Biles won the gold, Shilese Jones of the United States earned the silver and Rebeca Andrade of Brazil got the bronze.
“She’s the face of everything good that’s happening in gymnastics,” Jones said later.
The team mum
Watching Biles at the US Olympic trials in June, it was easy to see her confidence and her outsize influence. She moved around the arena like a seasoned party hostess, giving pep talks, handing out gymnastics tips and, with gestures big and small, acknowledging that she appreciated the crowd.
She hugged Joscelyn Roberson, who injured her leg in the final warmup session for the team final at last year’s world championships. Biles hovered over her the rest of that meet, kind of like a team mom. Back at their home gym, she left motivational notes for Roberson as she went through rehabilitation and began training again. One said, “Keep Trying,” along with a Bible verse. Roberson taped it to her locker.
“Just giving her a look and she looks back and reassures me every time,” said Roberson, now an alternate for the Paris Games.
Biles gave Jade Carey suggestions on how to improve her vault and was at the corners of the mat during her floor exercise, cheering her on. “She’s done a fantastic job of just reminding us, like, our normal is enough,” Carey said.
Biles’ goal now, as she has said, is to make the sport easier for other gymnasts, because she has been through – and conquered – it all.
“I think it’s really important to share my hardships with people because they think my life is like roses and daffodils, and that’s not always the case,” she said in an interview with the Times. “If I can be relatable and I can help them and guide them through whatever they’re going through from my experiences, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Nellie Biles’ plan
As the pressure of the Olympics built, Biles said she would rely on her family and friends to help her through the Games.
They are there this time. Sixteen family members – including Owens, who got a special pass from the Chicago Bears to leave training camp – travelled to Paris, and Nellie Biles has things all planned out.
The family are wearing their Team Simone T-shirts, covered with the bling that Nellie loves. Adria is there, ready to soothe her sister with supportive shouts each time Biles starts her routine.
“She honestly could roll around in forward rolls and I would celebrate just the same,” Adria said. “I just want her to be happy.”
In what could be her final Olympics, Biles is performing the best gymnastics of her life and improving each day, “like wine,” said Cécile Canqueteau-Landi, one of her coaches.
After the qualifying round yesterday, Biles is now in the hunt for five medals after making the finals for the individual all-around, the team final, balance beam, vault and floor finals.
But Biles wants the public to know that she just didn’t just snap her fingers and get better.
To calm her nerves and head off a relapse at the world championships last fall, Biles faithfully attended her Thursday therapy sessions, looked at inspirational quotes on her phone, performed breathing exercises and visualised herself on the beach in her mom’s home country of Belize.
Her coaches reminded her that she is worthy and can do hard things because she is the greatest of all time.
Biles acknowledged that the expectations of the Olympics and the bright lights might still cause her anxiety. But no matter what happens in Paris, she will not be alone.
Even after the announcer says that flash photography is prohibited, Nellie said, she will be in her seat with her phone’s light on, waving it back and forth so Simone can spot her.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Juliet Macur
Photographs by: Chang W. Lee, Doug Mills, Haiyun Jiang, Jenn Ackerman and Leslye Davis
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES