Simone Biles Goes Too Big to Fail—or to Properly Fathom
When Biles reached the top of her sport, she jumped even higher—and had no idea how she’d land. Now, she’s back at her third Olympics and, with one team medal already secured, is looking to complete a comeback that’s years in the making.
The human mind is an exceptional machine, although it does have some exceptions. About a million of them, or maybe it’s a zillion? Either way, one known weakness of our brains is that they aren’t designed to grasp huge numbers and other measures of enormity. “Our brains are evolutionarily very old,” one Stanford researcher said on NPR earlier this year, “and we are pushing them to do things that we’ve only just recently conceptualized.” The segment gave some examples of quantities that might be difficult to ponder: the size of the universe and/or the national debt; the length of time that passed between the Big Bang and the dinosaurs; the gap between net worths of a million bucks versus a billion. To all these, I’d add another one: the amount of eyes on gymnast Simone Biles this week as she competes in her third Olympics.
The American star arrived at the 2024 Paris Games eager to complete a comeback that began in the aftermath of a distressing performance at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. In those Games, Biles stumbled off the vault and eventually withdrew from much of the competition following descriptions of her being “lost in the air” and developing something called “the twisties.” It was less than two years ago that Biles had stepped so far away from competition that she occasionally had to post on social media that she hadn’t technically retired. But in the summer of 2023, she officially reappeared on the circuit to commence what Slate described as “the Beyoncé album-drop of non-comeback comebacks.”
Now, Biles is in France toting a magic bag of tricks that would impress Mary Poppins; a record of back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back first-place finishes since her return; and, for good measure, a production crew ready to capture the last two episodes of the Netflix docuseries Simone Biles Rising. (The first two episodes premiered earlier this month.) In the lead-up to the Games, she spoke of “redemption,” filmed so, so many TV promos, and signaled that she hoped to christen a new maneuver on the uneven bars—which would then be named after her. (There are already three moves called “Biles” and two moves called “Biles II” in other events.) In her first practice at the Olympic venue last week, Biles absolutely nailed a vault—the Yurchenko double pike, a.k.a. one of those Biles IIs—that no other gymnasts will dare try in these Games. And then during the qualifying round of competition on Sunday—well, how to describe what Biles did?
Here’s roughly how I put it when I jostled my sleeping husband awake around 4 a.m. because I couldn’t take it anymore: First, she was SO BACK on beam, but then she felt a pop in a warm-up, and it was so over! But then she was SO BACK again on floor, and they kept cutting to Tom Cruise being like, damn! Lady Gaga was there too. Then at the vault, she got down on her hands and knees and started … crawling? Simone, I mean, not Lady Gaga! But—wait, hey, wake up!—but I think the crawling was kidding, like she was doing a whole Kerri Strug bit. Anyway, then it kinda seemed like she made her injury worse right at the end, but who knows, because she was also waving to the crowd and dancing, because did I mention that she finished first? Like, BY A LOT? And is thus SO BACK?!
More succinct was the reaction of Laurie Hernandez, Olympic medalist turned NBC commentator, whose murmurs in the instants before and after Biles took off on one of her vault attempts spoke for a nation and summed up the whole vibe of the day: “I think I’m going to throw up. … … … Yay.”
It was a strange series of events indeed, but by the time the qualifying round ended, the results had settled into a familiar place: Biles and her teammate Suni Lee—the two all-around gold medalists from the Rio and Tokyo Olympics, respectively—would advance to Thursday’s all-around competition. They’ll go into it with happy spirits. On Tuesday, in the team final, the American women performed like the star-spangled sensations they are, leaping and flipping and handily clinching collective gold.
A couple of years ago, reflecting on her 2021 decision to withdraw mid-competition in Tokyo, Biles told Brene Brown: “Walking out of it was my biggest win.” This week, every time she walks out onto the floor in Paris to compete on her own terms feels like a victory, too.
