Paris Olympics: Simone Biles is and always has been tough

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PARIS — Just moments after delivering the highest qualifying score (59.566) at these Olympics, Simone Biles limped out of Bercy Arena.

Soreness in her left calf had flared up during a warmup tumbling pass. Team USA doctors furiously wrapped the ankle in an effort to add support. She is 27 in a sport often ruled by teens, the oldest American Olympics female gymnast since the 1950s. Injuries of any level are a major concern. Now here was one.

Biles delivered genius anyway.

She not only qualified herself for Thursday’s all-around competition and three other individual events (floor, vault, beam). She also powered the U.S. to the top qualifying spot in Tuesday’s team event, where she plans on competing in all four disciplines in pursuit of gold.

It was a testament to Biles' toughness, to her resilience, to her commitment to her team and to the Olympics.

These were all things Simone Biles was questioned about just three years ago at the Tokyo Olympics when she dropped out of the team competition after a single vault attempt. That day she was struggling with air awareness, a critical component to flipping through space and landing safely, let alone cleanly enough to impress judges. “The twisties” is what gymnasts call it.

Biles had a case of it ... and a segment of America had a meltdown over it.

It’s why, when she decided to try again for the Olympics at an advanced age for gymnastics — 27 — she vowed not to care what others thought even if disaster struck again for any reason.

“They are going to say, ‘Oh my gosh, are you going to quit again? Are you going to quit again?’” Biles said. “And if I did, what are you going to do about it? Tweet me some more? I've already dealt with it for three years.”

Biles has dubbed the Paris Games her “Redemption Tour.” That left-calf soreness may still impact how that looks in terms of medals. Gymnasts are particularly fine-tuned athletes and little things can become big things, especially over a competition schedule that will call on her to compete in five events over the next eight days.

Yet what she did at qualification in shaking off that physical injury could also play a role in redefining her to a public that was unfamiliar or suspicious of the twisties.

The theory among some watching those Tokyo Games was that even an injured Simone Biles was better than some of her teammates at 100 percent. As such, she should have continued to compete since the U.S. was locked in a heated competition with rival Russia.

Ya gotta play hurt.

“That depends on whether it is physical or mental,” said Jordyn Wieber, a 2012 Olympic gold medalist and now the head gymnastics coach at the University of Arkansas. “When it comes to mental, it's kind of all or nothing. It’s hard for people to conceptualize how it affects you.”

“You get lost in the air,” said Samantha Peszek, a silver medalist at the 2008 Olympics who now works as the lead gymnastics analyst for NBC, about the twisties. “You don’t know up from down or left from right. Imagine you are surfing and you get swept up in a wave and you don’t know which way is up to get out of it?”

Added Wieber, “You can either do it or you can’t.”

Biles could not.

Her vault attempt that day in Tokyo was supposed to be a Yurchenko with 2.5 twists. It carried a degree of difficulty of 5.8. Biles got lost and wound up pulling off a Yurchenko with 1.5 twists, although she said that was a matter of survival.

“I did not choose to do a one-and-a-half,” Biles said at the time. “I was trying to do a two-and-a-half but that was not clicking.”

Her teammates were so stunned while watching they covered their mouths. The Yurchenko 1.5 is a basic vault, carrying just a 5.0 degree of difficulty. Only one of the other 42 women who competed that night attempted an easier vault.

In a competition where tenths and even hundreds of points can matter, Biles had just left the Americans in a massive hole. Her 13.766 score was 1.2 points below qualifying and 0.700 below the worst Russian competitor. Russia took a sizable 1.067 lead after the first rotation.

The idea that Biles should have then somehow fought through it — tape it up like she did here Sunday — was ridiculous. First off, a serious physical injury was likely. “It’s incredibly dangerous,” Peszek said. And there is no easy fix to the twisties.

When Peszek suffered from it as a competitor she took “a mental break, took a couple of days off and then went back to the basics, almost relearning the skills,”

“It takes time to work through it,” Wieber said. “And [Simone] didn’t have that time.”

Even if she somehow tried, she was incapable of attempting the high-degree-of-difficulty routines needed. She was suddenly a liability that was almost certainly going to cost them the podium altogether rather than somehow rally it to gold.

She chose to step down and let her teammates take over. It’s a team after all. Jordan Chiles stepped in for her on bars and beam. Suni Lee took over on floor. The Americans held on for silver, albeit a distant 3.432 behind gold medal winner Russia.

“I am not going to lose a medal for this country and these girls, because they’ve worked way too hard to have me go out there and lose a medal,” Biles said at the time.

That wasn’t how many American fans, some of whom tune into gymnastics once every four years, saw it. The twisties were hard to explain. Complaints from athletes about the mental challenges of competing in a bubbled-up pandemic Olympics, with no friends, family or fans in attendance, only mattered so much.

They wanted to see Biles give everything for the team. Those inside gymnastics saw it differently.

“I commend her for what she went through and having the maturity to say, ‘I’m not helping my teammates,’” Wieber said. “Gymnastics is just a different sport.”

Biles would drop out of the all-around competition as well as two individual events. She returned on the final day of competition in Tokyo and won bronze in beam via a stripped down routine that she could handle.

An Olympics she had focused five years on — including through the challenges and isolation of COVID — had turned into a nightmare. She couldn’t avoid the criticism from back in the States.

“I kind of felt embarrassed with myself,” Biles said at the time. “... Why were my body and my mind [not] in sync? And that’s what I couldn’t wrap my head around. ‘What happened? Was I tired? Where did the wires not connect?’

“I trained my whole life,” she continued. “I was physically ready, I was fine and then this happens.”

Biles initially thought she’d never compete again.

“I never pictured going to another Olympic Games after Tokyo just because of the circumstances,” she said last month. “I never thought I'd go back in the gym again and be twisting [and] feel free.”

What happens here in Paris remains unknown. The injury. The impact. The competition. She has already returned to elite gymnastics. She won gold at the 2023 world championships, pushed the sport to higher degrees of difficulty and proved to herself that she was still capable.

And on Sunday, maybe she proved to the critics the difference between a physical and mental setback.

Because Simone Biles is and always has been tough, resilient and team-oriented.

That much has already been won.