Simone Biles saw it right away.
Suni Lee was lost.
Lee, the defending Olympic all-around champion, in mid-air pulled out of what was supposed to be two twists in her opening vault at the U.S. Gymnastics Championships in Fort Worth, Texas, last month.
Biles saw it even before Lee touched down, sitting back on her landing; saw it with the eyes of someone who had been there, spinning, twisting, 12, 15 feet up in the air, no bearings, just a whole lot of fear and uncertainty between her and getting back to the ground in one piece.
So Biles went looking for her, a one-woman search party through the halls of the Dickies Arena.
“Did you get lost or did you just decide to do 1 1/2?” Biles asked after finding Lee in a tunnel off the competition floor.
Lee acknowledged she had gotten lost her bearings.
“I knew exactly what was going through (Lee’s) head,” Biles said. “I dealt with that in Tokyo. So I just knew that she needed some encouragement and somebody to trust her gymnastics for her and to believe in her.
“Because I’ve been in her shoes. I’ve done that exact thing. I know how traumatizing it is especially on a big stage.”
Three years ago at the Tokyo Olympics, with the world watching, Simone Biles got lost in space.
On the opening rotation of the team final, Biles, the four-time Olympic, 23-time World champion, charged down the vault runway and then launched herself high into the air. In the eight years since she had first emerged as a global superstar at 16 in 2013, she had propelled herself, and her sport, to heights it had never been before, to places beyond even the imagination. Now she worried that she might not make it back down safely.
Suffering “the Twisties,” a psychologically induced gymnastics form of vertigo, Biles cut her routine a rotation short. She touched down but still found no direction of home. How could she with so many pointing her in so many different directions?
Biles has found her way back to a third Olympic Games, favored to recapture the all-around title as well as the vault and floor exercise gold medals, the lost soul in Tokyo finding herself on the way, guided to Paris by a compass that had been there all along, hidden within her.
“To be completely honest, it took a lot mentally and physically to just trust my gymnastics again and most importantly to trust myself because I think that was the hardest part after Tokyo — I didn’t trust myself to do gymnastics,” Biles said. “I knew it would come, but I just had to trust myself. Mentally it was a lot harder than physically.”
Having found herself, Biles, 27, is determined to lead the most scrutinized Team USA in history back to the top of the sport.
“So if I can do anything to help them right now or in the future, that’s what I’m gonna do,” she said of a team that includes three other members from the 2021 Olympic team. “Just be a guide.”
As always Biles’ gymnastics remains unmatched.
Her first-day 60.450 score at the U.S. Championships was the highest of any gymnast this Olympic cycle. She won the Olympic Trials finishing 5.5 points ahead of Lee despite a rare fall on the balance beam.
“We have to invent a new adjective,” said Chellsie Memmel, the technical lead of USA Gymnastics women’s program.
“I don’t know if there will ever be another gymnast not even close to touching her caliber of achievements, difficulty and just the impact she’s had on our sport,” said Alicia Sacramone Quinn, USA Gymnastics strategic lead.
“An icon? I don’t even know if that’s the right way to say it.”
“I laugh after she does her Yurchenko double,” Memmel said, referring to the most difficult and most dangerous vault in gymnastics in which an athlete flips twice in a pike position. “Like how? What are you thinking before that? Because I can’t comprehend that in my mind.”
Biles stuck the landing after a flawless Yurchenko double pike, also known as the Biles 2.0, in Thursday’s Olympic podium training.
“We’re all breathing a little bit better right now. I’m not gonna lie,” U.S. coach Cecile Landi said.
Biles is doing the incomprehensible more than a decade after she won the first of her record World all-around titles.
“I’m using the phrase aging like fine wine,” Biles said. “I thought it was moldy a while ago but it’s just getting better and better. We’ll see. Hopefully we’ll get to ride this out for the rest of the year. So I’m pretty excited about that.”
It’s a ride that seemed inconceivable in the wake of the Tokyo Games.
“I never pictured going to another Olympic Games after Tokyo just because of the circumstances,” Biles said. “I never thought I’d go back into the gym again and be twisting, feel free.So I think it’s exciting for all of us,” she continued referring to her team, “for myself, (to think) ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m still doing it. I’m still capable.”
