BACK ON TOP
Simone Biles deserves this trip to the Paris Olympics
MINNEAPOLIS – Simone Biles has earned this moment, in every meaning of the word. As expected, Biles won the U.S.
Olympic gymnastics trials Sunday and the automatic spot on the Paris Games team, extending an unbeaten streak in all-around competitions that began in 2013. Also as expected, it wasn’t close. Even with a fall on balance beam – at this point, a trials tradition – she finished with 117.225 points, a whopping five-plus points ahead of Suni Lee.
Now Biles is headed to the Olympics for a third time, seeking a better experience than the nightmare of Tokyo three years ago.
“She’s calm. She laughs. She’s back to her same goofy self that we had missed,” Cecile Landi, who coaches Biles with husband Laurent Landi, said last week. “She has a few tools that are personal to her but that help her stay calm and remember why she’s here.”
It isn’t to add more medals to her collection. With 37 from the world championships and Olympics, including four golds from the Rio Games in 2016, Biles is already the most decorated gymnast, male or female. It isn’t to try to burnish her legacy, either. She long ago established herself as the greatest gymnast in history and another title, even a second all-around crown, isn’t going to change how history remembers her.
It’s for herself. And it’s because she can, not long after she feared she couldn’t.
Pretty much the entire world had a front-row seat to Biles’ trauma in Tokyo. Mental health issues, aggravated by the isolation caused by the COVID protocols, brought on a case of “the twisties,” causing her to lose her sense of where she was in the air. Unwilling to risk her safety, Biles withdrew during the team final and missed the all-around, vault, uneven bars and floor exercise finals.