SIMONE BILES
Pain of being the world’s greatest gymnast
Days tend to start the same way for simone Biles. There’s a moan, a groan and a grudging appreciation of the irony that she, the woman who has redefined the art of movement, can barely lie in bed without something aching.
‘Oh, this body,’ she says, sweeping a hand from head down to toe, a journey of approximately four feet and eight inches.
‘It starts when I wake up. I can tell you almost straight away if it is cold or not because my bones will shake. I joke to my friends a lot that I am going to be in a wheelchair at 30.
‘My body feels like it is maybe in its 30s or 40s. Maybe older. Inside it is screaming and yelling at me.’
Outwardly Biles is laughing. It’s all normal to her and at the same time she knows it shouldn’t be for a 22-year- old. ‘Pain is just something I live with and that is pretty odd for my age, right? It feels weird if I’m not in pain.
‘I was thinking about this — I’ve been quite fortunate with injuries but there’s been some stuff. There’s been a calf I have partially torn two or three times, I broke a rib in 2016, and oh yeah, it turned out my toe was shattered in five pieces after the last Olympics without me knowing.
‘That was weird. I had it for ages and used to tell people it was going to fall off. One day I had it X-rayed and they were asking how long it had been bad. I’d had it about two years. Oh, and my shoulder, I’m not even going to go into specifics but that, too.
‘I guess that is it. If you are jumping up in the air all the time, sometimes gravity says no.’
and then she giggles again, this american superstar who walked out of Heathrow airport on Monday afternoon barely drawing a glance from those around her.
at this point, a few numbers: she has four Olympic gymnastics gold medals and one bronze, each won at Rio 2016, and she has collected 14 world titles.
Her margin of victory for the allaround gold over silver at the worlds last year was bigger than the gap between the silver medal and 12th place. as it happens, she felt her performance that day let down her country.
Next, a couple of common conclusions: she is regarded as the best gymnast in history and by extension she can be fairly ranked among the true wonders of the wider sporting world.
To reiterate, she is only 22, has had a life that has also included her adoption by her grandparents at six because her mother was addicted to drink and drugs, and the sexual assault she suffered by the jailed Usa Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar.
That she can spring from the floor to the height of a basketball hoop despite so much that might weigh her down is astonishing.
and now Biles has come to London, where she will compete on saturday in the superstars of Gymnastics event at The O2. Watching that short and muscular frame twist, contort and fly ought to stand as a bucket-list item for the recent sporting era, next to Messi, Williams, Federer, Woods, Kohli, Phelps and Bolt.
Except here, unlike in the Us and probably unlike those others, she feels largely anonymous and blessedly so.
‘When I landed, a couple of people recognised me at the customs line but that was about it and it was nice,’ she says.
‘I don’t want it to sound wrong because I worked my whole life to be good at something, and to get recognised for that is nice, but it can be pretty hard.
‘at home I get it a lot. If I go out someone will always recognise me, stop me. I haven’t been able to go one place without someone recognise me, so this is nice. It can feel a bit weird to be put on a pedestal.’
and that, really, is a key topic for Biles at this point, 491 days out from Tokyo 2020 and her bid to become the first woman since 1968 to defend the all-around title. The pedestal. The expectation. The slight fear that one week after turning 22, she is already an old lady in her world, even if those outside it see gold as a foregone conclusion.
after all, it’s 19 meets and six years since she last lost an
all-around title. ‘I definitely am a veteran,’ she says. ‘It is kind of crazy to think I am old if you are outside the sport, but in it, I kind of am. But I am still peaking.
‘People say I turn up and win and it isn’t like that. This is hard. The expectation as well. Before the last Olympics, I remember I was really stressed until I got there. This time, I have a sense of what it will be like if I do get to Tokyo and it calms me down.
‘But it is almost more nerveracking second time round because people expect so much. I don’t know how long I will be at the top.’
While few would realistically buy into her claim that she might not be picked for Tokyo — which she says will be her last Olympics — there is no disputing the challenges she has faced in this four-year cycle, which cumulatively might serve as her main opposition to gold.
In order, she took off the entire 2017 season after the ‘mental and physical’ exhaustion of matching her hype at Rio 2016, then in 2018 she came forward and joined more than 140 other women and girls whose testimonies sent Nassar to prison for life for sexual abuse.
USA Gymnastics was ripped apart by the scandal and Biles, as the face of the team, has had to relive the ordeal under a spotlight.
She has previously revealed she took anxiety medication to deal with the fallout. If there has been a toll on her sporting form, it has not yet been noticeable.
Her return to global-level competition at the worlds in Doha last October brought golds in the all-around, team, vault and floor disciplines, with silver in the uneven bars and bronze on the balance beam.
What made those medals more ludicrous is a revealing tale she tells about a kidney stone the night before the competition began. It brings the conversation back to pain.
‘It was pretty bad,’ she says. ‘The pain was coming in waves — I was walking around and then I’d be literally crawling on the floor because it hurt so bad.
‘We went to the hospital for a prognosis, which is all I wanted. They said it was a kidney stone, not a ruptured appendix or anything, so I was like, “Thank you, I’ll deal with it later”.
‘But they wanted me to stay overnight at the hospital and the doctor was going through the specifics of what might happen if I left. They had three of them explaining this to me, saying, “The pain could get worse or you might collapse”, or whatever.
‘But I was competing the next day. I think I said something like, “Ok, well, if it gets worse I’ll probably call you guys or be in an ambulance so...” Anyway, I discharged myself.’
After refusing pain- killers because of doping rules, she celebrated the all-around gold medal with a face of fury on the podium, despite a monumentally big margin of victory.
The expression had nothing to do with kidney stones.
‘It wasn’t the performance I wanted,’ she says. ‘I was a bit upset to perform like that for my country.’
A bonkers story. And one that rather heightens the feeling that Biles, like those other sporting luminaries, has reached that stage in a career when winning isn’t enough.
She speaks of ‘ chasing perfection’ as much as she speaks of medals, of a certain level of performance that she wants to turn in before the mad attrition of gymnastics brings her back down to earth.
Quite what constitutes that perfection isn’t disclosed, whether it is a score or redefining her sport further with another new move. She already has two creations in the official scoring system.
‘I won’t tell anyone because then they would expect,’ she says.
A nice try, of course. But pain her as it might, they already do.
‘A broken rib,
torn calf and a toe shattered
in five pieces’