Following Tuesday’s team gold, Biles was asked whether this year’s squad has a name. (Past teams have gone by the Fierce Five and the Final Five.) She and her teammates consulted and came up with one: the F-Around-and-Find-Out Five. On Thursday, as she tries for another individual medal, it’s safe to say the world will be finding out, from both living rooms and inside the arena. Biles’s opponents are some of her biggest fans, after all, and the above picture of the picture takers, which aired during Sunday’s broadcast, made for a telling glimpse into what life looks like from the receiving end of our collective gaze. It all adds up to a level of attention that is impossible to fathom. You could say the same thing about Biles’s entire career.
Since hitting the senior circuit in 2013, Biles has won eight Olympic medals (five gold, one silver, two bronze) and another 30 medals in the World Championships—a combined total that makes her the most decorated gymnast in history. (Twenty-three of those World Championship medals were gold, an amount more than double that of anyone else.) The degrees of difficulty in her routines are so high that sometimes she’ll fall off the beam or step out of bounds on the floor—the kinds of mistakes that would mean goodbye and good luck for most other competitors—and win the meet by like two points anyway. (In gymnastics, two points is a number as big as the cosmos.)
As a 19-year-old at the Rio Olympics in 2016, she set a new record on the floor exercise and came home with four gold medals and a bronze. In 2022, she earned some new hardware: the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
If she gets her wish, Biles could emerge from France with eponymous maneuvers on all four apparatuses. (A trick is named after you when you’re the first person to land it in major international competition.) Since her debut season, she hasn’t earned anything less than all-around gold in a single meet that she started and finished. Here’s another good one: She is the oldest woman on the U.S. gymnastics team in 72 years, having turned 27 years old in March.
Biles has stuck so many landings and stood atop so many podiums and spun around the axis of herself so many times this century that wrapping one’s head around the scope of her talent requires an entirely recalibrated sense of scale and possibility. “Our human brains are pretty bad at comprehending large numbers,” that Stanford researcher on NPR noted, “and the same is true, actually, for really small numbers, too.” Which might be why my mind’s eye so often rejects the premise that Biles is 4-foot-8, instead envisioning her as the size of a Times Square billboard or Mount Rushmore carving. (We’ve all seen the powerful ups that Biles can summon; you expect me to believe that kind of explosiveness doesn’t require quads the size of a city block?)
Everything around Biles always seems to be going up, up, up: more courage, more tricks, more risk, more people tuning and weighing in. Everyone around Biles always wants to know what it’s like to live inside her head, but at some point, there’s just too much to explain. Last week, The Onion ran an “interview” with Biles that included this (faux) exchange:
The Onion: What goes through your mind when you’re so high in the air?
Biles: Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, please don’t die, don’t die, don’t die, don’t die, don’t die.
Ha ha, but that actually isn’t too different from what the real Biles has said when people try to get her to describe her in-competition mentality. When The New Yorker asked her why she wasn’t planning to try a rather bonkers vault move called the Produnova at the Rio Olympics, she responded, “I’m not trying to die.” Before the Tokyo Games, which were postponed a year to 2021, Biles was the subject of a seven-part Facebook series called Simone Vs. Herself in which she was asked essentially that same Onion question. She characterized what it was like to be midair, mid-stunt as less of a feeling than a sound. “It feels like: zzzoop,” she said. “Half the time, honestly, I feel like I’m just gonna die.” And in the Netflix series, Biles recalled what was in her head during one botched vault in Tokyo. “To me, it felt silent,” Biles says. “Almost like death.” There was no zzzoop that time.
Remember earlier, when I wrote that Biles hadn’t lost an all-around competition that she started and finished since 2013? You may have sensed from the wording that this was some sports-stat legalese designed to sidestep an inconvenient truth. Such as leaving out one particularly noteworthy meet that Biles did not in fact start and finish and that she definitely did not win. That would be the Tokyo Olympics.
