Eight years ago, at the Rio Olympics, when Simone Biles made the quantum leap from gymnast to global household name with her groundbreaking masterclass of four gold medals in seven days, the most common refrain used to describe her greatness was that her routines were so ridiculously difficult that she could fall multiple times and still win. For years, Biles had been so far ahead of everyone else it was almost embarrassing, performing elements and routines so difficult that an entire generation of her successors would struggle to keep up.
On Monday afternoon, the most stubborn of her rivals finally did so when Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade, who had been closing the gap on the greatest gymnast of all time for years, defeated Biles for gold on the floor exercise by less than four-hundredths of a point. That Biles failed to medal on the beam, the sport’s most precarious and unpredictable event, was no surprise. But her silver on the floor marked the first time she had been defeated in her favorite discipline at a competition since Aly Raisman defeated her at the 2015 U.S. National Championships. During a week in which gymnasts from Algeria, Ireland and the Philippines won their countries’ first-ever Olympic titles, Andrade’s gold was perhaps the biggest shock of all.
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The final day of an unforgettable gymnastics program in the 12th arrondissement does nothing to diminish the spectacular comeback of Biles, who became the oldest American woman to make an Olympic gymnastics team since the 1950s. She had already won three golds in the past week through Monday, giving the United States a redemptive triumph in the team event, and became only the third woman in history to win a second Olympic all-around title and a third. She leaves the French capital with an absurd 41 medals between the Olympics and world championships, by far the most of anyone in history.
But what came into sharper focus Monday was Biles’ role as leader of the sport’s revived dynasty. At the Paris Games, which for the first time became the heartbeat of the U.S. women’s gymnastics team, she was never better than in defeat. As she wrapped a weeping Jordan Chiles in a bear hug after the final examination that lifted the 23-year-old from fifth to bronze, Biles was more elated for her old American teammate than for herself. It was the same when she bowed to Andrade on the podium in one of the enduring images of these Summer Games, expressing genuine joy and respect for the rival who has dogged her for nearly a decade.
Though she was the star of the Rio Olympic team that became known as the Final Five, Raisman was that group’s locker room leader. And while Biles was certainly expected to lead the U.S. team at the pandemic-postponed Tokyo Games, her priorities rightfully shifted to her own well-being after her abrupt withdrawal from the team event with a case of twisties. But in Paris, there’s no question who the captain is, and for the most part, she’s filled that role admirably. Even on the oldest U.S. women’s gymnastics team since 1952—the hook behind its nickname, the Golden Girls—Biles is the den mother of a group that grew up idolizing her and continues to do so. Throughout the weeklong competition, Biles has been out front, offering vocal support and encouragement to teammates and rivals alike, embodying the unique camaraderie that sets gymnastics apart from all other sports.
Biles is one of a number of veteran American athletes, including Ryan Crouser, Lee Kiefer, Katie Ledecky and Nyjah Huston, who have openly considered extending their careers for the chance to compete at the Olympics on home soil in four years. Biles just became the oldest Olympic all-around winner in 72 years and will be 31 when the Games begin in Los Angeles. But a confluence of factors — her sky-high self-confidence, her earning potential, her status as the face of the American Olympic movement and the positive overhaul of USA Gymnastics under CEO Li Li Leung — makes it a good bet we’ll see her there in some form, perhaps as a specialist, likely after the same two-year break she took after Rio and Tokyo.
It will be interesting to see, then, how Biles wields her outsized influence as the team’s unquestioned leader going forward. Oddly enough, as impeccably as she handled Monday’s surprising setback, it was the way she set the tone in the win that raised the only questions. There was her outsized focus on the “haters” after Tuesday’s team gold and the revelation of their internal Fuck Around and Find Out moniker. Rightfully so. There was her dunking on a long-forgotten teammate who had doubted the team during the Olympic lead-up in a vlog that barely made a ripple outside of the gymternet. Which is fine. But seeing the 27-year-old face of the U.S. Olympic team give Chiles a hard time is where the whole thing starts to drift into Regina George territory. Are we celebrating a team, or are we building a clique?
Now, there are certainly times when pettiness is a virtue. Biles’ overlong salute to interrupt Monday’s floor exercise, after being criticized by the judges for not doing so after her beam vault, would have made Katniss Everdeen proud. And it’s important to note that all of these tabloid extracurriculars, earned through years of hard work and dedication, have generated box office numbers on social media. Frankly, these kinds of feuds do more toward achieving the IOC’s holy grail of getting younger people into the Olympics than adding breakdancing or 3×3 basketball ever will.
And more than anything, it’s crucial to emphasize that Biles the gymnast is truly a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, a special artist who makes the unthinkable look elemental and the extraordinary seem effortless. We’ll never see anyone like her again. Watching her spacetime-cheating routines of the past decade has been like watching Vince Carter defy gravity in the NBA dunk contest or Maradona slalom through half of the England team at Azteca Stadium. Since winning her first national title in 2013, she’s won every all-around competition in every meet she’s entered, 34 in all, setting one of the most unbreakable records in all of sports. There’s a credible argument to be made that she’s been America’s best athlete for over a decade, period.
But the simple act of paying attention to the trolls and critics who slip her name by belies the joy, the bounce, the brio that people want to remember when they recall what they felt when they saw Biles perform. As she continues as the undisputed leader of the world-beating U.S. women’s gymnastics team for as long as she wants the job, Biles’ impact on setting the tone for a program that is the envy of the sport and the young gymnasts who come through it is greater than ever before, and perhaps greater than the American Olympic movement itself. How she handles it going forward will be something worth watching.
