The first time I saw Simone Biles in competition, she didn’t win. This, it would turn out, was an exceedingly rare experience, because winning has become synonymous with the Texan—it’s something she’s done more of than any other gymnast who ever tiptoed across a balance beam.
Many gymnastics fans were introduced to Biles when she was already in the middle of her first gold medal run, at the 2013 world championships in Antwerp, Belgium. Others might have heard of her after she hoisted gold at the 2015 worlds in Glasgow. That competition wrapped up less than a year before the 2016 Olympics were set to begin. By the time the Rio Games began, even casual fans understood that Biles’s eventual win in the all-around was considered a foregone conclusion. Nearly everyone who watched her compete in Brazil expected to witness greatness—and so has just about everybody who’s seen her compete since then.
But back in the spring of 2013, at the American Cup in Worcester, Massachusetts, Biles was a fifteen-year-old newcomer who had just aged into the senior ranks. As a junior gymnast, she had done well but hadn’t been a standout. It wasn’t until her final junior seasons that she started to win significant titles, and those were only of the domestic variety. Her senior debut in Worcester was Biles’s first competition at the international level.
I’ll admit that I knew very little about her when I sat down in the media section at that event. I knew some basics: her age; that she was from Spring, Texas, just outside Houston; her placement at the previous year’s junior nationals. (The year before, 2012, I had been exclusively focused on the athletes who were old enough for 2012 Olympics, and I hadn’t paid much mind to the gymnasts coming up behind that group.)
I was seated vaultside, at the ideal angle to view Biles’s Amanar (a vault move named after Romanian gymnast Simona Amânar). Though it had been introduced in 2000, only a handful of gymnasts had competed it over the next dozen or so years, and even fewer executed it well. Biles clearly fell into the latter camp. Her block was clean, and it lifted her high into the air even before she started wrapping in the two and a half clean twists. McKayla Maroney had performed that skill to near perfection at the previous year’s London Olympics, and here Biles was doing it almost as well as Maroney.
On bars, her weakest event, Biles was tidy but not a standout. Her nerves and inexperience shone through on beam, where she fell. But then came floor, the event that would become one of her signatures. There, she demonstrated her tumbling prowess and her immense promise. In the years since the 2013 American Cup, when I told friends about seeing Biles for the first time, I always brought up her tucked double-double tumbling pass. I had never before seen anyone twist so quickly in such a tight tuck position and complete the rotations with that much space beneath them. “You could drive a truck under her,” I’d say to describe the vertical height Biles attained at the peak of her somersaults.
But my writing about that moment, at that moment, used tamer language: “When you watch the 15-year-old on all four events, you’re struck by how much potential Biles has, and she’ll only improve over the next couple of years if she avoids injury. . . . Biles’s tumbling, which would be extremely difficult even for more experienced gymnasts, seems easy for her, and she’ll certainly upgrade it in the near future.”
Watching Biles in this early period of her career felt like watching a new TV show from its pilot, before streaming made it possible to binge-watch. The episodes were released over the course of several weeks, months, or years, and it took a while for the story to unfold. With Biles, you got to be continually surprised by her literal twists and turns.
Of this early period, Biles, in the new Netflix series Simone Biles Rising, observed that this was the last time she was considered an underdog. By the end of 2013, she had picked up her first all-around gold at the world championships, and from then on, she was expected to win every competition she entered. She seemed almost wistful recalling those early days, when the career in front of her was defined by endless possibilities and few expectations.
But at some point, possibilities became probabilities. Biles stopped being simply a contender or a favorite and instead became a sure bet. I believe this happened somewhere between her win at the 2013 worlds and the following year’s world championships, in China. I attended that competition, in Nanning, and I recall nearly everyone there believing Biles was unbeatable. I agreed, but I was taken aback by how quickly the consensus had formed. It took all of one year for the gymnastics community to view Biles as the rest of the world would once it became aware of her—as an inevitability.
There’s a chance that Paris 2024, Biles’s third Games, will also be her final Olympic hurrah, though she hasn’t said so herself. Unlike in the lead-up to 2020, when she declared many times that she would be done after Tokyo (she softened her stance as the postponed Games approached), she has remained mum on the topic this time around. Still, that hasn’t stopped some in the media from announcing her retirement for her.
