Simone Biles has spent the last three years moving past the Tokyo Olympics.
The gymnastics superstar understands not everyone has.
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No matter how many national titles she wins or how times she stands atop the podium at the world championships, Biles knows she remains frozen in time to critics unwilling or unable to forgive her for pulling out of multiple finals at the 2020 Games to protect herself.
The proof is in her mentions, the ones she says she tries to ignore but still stumbles across anyway.
The 27-year-old wants to make something clear as she prepares for a third trip to the Olympics: the redemption she is seeking later this month has nothing to do with silencing those who will tune in just to see if “the twisties” resurface. Mostly because she knows there's no use.
“They’ll still say like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re going to quit again? Or are you going to quit again?’ And like, and ‘If I did, what are you going to do about it? Tweet me some more?’” Biles said after winning the Olympic trials last month. “Like I’ve already dealt with it for three years. But yeah, they want to see us fail.”
Life happens
The woman who will step onto the floor with the rest of the U.S. team during qualifying on July 28 is not the one who left Japan at the center of the sometimes uncomfortable conversation about mental health.
She has evolved, both personally and professionally, committing herself to therapy — even during meets — and making sure her sport no longer defines her, all the while looking perhaps as good as ever more than a decade removed from the first of her record six world all-around titles.
Biles married current Chicago Bears safety Jonathan Owens in the spring of 2023 and her busy personal calendar is dotted with the mileposts of a normal 20-something: from baby showers to weddings to overseeing the details of the house she and her husband are building in the Houston suburbs.
When one of her former Olympic teammates welcomed her first child late last year, Biles admitted she felt a pang of “that's what I should be doing.”
Only she's not. Not yet anyway. Two decades after she took up the sport, Biles still finds herself inside World Champions Centre — the gym the Biles family owns in Spring, Texas — countless hours a week. Still flipping. Still twisting. Still “testing my life every day" while dispelling the myth that elite gymnasts peak in their late teens.
Why?
“I think with everything I’ve been through, I want to push the limits, I want to see how far I can go,” she said. “I want to see what I’m still capable of so once I step away from this sport, I can truly be happy with my career and say I gave it my all.”
Mentor and friend
Even as her definition of “all” is changing. The teenage prodigy has become an elder stateswoman who has grown comfortable leading from the front.
When good friend and 2020 Olympic champion Sunisa Lee tripped and fell on vault at the U.S. Championships in June — a scene eerily similar to the sequence that led Biles to remove herself from the team final in Tokyo — Biles ran over to offer support.
At the 2023 world championships, Joscelyn Roberson suffered an ankle injury that forced her to miss the vault finals. Biles did her best to lighten the mood by cracking jokes. And when Roberson found herself struggling during a sometimes grueling rehab, Biles left a note of encouragement in Roberson's locker that urged her to keep trying.
When Jade Carey had problems with her Amanar vault at the Olympic trials, Biles reminded the reigning floor exercise gold medalist to take a step forward on her dismount, something Carey laughingly noted she didn't actually do.
“It’s just really great to have someone like her supporting all of us and helping us get through it,” Carey said.
A singular talent
It wasn't always that way. There has always been an unspoken otherness around Biles. Part of the team — the center of it most times — to be sure, but also a one-of-one.
“I’m like, ‘Can you stop being so good and fall every now and then?’” said Alicia Sacramone Quinn, the co-lead of the U.S. senior women's program. “Her talent and her just level of difficulty and her general ability as an athlete, it is mindblowing.”
When people in Quinn's personal life ask her about Biles, Quinn — whose resume includes 11 medals between the world championships and Olympics — just shakes her head.
“What you see on TV doesn’t even do it justice,” Quinn said. “Her gymnastics has brought such a larger pool of an audience because people want to see what she can do.”
Or, in the case of some, what she can't.
Call it the byproduct of making things impossibly hard look impossibly easy so often it sets a standard that no one else — Biles herself sometimes included — can match.
Double-edged sword
That is the beauty and also the weight of the Olympics, a lesson Biles learned after Tokyo, when all of the glory and gold she brought to the U.S. program through the years suddenly didn't matter to a group bent for some reason on taking her down.
“I do think there’s an unfairness to it because you only watched it once and then if they fall it’s, ‘Oh she sucks’ and it’s like, ‘No, you’re still sitting on the couch and they’re still at the Olympics what are you talking about they sucked? They’re the best in their country,'" Biles said. "So it’s hard.”
Biles is willingly putting herself under the white-hot microscope the Games provide for a third time, obligated not by ego or fame or money but respect for her own talent.
“Knowing Simone and just the fighter that she is, she will definitely want to leave on what she considers on top,” her mother Nellie said. “That I think is what Simone wants for Simone.”
And what Biles wants more than anything else at this point in her life, is peace. There's a very real chance this could be it for an athlete who jokes “I'm ancient now. Forget grandma, I'm past that.”
She's past a lot of things. Maybe Tokyo most of all.
A final bow?
She has taken very methodical steps to protect herself in the run-up to Paris. Her therapist remains on call. Her family — Jonathan included — will be in the stands. She will be surrounded by friends on the competition floor who know perhaps better than anyone the pressure Biles faces.
And then Biles will salute the judges — the ones who do the scoring and in some ways, the ones sitting at home too — and throw herself into the breach once more, perhaps for the last time.
Maybe Paris ends with her hand over her heart as “The Star-Bangled Banner” plays as it has so many times before. Maybe it ends like Tokyo. While she's taken steps to make sure that doesn't happen, she won't really know until she does it.
Either way it goes, Biles plans on walking away on her terms. The woman who has redefined gymnastics is no longer letting her gymnastics or the once-every-four-year experts define her.
She has been quiet about what comes next. She will headline a post-Olympic tour, just as she did three years ago. After that, who knows?
The greatest gymnast of all time may have offered a hint at the end of Olympic trials. Biles was talking about the nature of being a high-profile athlete and the inevitable pushback that comes with it. She was speaking in generalities while leaving plenty of space to read between the lines.
“They want to see the downfall, which is really unfortunate because sports hasn’t seen athletes like we’ve seen before,” she said. “So you really have to give them their flowers in the sport because once they’re gone, you’re going to miss them.”
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AP Summer Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games