Recently, director Katie Walsh had one of those classic anxiety dreams that are related to one’s line of work. Hockey players I’ve interviewed before have described dreams in which their skate laces turn to dust in their hands; Hernandez once told me that in her nightmares, she couldn’t land a front flip on the beam and would just keep over-rotating toward the ground until she woke up. In Walsh’s case, she says, she was holding a viewing party for the first two episodes of Simone Biles Rising, and the guests all up and left, right in the middle of the screening.
I can only imagine Walsh’s relief when she woke up to find that it was all a dream, that people are as tuned in to the story of Biles as ever. And watching her series is a rough reminder that, in 2021, Biles experienced one of these professional nightmares herself—except there was no waking up. “Work for five years for a dream and just have to give it up,” Biles mutters in the first episode of the Netflix series. “It was not easy at all.”
On the surface, Biles entered the Olympics in 2021 at the top of her game. She had steadily added to her international gold medal count since Rio, and at the 2019 World Championships, she had finished first by more than two points. “The world wants everything from Simone Biles,” began one 2021 article in The Wall Street Journal, “and she keeps on giving it.” The title of the Facebook show released that summer, Simone Vs. Herself, conveyed her GOAT status: There was simply no one on her level.
But that title would also wind up being prophetic. When Biles was named to the Olympic team at trials in June 2021, she wasn’t wholly satisfied with her showing. “Simone Night One kicked Simone Night Two’s butt,” she told reporters afterward, and this wasn’t an attempt at humility. On the second night of competition, Biles had bopped around on her vault landings, stepped out of bounds on the floor exercise twice, fallen off the balance beam, and cried. “It wasn’t my best performance,” she said. “I kind of got in my head today.” She also won by nearly three points.
A few weeks later, during qualification at the Tokyo Olympics, the problems resurfaced. Biles didn’t just step out of bounds during the floor exercise—she sailed off the raised surface altogether. On her first vault attempt, she lunged sideways upon landing—unusual stuff for someone who typically dominated both events. “it wasn’t an easy day or my best but I got through it,” she wrote afterward on Instagram. “I truly do feel like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders at times. I know I brush it off and make it seem like pressure doesn’t affect me but damn sometimes it’s hard hahaha! The olympics is no joke!”
During the team final in Tokyo, Biles stared down the vault. “It doesn’t matter what vault she does,” chirped a TV commentator. “It’s a showstopper, and it’s must-see TV!” This, too, wound up being prophetic.
Biles would later say that as she ran toward the vault, she wasn’t sure what she would do when she got there. Then, once aloft, she under-rotated and flailed and looked really, really panicked and hit the mat hard—though somehow, luckily, feetfirst. “Very uncharacteristic vault for Simone,” the broadcaster said slowly. “It looked like she almost ... got lost in the air?” It was a showstopper, all right: Biles walked off the mat, gave her speechless teammates a pep talk, left the floor, and withdrew from the remainder of the competition.
“It should be a forbidden word,” Biles says in her Netflix series about the twisties, a perky name for a merciless affliction. “Twisties” describes a mind-body torment in which a gymnast loses their grip on where they are while in the air and spirals, mentally and/or physically, beyond control. It’s similar to the yips—a phenomenon in which even an elite baseball star can suddenly lose the ability to make a routine toss—or other woes like “dartitis.” But the twisties have a key differentiating factor: the threat of dramatic, traumatic injury. “You find out where the ground is when you slam into it,” wrote CNN reporter and former gymnast Elle Reeve in 2021. And for someone as high-flying as Biles, whose moves already exist on the knife-edge of risk and reward, getting lost in the air is as dangerous as it gets.
