BEAMING SMILE
Biles is back – and bags an emotional bronze
As Simone Biles’s chalked feet touched down on a balance beam not even four inches wide, a global audience took the sharpest intake of breath. She had mastered this fiendish highwire act countless times, but never in these conditions, under such an unforgiving microscope.
The beam is a piece of apparatus that punishes the slightest fragility and, just a week earlier, Biles had given chapter and verse on her mental turmoil on the most scrutinised stage in sport. That she perfected her routine to the point of earning a bronze medal was, even for an athlete with 25 global golds, a feat close to miraculous.
There were no post-competition tears this time, but the scars remain raw.
Biles explained that she had dialled down the difficulty of her dismount so much, to a humdrum double pike, that she could not recall performing one similar since she was 12. The rationale was that she would not risk any elements that required her to twist, given her acute case of the “twisties”, a form of scrambled spatial awareness that strikes fear into the heart of any gymnast. Merely watching the double-doubles unleashed by China’s Chenchen Guan and Tang Xijing, the gold and silver medallists, had made her “want to puke”.
This was a statement all the more extraordinary for the fact that the dismount in question – an absurdly audacious double twist, double backflip – is inscribed in gymnastics’ code of points as “the Biles”.
So all-consuming was her anxiety at losing her sense of direction in mid-air, that she could not even bear to observe a move named after her.
To listen to Biles here was to form a fuller appreciation of the private hell she has been experiencing in the athletes’ village.
During one practice session on beam and uneven bars, she disclosed, she had suffered the “biggest mental breakdown –I could not breathe”.
No sooner had she withdrawn from the team event, realising after a ragged vault that she needed to protect her well-being, than she learnt that her aunt, on her father’s side, had died. As such, she reserved particular disdain for the celebrity controversialists who had accused her of weakness.
“We’re not just entertainment, we’re humans,” she said. “People forget that, they don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. They just judge from our social media. I got a lot of great comments, but I also got a lot of bad stuff. I woke up the other day and my aunt had unexpectedly passed away. I thought, ‘You guys have no idea what we’re going through’. I feel that if you can’t do what we can do, you can’t talk yet.”
Biles had abundant reasons to derive pride from this bronze. For a start, it was a repeat of her result at the Rio Games, where she hit an allbut-invincible standard across the board. Beam has often been identified as her weakest skill but, ironically, it was the one where she felt safest.
Having already abandoned the defence of her Olympic vault, floor and all-around titles, this represented the one event where she
could afford not to incorporate a twist.
Despite the simplified dismount, she fulfilled her repertoire impeccably, her grace, poise and athleticism all undimmed by her recent ordeal.
She was overjoyed at this medal, ensuring that these blighted Olym
pics ended not with a premature flight home, but with an ovation by dozens of her US team-mates.
Still, as this scene played out, it was impossible not to keep searching for explanations as to how Biles’s torment had arisen, how an Olympic campaign spanning six events had been pared back to one beam appearance and one aborted vault.
She continues to wrestle with these questions herself. “My problem was, ‘Why were my body and mind not in sync?’” Biles acknowledged. “That’s what I couldn’t wrap my head around. Was I overtired?
Where did the wires not connect? It’s really hard, because I trained my whole life. I was physically ready, and then this happened. It was something so completely out of my control.”
This felt, inescapably, like the end of Biles’s Olympic road. As she absorbed the moment, Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, stepped down from his VIP perch to present her with a commemorative gift, understood to be a watch. She accepted it politely, although it is unlikely to take pride of place in a collection that comprises 34 global medals, drawing her level with Larisa Latynina as the most decorated gymnast in history. Where she stands clear of Latynina, dominant for the Soviet Union in the late Fifties, is in the number of golds, 25 to 18.
Biles looked, in every way, as if she wanted to go home. Her priority, she reflected, was not to carry out any inventory of her silverware.
“My mental health is above all the medals I could win,” she said. “Every day here, I had to be medically evaluated. I had two sessions with a sports psychologist, plus a lot of counselling. I wasn’t in the right head space and I didn’t want to jeopardise my health or my safety because, in the end, it’s just not worth it. We almost missed the deadline to do beam, but to be cleared meant the world. I was out there doing this for me. I’m still trying to process it.”
Thoughts of Paris 2024 were, she confirmed, remote from her calculations.
Biles has endured a torrid Olympic cycle, starting with the fallout from the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal and ending with a spate of last-minute withdrawals due to her psychological distress. She would tell anyone who listened that she felt the joy of gymnastics had gone for her, diminished by constant pressure and by her governing body’s abject failure to protect its athletes. If this was, indeed, the last time at an Olympics that we saw the great Simone Biles, we can be grateful for the memories.
Now, at last, she can start finding a path to happiness on her own terms.
‘We almost missed the beam deadline, but to be cleared meant the world. I was doing this for me’