She paused for a moment and laughed.
“If it would have gone my way (in Tokyo),” she said, “I actually think I would have been crazy enough to be sitting right here again.”
Biles returned to the sport last year, winning World Championships gold medals in the team, individual all-around, beam and floor exercise and taking silver on the vault.
Biles and her coaches, the French husband and wife team of Cecile Landi and her husband Laurent, said she goes into the Paris Games better than either the 2016 or 2021 Olympics.
While Biles said she “could barely walk” after her first competition this season, she trains at World Champions Centre, the Spring, Texas gym owned by her grandmother Nellie, 30 hours a week just as she did leading up to Tokyo. Team USA officials are considering having Biles compete in only three of the four events in the team final to lighten her physical and emotional load.
“It’s not even the skills,” Cecile Landi said. “It’s the attitude and her behavior. I really feel like she’s happy to be here. I know she says she’s ready to be done but I think she’s really enjoying it and appreciating every meet she gets to do.
And, adds Landi, “I think she can still improve.”
“I just see her, I don’t know, she’s just happy. She’s happy to be here. I don’t feel the anxiety.”
Biles has worked just as hard on her mental approach.
“Before Tokyo, she never would have thought that would have happened and now she knows,” Laurent Landi said. “That’s why she does therapy every single week. So doing this she trained herself mentally to get more prepared and handle it every time.”
She also has a husband to lean on now. Biles married Chicago Bears defensive back Jonathan Owens on April 22, 2023. Owens will be in Paris.
“The Bears are giving him a couple of days off,” she said.
“Different?” said Jordan Chiles, Biles’ training partner and U.S. teammate. “Personally I don’t think so. She’s not 24, she’s 27 now. And she’s married now so I think maybe she has a different mindset now, for sure, on what life is.
“A three-year gap changes a lot within yourself. Physically, mentally, emotionally.”
Biles first took a break from gymnastics in 2017 after winning gold medals in the team, individual all-round, vault and floor exercise at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
She returned in 2018 to win that same set of gold medals at the World Championships and then add a fifth title, on the balance beam, at the 2019 World Championships in Stuttgart.
She continued to lead the way out of the gym as well. She was a strong and persistent voice in the Black Lives Matter movement. And in January 2018, Biles became the the most well-known and one of the most vocal of the more than 500 survivors who were sexually assaulted under the guise of treatment by former U.S. Olympic and women’s national team physician Larry Nassar, casting herself as a survivor on her own terms, refusing, she said, to “be labeled by Larry Nassar’s abuse.”
Much of Nassar’s abuse took place during Olympic and national team training camps at the Karolyi Ranch, operated by longtime U.S. national team director Martha Karolyi, located at the dead end of a red clay road in a remote central Texas forest. Biles alluded to the ranch when she stepped forward.
“It breaks my heart even more to think that as I work towards my dream of competing in Tokyo 2020, I will have continually return to the same training facility where I was abused,” she wrote on Twitter.
USA Gymnastics closed the facility and cut ties with the Karolyis three days later.
“If she hadn’t opened her mouth and spoke out, gymnasts would still be going there for national team camps with Martha walking around the perimeter,” said John Manly, an Orange County attorney who represents Biles and more than 100 other survivors of sexual abuse by Nassar and former Olympic coaches
She continued to push USA Gymnastics to take responsibility for Nassar and create a culture that prioritized athlete safety over branding and corporate sponsorships
“It’s hard coming here for an organization, having had them fail us so many times,” Biles said at the 2019 U.S. Championships in Kansas City. “We had one goal. We have done everything that they asked us for, even when we didn’t want to, and they couldn’t do one damn job. You literally had one job and you couldn’t protect us.