A few days after her withdrawal, Biles posted a video on Instagram in which she struggled to do some easy (for her) practice moves. “literally can not tell up from down. it’s the craziest feeling ever,” she wrote. “not having an inch of control over your body. what’s even scarier is since I have no idea where I am in the air I also have NO idea how I’m going to land. or what I’m going to land on. head/hands/feet/back…”
Team USA was deep and resilient enough in Tokyo to win the team silver medal in Biles’s absence; her teammate Lee eventually won the all-around gold. Biles wound up returning for one event in Tokyo, winning bronze on the beam. But talk of the twisties swept the States and beyond, as did discussion about Biles’s choice to sit mostly out. Some hot-take merchants were eager to scold or snark on Biles, including the reliably cranky Piers Morgan, who complained that mental health issues had become a “go-to excuse”; the weirdo Charlie Kirk, who called Biles a “selfish sociopath”; and Jason Whitlock, who generally sought attention.
By and large, though, Biles was praised—by celebs and civilians alike—for setting an example by centering her own health and safety. “The Radical Courage of Simone Biles’s Exit From the Team U.S.A. Olympic Finals,” read one New Yorker headline. “Simone Biles Rejects a Long Tradition of Stoicism in Sports,” hailed The New York Times. Vox noted that between Biles and tennis player Naomi Osaka, who had recently spoken up about her state of mind, “America’s mental health moment is finally here.”
That’s how I remember it, anyway. Biles saw things a little bit differently.
“As soon as I landed, I was like, ‘Oh, America hates me,’” Biles recalled on the Call Her Daddy podcast earlier this year. “The world is going to hate me, and I can only see what they’re saying on Twitter right now. That was my first thought. I was like, ‘Holy shit. What are they going to say about me?’” It’s not surprising that in that moment, Biles’s mind went to such an anxious place. What happened in Tokyo was about the twisties, yes, but it was also about all the years of triumph and tragedy that had preceded them.
“In 2016, it was so much fun,” Biles said on Call Her Daddy about her first Olympics. “The camaraderie, the team spirit, everybody’s rooting for everybody. I feel like that’s world peace. Time stops.” But when it was all over, she thought that her career might be, too; it was unusual for Team USA gymnasts to be tapped for the Games more than once. “I thought that’s where it ended,” she said. “I was like, Oh my gosh, how have I reached my greatest achievement in life at 19? I was scared for the rest of my life. How can I beat this? How can I top this? What the heck am I going to do? I won the Olympics at 19. It’s going to be a shithole from here on out.”
It both was and wasn’t. In the interim between Rio and Tokyo, Biles went on Dancing With the Stars—the first time she had ever “danced with a boy,” she said on the podcast—and she also met her now-husband, the NFL’s Jonathan Owens. She became a celebrity celebrity, and she went back to winning every meet. But it was a painful time to be the public face of women’s gymnastics. Former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar was on trial for first-degree criminal sexual conduct against the gymnasts he was entrusted with treating. And adults throughout the top levels of the sport were said to have failed the young athletes again and again in a variety of ways. “Most of you know me as a happy, giggly, and energetic girl,” Biles wrote on Twitter in January 2018, in a post stating that she had been sexually abused by Nassar. “But lately...I’ve felt a bit broken and the more I try to shut off the voice in my head the louder it screams.”
Biles was beginning to see that her influence could be a force for change. In her tweet, she added that it would break her heart even further to have to train at the Karolyi Ranch, where much of the abuse had taken place. Days later, USA Gymnastics closed down the facility. In April 2021, Biles told The Today Show that one of her reasons for wanting to compete in the Tokyo Olympics was to make sure that Nassar and the adults in charge who enabled him would be remembered. “I feel like if there weren’t a remaining survivor in the sport, they would’ve just brushed it to the side,” she said.
Unfortunately, Tokyo was no Rio. There was no world peace to be found, and no inner peace, either: not at the hotel, not in the gym, and definitely not out on the mat at the end of that vault. The stands were kept nearly empty due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and no friends or family were allowed. (In Simone Biles Rising, her mom, Nellie, laments that it’s the lone meet of Simone’s that she’s ever missed.) It would be hard to design a more stressful Olympic environment if you tried.