But even if Paris is not the end, it is an end of sorts. We tend to measure the careers of Olympic athletes in quadrenniums. Sports such as gymnastics are oriented around the Games in most matters, from the rule book—updated for the start of each new Olympic cycle—to the scheduling of events. Everything is done with an eye toward the next Games. And the year after an Olympics is when athletes hit the reset button and start all over again. But this is easier said than done, as Biles herself indicated in a recent interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast. “ ‘Have I reached my greatest achievement in life at nineteen?’ ” she recalled thinking right after she won five medals (four of them gold) at the 2016 Olympics. “I was scared for the rest of my life. ‘How can I beat this? How can I top this?’ ”
And so began the “How can I top this?” phase of Biles’s career. Winning was no longer enough. She was going to test the limits of her talent and her mental stamina, a task made all the more remarkable because she was doing it while publicly and privately processing her trauma as one of the victims of Larry Nassar, the former U.S. women’s gymnastics team doctor who was convicted of sexually abusing athletes under his care. During this period, she introduced some truly mind-blowing elements, such as the triple-twisting double somersault on floor and the double-double off the balance beam. Unlike her first eponymous skill, the double layout half, these skills weren’t small tweaks on commonly performed elements; they represented exponential leaps in difficulty. And she didn’t simply land them—though that would’ve been impressive enough. Biles added flair and virtuosity to these skills. Someone else might perform them someday, but they won’t do them like she did. They’ll probably be thrilled just to execute them.
From a scoring perspective, Biles didn’t need the extra difficulty points. She was already stacking gold medals without them. But exploring the limits of her ability was necessary to keep her engaged in the sport. “It’s going to be very hard to motivate her in the gym if we keep the same assignment almost year after year,” Laurent Landi, one of Biles’s coaches, told me for a 2020 story for Vice. By then, Biles had won the all-around title five times and had broken the record for the most gold medals won at world championships. Winning had become routine, so she was setting her own, loftier goals.
Soon afterward, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the 2020 Olympics, which were supposed to be another “ending” for Biles—perhaps even the last competition of her career—were postponed. The Olympic cycle was upended, extended from four years to five. Though Biles didn’t immediately announce that she’d stick around to compete in 2021, I felt confident that she would. This was not based on insider knowledge. In 2013, I could see the potential but couldn’t envision the career she would end up having; in 2020, I couldn’t imagine Biles not capping off her career with another Olympic all-around title, even if it meant waiting another year. A double failure of imagination on my part.
Biles did compete in Tokyo, but she didn’t defend her title. At the start of the team final, Biles got lost in the air on her vault. It was supposed to be an Amanar, the same skill that had caught my eye in 2013. She had been doing it for nearly a decade at that point. There were open questions about Biles at those Games: How many gold medals would she win? Would she perform all of the staggeringly difficult skills she had introduced since Rio, including the Yurchenko double pike vault she’d debuted a few months earlier?
But that Amanar vault in Tokyo wasn’t supposed to be an open question. It was supposed to be a foregone conclusion.
In perhaps the most talked about event of those Games, Biles withdrew from the majority of events in Tokyo due to the twisties. The exceptional kinesthetic awareness for which she was so well-known had suddenly abandoned her. Nearly everything elite gymnasts do is dangerous, but the risks are calculated and known. With the twisties, the sport’s inherent danger becomes wildly unpredictable. Forced to do a quick risk calculation on the spot, Biles decided to withdraw, not something she or anyone else had seen coming.
Her Netflix documentary spends considerable time on the aftermath of this decision. It was the right call, and besides some loud squawking from sports-talk culture warriors, she was widely praised for the decision. But it was devastating, and in the Netflix film, Biles becomes emotional while speaking about it. She had been in the best shape of her life, ready to become the first female gymnast to successfully defend the all-around gold since Věra Čáslavská did so in 1968—that’s an opportunity she’ll never get back, no matter what happens in Paris. She hadn’t spent four—and then five—years training to arrive at the Olympics and simply not compete.
The incident in Tokyo now seems to be the true dividing line in her career. “After Tokyo, I literally had not one ounce of belief in myself,” she said in her Netflix interview. Her long list of previous accomplishments didn’t seem to bolster her confidence, didn’t remind her of who she was. She felt haunted by the twisties and her subsequent withdrawal. And her dominance no longer felt like a foregone conclusion, at least not to herself.
The way Biles returned to form was by going back to the basics, which is what she advises other gymnasts who experience mental blocks to do. Biles is known for the extraordinary, anything-but-basic skills she’s mastered. Observers are often so focused on the pyrotechnic acrobatics at the ends of her passes that they overlook just how strong her basics are. Her roundoff back handspring is the best in the business; this is why she can do a triple-double with such virtuosity. When casual fans talk about Biles, they tend to say things like, “She breaks the laws of physics.” I like to think that she just has a keener awareness of how to harness those laws and use them to complement her athletic gifts.
The ride Biles has taken us on over the last eleven years might finally be ending, and all I want to do is go back to the beginning and try to experience it all over again for the first time, the same way you might wish you could watch your favorite TV show or movie again with fresh eyes.
But we can’t be clean slates when it comes to Simone Biles. We’ve watched her excel for too long. When she stands at the end of the vault runway in Paris, we might be holding our breaths until she lands safely on the other side, but when she does, it won’t be a surprise. It’ll be a relief that once again, she has met the expectations that so many fans have for her and that she has for herself.
“I get to write my own ending,” Biles said in her docuseries. It will be no surprise if that ending captivates and delights.