“But then at the end of the day, we still need to know and have an independent investigation. So, for some of us survivors, it is disheartening to know that that hasn’t happened. And some of the survivors are still out there competing, and I feel like they (USA Gymnastics) just want to sweep it under the rug. But that’s not how to go about it. I feel like in gymnastics, you get deductions for stepping out of the line and all this stuff and they just get slaps on the wrist and keep going. It’s like it just doesn’t disappear. After I step out in three nights in a row, they’re like, ah, she’s going to step out. We’re not going to deduct for it anymore. So, I just feel like there needs to be consequences for their actions. But I’m sure it’s coming.”
Despite the distraction, Biles seemed invincible going into Tokyo, favored to win four of the six available gold medals.
And then she took off down the vault runway in the team final.
“I do a lot of therapy,” Biles said, “so every time I’m in therapy if I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna die.’ She’s like don’t say that. That’s not good to rehearse that. It’s not good to say that or whatever negative thoughts I have. She says, ‘This is therapy, it’s an open space, but please don’t say that.’ You can’t remind yourself of that.”
Biles withdrew from the remainder of a team competition in which the U.S. finished second to Russia as well as the individual all-around, vault, uneven bars and floor exercise finals.
She eventually returned to claim a bronze medal on the balance beam.
Biles used the platform of her Olympic disappointment in Tokyo to become a leading voice in speaking up on mental health issues.
“I think it’s nice that Tokyo gave us that opportunity, you know to open up that stage for that talk,” she said. “And now I think athletes are a little more in tune. We trust what our gut is saying and they take mental health a little more serious.”
Biles also now knows how to manage expectations.
“I actually think there’s something good about going into 2016, like, blindly because I didn’t know anything and the expectations weren’t as big as they are now,” she said. “So now having gone to two Olympics, everyone I feel like is a little bit more stressful because I know exactly what to expect, I know exactly what I expect from myself. So I honestly think Rio was so much fun because I was a little bit ditzy and out of it when they told me, ‘Oh, you made this event final, this event final, this event final’ and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s cool.’ But now I know what exactly the (expectations are).
“So there’s beauty in the blindness. So yeah, just focusing on what I can control,” Biles said.
So Biles refuses to be a player in America’s favorite pastime: building someone up, just to tear them down.
Conservative commentator Charlie Kirk described Biles after Tokyo as a “sociopath.”
“We are raising a generation of weak people like Simone Biles,” Kirk said on his podcast. “If she’s got all these mental health problems: don’t show up.”If you’re not ready for the big time, we’ve got thousands of young gymnasts that would love to take your place. Thousands. Simone Biles just showed the rest of the nation that when things get tough, you shatter into a million pieces.
“She’s an incredible athlete, of course she’s an incredible athlete, I’m not saying that—she’s probably the greatest gymnast of all time. She’s also very selfish, she’s immature and she’s a shame to the country.”
TV host Piers Morgan was just as brutal.
“Are ‘mental health issues’ now the go-to excuse for any poor performance in elite sport? What a joke,” Morgan tweeted. “Just admit you did badly, made mistakes, and will strive to do better next time. Kids need strong role models not this nonsense.”
Biles continues to be a target of criticism from the right. She has vowed to stay off social media during the Olympics.
“Yeah, but it doesn’t even matter,” Biles said when asked why she doesn’t respond to her critics. “If I do that they still say, ‘Oh my gosh, are you going to quit again? Are you going to quit again?’ And if I did what are you going to do about it? Tweet me something more? Like I’ve already dealt with it for three years.
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“But yeah they want to see us fail. They want to see the rise to success and as soon as you get it and you kind of take that and run with it, you start reigning for a really long time, they want to see the downfall.”
For at least one more Olympics, fans get to appreciate Biles, lost no more, once again leading the way.
“This is definitely our redemption tour,” Biles said. “We all have more to give and our Tokyo performance wasn’t the best. We weren’t under the best circumstances either but I feel like we have a lot of weight on our shoulders to go out there and prove we’re better athletes, we’re more mature. We’re smarter, more consistent.
“Everybody looks at this team, ‘Ok, they went to Tokyo and this, this and this happened and what are you going to do here in Paris?’ But for us, I know we’re stronger than we showed in Tokyo. So I think this has to be for us. It can’t be for anybody else because that’s not why we do it. We do it for ourselves and the love for the sport and the love for representing the U.S.”
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