Because of her documentary project, Biles’s room at the Games was rigged up with various mics and cameras, making the place seem like a Real World confessional or that set where Survivor contestants go to be interviewed after they’ve been voted off the island. Which is pretty much exactly what Biles did after being stricken by the twisties, recording a teary video. “It could happen any other time,” she says in the footage, sniffling. “I don’t get why it happens at the Olympics.” But looking at the fact pattern, it wasn’t hard to see why it happened at this Olympics.
After Tokyo, Biles took two years off. Well, sort of. First, adding insult to twisties, she had to make the rounds touring as part of a previously planned, unfortunately named, 35-city gymnastics showcase called Gold Over America Tour. In the fall of 2021, Biles went to the Met Gala, and testified before Congress about sexual abuse, and said she was at peace with her career: “Making it this far? It was one in a trillion,” she told The Cut. In March 2022, Biles was in a Powerade ad exhorting athletes to pause every now and then for their mental health. “Honestly, last year was a crazy year,” she told USA Today, “but I think pushing mental health to the forefront was a huge thing. I honestly didn’t realize in that moment the impact that it would have.”
Contrary to popular belief, Biles had not yet retired—a fact she had to remind fans of from time to time—and in September of that year, on The Late Late Show With James Corden, she hinted that she might be back at the Olympics—somehow. “I think right now I still have to heal mentally and physically,” she said. “So, I will be in Paris. I just don’t know yet what role, if that is an athlete or an audience member.”
It’s rare, especially in the U.S. program, for a gymnast to appear in two Olympics; it’s almost unheard of to come back for a third. (Three other U.S. women have done so: Muriel Grossfeld and Linda Metheny, whose tenures overlapped on the 1964 team, and the legend Dominique Dawes.) Biles decided she wanted to return so that she’d never look back with regrets and wonder, “What if?” “My ‘why’ is nobody is forcing me to do it,” she told The Athletic. On Call Her Daddy, Biles said that when she first told her coaches, a husband and wife named Cecile and Laurent Landi, that she wanted to return to the Olympics, their immediate answer was no—though you have to assume that they knew Biles would find a way to make that a yes.
This week, Biles and Lee will both try to win a second all-around title and complete their respective comebacks—Biles is returning from the twisties and Lee has endured two kidney diseases that required multiple surgeries in recent years. But being back on this stage still comes with its share of challenges.
Both Lee and Biles have admitted that social media still degrades their mental health. “The mean things were way louder than all of the support,” Biles says in Simone Biles Rising of the noise that has long surrounded her. (Giselle Parets, one of the series’ executive producers, tells me that what surprised her most in working with Biles “is how much social media can influence somebody’s life.”) Biles remembers and quotes specific tweets about herself and, increasingly, her husband. She deletes Twitter, then reinstalls it (who among us?), then deletes it again. She generally behaves such that it would not surprise me to learn that she lies in bed and subjects herself to search terms like “simone biles coward” and “jonathan owens overrated.”
All of this is relatable for anyone who has ever received feedback—solicited or otherwise—online, and it’s also a real bummer to realize that you can be one of the planet’s most astonishing people and still feel demoralized by the opinion of some anonymous schmuck. But even GOATs are human, so maybe it’s all rooted in how the brain copes with the kind of quantities that are too big to feel. By my back-of-the-envelope estimation, the amount of people who love and support Biles rounds to “pretty much everybody,” but therein lies the problem: How can a person be expected to actually perceive and process a universe so vast? Far simpler just to keep track of those nobodies out there than to try to tally up every star in the sky.
