Simone Biles and Team USA are golden again.
At the 2024 Paris Olympics, Team USA won the gold medal in the team finals. Biles, along with teammates Sunny Lee, Jade Carey, Jordan Chiles and Hazley Rivera, Compiled a score of 171.296 and beat Italy (165.494) and Brazil (164.497) who won silver and bronze.
This is Biles’ fifth Olympic gold medal, bringing her total to eight Olympic medals in three Olympics. Biles’ medal haul, including her 30 world championship medals — 23 of which were gold — solidifies her as the greatest gymnast we’ve ever seen and arguably the most influential athlete in all of sports.
Her legacy is punctuated by her strength, consistency and winning record, but it is her return to the Olympics and gymnastics that is truly remarkable. Over the past few years, Biles has spoken openly about her mental health struggles and the abuse she endured as a Team USA gymnast. He shares these painful moments in the hope that what happened to him never happens again. She wants to make the game safer and better for the next crop of girls to follow in her footsteps.
While this type of transition isn’t as easy to measure as a triple-twisting double back, Biles’ resilience and bravery are as legendary as her skills.
Why is Simone Biles the goat?
To put Simone Biles’ talent into perspective, you have to understand that gymnastics is scored in decimal points. Biles routinely beat her competitors by nearly two full points. These margins are winning a tennis match 6-0, 6-0, outscoring an American football team by multiple touchdowns, or besting another basketball team by 40 points, and so on.
Biles achieves these huge scores because she is performing the most difficult moves at the most consistent clip. Biles’ two highest scoring events are floor exercise and vault, both of which allow Biles’ strength to take center stage.
As experts explained to me in 2016, going to the Rio Olympics and again before the delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Biles’ strength on the floor allows her to perform the most difficult tricks. Floor routines are usually stacked so that the first tumbling passes are the most difficult, so they can be performed when a gymnast has the most energy. However, Biles’ third tumbling pass (which is usually her easiest pass) sometimes has the same difficulty as most women’s first pass. Two of Biles’ floor moves are named after him: Biles I (a double back layout with a half twist) and Biles II (a triple-double: two flips and three twists). As of 2024, no woman other than Biles has landed Biles II in any competition.
In addition to floor exercise moves, Biles has three High scoring Elements are named after him: in the vault, he has Biles (two twists and front layout) and Biles II (a Yurchenko double pike); And on beam, she has a Biles dismount (a double-twisting double backflip).
Before the Tokyo Games, Biles became embroiled in a scoring controversy. The problem? His technique was very good. The judges couldn’t figure out how to adequately score Biles because her moves were pushing the limits of difficulty. Critics said the judges in Tokyo were scoring elements like Biles’ eponymous beam dismount too conservatively and not giving her full credit. Giving her the full total of her solid elements would have widened the already huge gap between Biles and her competitors.
“They are … too few and they even know it,” Biles told the New York Times In May 2021. “But they don’t want to keep the field too far. And that’s just some of that on them. It’s not on me.”
Biles is so good and so consistent that he has pushed the game to a new level that has yet to be matched. There are gymnasts and there is Simone Biles. Simone Biles is one.
In Paris, Biles is doing a nursing Minor calf injury But still scored 14.90 on vault and 14.66 on floor to lead the US team to gold. He will be ready for the all-round competition on Thursday, August 1.
Resilience by Simone Biles
Although Biles is a lifelong athlete, her return to the Olympics is nothing short of extraordinary. Three years ago in Tokyo, Biles suffered from a mental block known in the gymnast world as “twisty.” As Biles explains extensively in the article and in her new Netflix documentary Simone Biles: RisingHappens when there is a disconnect between your brain and body. Lack of body awareness, especially when gymnasts perform difficult tricks, can end in serious injuries. As a result, Biles dropped out of the team and all-around competition despite being the heavy favourite. She returned to one event, the finals of the balance beam event, and won a bronze medal on the apparatus.
However, Pandit Mainly a right-wing personalityAttacked Biles for withdrawing from the competition and failing her team.
What the public didn’t fully understand, and Biles spoke honestly about what risingHe believes that the anxiety he endured in Tokyo is the result of unresolved stress and trauma.
Due to Covid-19 and health precautions surrounding the pandemic, families are not allowed to travel with athletes to the 2021 Olympics. Biles’ support system — her family, and especially her mother — wasn’t present.
Biles also explained that Larry has yet to fully process or receive adequate treatment after being abused by Nassar. Nassar was a former team doctor for Team USA’s gymnastics team and was accused of sexually abusing girls and young women. after Convict On federal pornography charges (Nassar had child sexual abuse material) and multiple child sexual abuse charges, He was sentenced 60 years in federal prison and over 100 years in state prison.
Biles was One of hundreds of women And the girls who came forward against Nasser. He also spoke about the FBI’s failure to properly investigate the allegations.
In September 2021, weeks after the Olympics, Biles testified at a US Senate hearing against Nassar. “I have worked incredibly hard to ensure that my presence can help maintain connections between failures [around the Nassar case] and compete in Tokyo 2020,” Biles told senators. “This proved to be an exceptionally difficult burden for me to bear, especially when my family needed to travel to Tokyo without support. I am a strong person and I will persevere, but I should not be left alone to endure Larry Nassar’s abuse.”
If Biles had walked away from the sport after Tokyo, no one would have blamed her.
He won nearly every medal possible — including team and all-around golds in Rio. He revolutionized gymnastics, creating moves that the judges couldn’t score correctly. The sport itself is mentally and physically taxing. And speaking openly about sexual assault and your own mental health in the media spotlight must be incredibly difficult.
But back in Paris, Biles changed gymnastics for the better.
She helped open the door to an honest, stigma-free conversation about mental health. She questions the pressure we put on athletes, especially young girls (Remember Kerry Struggle?) and how stories about their “toughness” and “perseverance” as gymnasts are constructed. So is he and his family Opened their own gym And helping the next generation of young girls make a difference in sports.
Because Biles is so influential and talented, we embrace her greatness. Without her honesty and vulnerability, we would never have realized how resilient she is. And thankfully, we were lucky enough to witness it.