Back in the summer of 2021, a reporter from Reuters got in touch with a former champion Soviet-era gymnast named Larisa Latynina to hear her thoughts on the state of women’s gymnastics. In the late ’50s and early ’60s, Latynina was an elite and successful athlete for the USSR team, amassing 18 Olympic medals, nine of them gold (still a gymnastics record). Latynina, who lived through Nazi occupation as a child, was 21 when she made her Olympic debut. Two years later, at the 1958 World Championships, she won five golds while hiding a four-month pregnancy from just about everyone. In 2016, when Michael Phelps finally edged out her count of 18 medals, she coolly remarked: “I’m quite happy there is a man in the world who can overcome my record, finally.”
Now, at age 89, she is the only living woman on earth who has won the Olympic all-around title more than once, a feat that both Biles and Lee are now jockeying to match. (Latynina contemporary Vera Caslavska, a Czechoslovak athlete and activist who kept in shape by shoveling coal and carrying potatoes through the woods, also won two all-arounds; she died in 2016.) “Looking at what gymnasts today do, I’m a little afraid,” Latynina told the reporter. “What we did is not comparable to what modern gymnasts do.”
She wasn’t wrong. Watching Latynina footage after such a steady diet of Biles and Team USA highlights reminded me of that old tweet positing that “a single Dorito has more extreme nacho flavor than a peasant in the 1400s would get in his whole lifetime.” I say that with no disrespect. See for yourself Latynina’s Olympic gold-winning vault. Or consider that, in Latynina’s gold-medal performance from Melbourne in 1956, her floor routine consisted of maneuvers such as a back walkover, a tour jeté, and a roundoff connecting into a handspring. The routine Biles previewed in Paris, meanwhile, begins with the Biles II, a “triple-twisting double back tuck,” which acts as a nice tone-setter for the full-twisting front layout–double-twisting double back tuck combination pass that follows.
The constant progression in modern gymnastics inspires wonder in a spectator: Just when you think all the loopholes of classical physics and/or human biomechanics have been found and exploited, there’s more! But the flip side of all the soaring is that at some point, it’s a long way down. For all her understanding that today’s sport is a whole different beast than the one she knew, Latynina was nevertheless taken aback when Biles withdrew in Tokyo. “In our day that would have been unacceptable,” she said at the time. “I can’t imagine how that’s possible.” It would have remained pretty unacceptable in Biles’s day, too, if she hadn’t helped lead the groundswell to reframe the organizational mindset of USA Gymnastics and treat athletes like people with precious bodies and minds and souls.
This year’s team drew some notice when they took a photo in the Parisian athlete village cafeteria smiling over some pizza. That’s because, even just a couple of Olympic cycles ago, things were very different for the women on the team. In former Olympian Aly Raisman’s memoir, she writes about winning her first all-around gold at a meet in Italy in 2010 and having a celebratory slice of pizza afterward at a banquet—and being immediately shamed by a USA Gymnastics official: “Aly, you are never allowed to do that again, as long as you’re competing,” she was scolded. Raisman’s name also came up recently for another reason, when Biles said that she owed her former captain an apology. Back when they were teammates in Rio, Biles told NBC: “[Raisman’s] like our sleeping little grandma.” At the time, Raisman was the oldest women’s gymnast to have made a U.S. Olympic team in 16 years, which is to say that she was all of 22.
“I definitely have to apologize to Aly for calling her grandma,” Biles said with a laugh in June, after winning the Olympic trials and making her third team, “because, whew, I feel like I’m way older now!” The next morning, on Today, Hoda Kotb mentioned Biles’s own advanced age. “I definitely feel 27 after meets like this,” the gymnast groaned, and the way she said the number 27 made it sound like she had just turned a million years old. (Or maybe it’s a zillion?)
Watching Biles perform in her third Olympics this week—her calf taped up and her expression resolute; her 4-foot-8 frame moving in ways that look larger than life; her entire past, present, and future all up there in the air alongside her, revolving and evolving and zzzooping and trying not to die—I realized that what Biles asks of her body is the same as what most people seek from their minds. Pushing them to do things that we’ve only just recently conceptualized, as that researcher on NPR put it. Adding and adding, going bigger and loftier, seeing just how high we can count.
