Simone Biles sticks her vault, leads ‘Redeem Team’ to Olympic gold in Paris

Spectators inside Bercy Arena -- and, given the suspense of this Olympic redemption story, untold millions watching from afar -- held their breath as Simone Biles sprinted down the runway, sprung over the vault, twisted one and a half times toward the rafters and stuck her landing.

One teeny hop backward, one collective exhale. Biles thrust her hands in the air and smiled. Three years after bailing out on the apparatus that was her undoing at the Tokyo Olympics, she scored 14.9 points Tuesday in the gymnastics team final. With one clean vault, Biles proved she was back while simultaneously providing a therapy session to the stressed-out, burned-out and tired-out everywhere.

Biles glowed from atop the medal podium. Winning team gold was Biles’ mission, too. Her abrupt withdrawal from the team final in Tokyo caused the heavily-favored U.S. to slip to silver, behind Russia. She later said scary episodes of “the twisties” -- a mental block during which gymnasts get disoriented in midair -- made her decide to bench herself rather than risk injury on her difficult routines and drag her team out of medal contention.

After the most anticipated and scrutinized event of the Paris Olympics was over, Biles acknowledged she was nervous, but that her renewed self rose to the challenge. She had led a national conversation about mental health after succumbing to pressure in Tokyo, and was proud to see her advocacy of treatment validated on the Olympic stage.

”I started with therapy this morning, told [my therapist] I was feeling calm and ready,” Biles said. “After vault, I was relieved, like whoo, please no flashbacks. I knew we were definitely going to do this.”

Teammate Jordan Chiles was glad to get the vault out of the way first. The U.S. lead just kept growing through the next three events -- uneven bars, balance beam and floor exercise -- in parallel with the perceptible joy of the team’s three seasoned gymnasts. The U.S. finished 5.8 points ahead of silver medalist Italy and 6.8 points ahead of third-place Brazil.

”Hallelujah,” Chiles said of Biles’ Cheng vault, more conservative than her Yurchenko double pike but a practical choice for team competition. “Me jumping up and down was me showing relief. She’s the greatest of the greats, and I knew in that moment that we were going to go out and be us.”

Fittingly, Biles’ finale on floor, performed to Taylor Swift music, included two of her eponymous tumbling run skills and induced a roar of “USA! USA! USA!” from the crowd as she blew kisses to the cameras and shook her index finger.

At 27, Biles is an elderly woman in a sport where teenage girls typically have the competitive lifespan of a fruit fly. She’s the oldest gymnast to compete for the U.S. since 1952. She spoke about how gymnastics has changed since her first Olympics eight years ago, and her role in changing it.

“In 2016 we were destined to win gold and we went out and did our job. We were young and naive. The pressure was so on for us so we did what we were supposed to do,” she said. “But this felt different. It was super exciting.”

“They used to put us in a box,” Biles said as if referring to a bygone era, and the grueling days at Bela and Marta Karolyi’s regimented training camps in Texas. “At the ranch nobody would really talk and laugh. That’s not how I do gymnastics. Once Marta understood that, the girls started showing more of their personalities. Now we can really have fun.”

There was nothing fun about 2021, or the lead up to it. Biles and traumatized gymnasts suffered horribly during the sport’s reckoning with the disgraceful coverup of years of abuse by U.S. team doctor Larry Nassar.

The 4-foot, 8-inch Biles said she felt “the weight of the world on my shoulders” going into the Tokyo Olympics, which had been postponed a year because of the COVID pandemic. She was the face of the Games, omnipresent on social media, the darling of corporate sponsors and self-proclaimed G.O.A.T. The expectations crushed her, she admitted.

”It’s been really stressful this Olympic Games,” Biles said at the time. “Not having an audience, there are a lot of different variables going into it. It’s been a long week. It’s been a long Olympic process. It’s been a long year. I think we’re just a little bit too stressed out.

“I know I brush it off and make it seem like pressure doesn’t affect me but damn sometimes it’s hard hahaha! The Olympics is no joke!” she wrote on Instagram. She said she needed to “work on my mindfulness” and “focus on my mental health.”

“It just sucks when you’re fighting with your own head.”

After Tokyo, a devastated Biles wasn’t sure if she would compete again. She was criticized for choking, for selfishly letting her team down. She took two years off. With support from her family, her husband (Chicago Bears safety Jonathan Owens) and therapists, Biles decided to go back to the gym. And she decided to amplify talk about a previously-taboo subject. COVID, and the pandemic’s ravages of isolation and depression, had already opened up the discussion.

Naomi Osaka, then the No. 2-ranked tennis player in the world, withdrew from the 2021 French Open and Wimbledon to heal her anxiety.

“I do hope that people can relate and understand it’s OK to not be OK; and it’s OK to talk about it,” she wrote in Time magazine about her “long bouts of depression.”

Biles, inspired by Osaka, spoke about the storms in her head. She was not only in a judged sport where young athletes hyper-conscious of body image are scored on how close they come to perfection, but she was an Olympian, and Olympians feel four times the pressure under a fleeting quadrennial spotlight. They are not like LeBron James, who can say, after playing 82 televised NBA games, “there’s always next season.”

“Put mental health first, because if you don’t, then you’re not going to enjoy your sport and you’re not going to succeed as much as you want to,” Biles said. “So it’s OK sometimes to even sit out the big competitions to focus on yourself, because it shows how strong of a competitor you really are, rather than just battle through it.”

She agreed to make the revealing Netflix documentary “Simone Biles Rising,” and tell her vast audience, “I don’t have it all together, but I can be there with you every step of the way.”

Pitchers get the yips. Golfers miss 3-foot putts. Basketball players shoot air balls. Speedskater Dan Jansen and skier Mikaela Shiffrin slipped on ice and snow. Is that choking? Biles made vulnerability a sympathetic human quality.

After a terrible race in Tokyo, U.S. steeplechaser Emma Coburn was asked why she finished off the podium. Was it her mental health?

“No, I just sucked,” she said.

No excuses.

“I don’t have an injury, I don’t have an answer, and I’m really sad,” she said. Then she got the journey question. Was she grateful for the journey?

“No, we’re professional athletes,” she said. “Obviously everyone has their own experience, but for me it’s about results. We’re seeing a lot of mental health (issues) in these Olympics, but for me to come here and be physically prepared and to suck like I did....I walked to that starting line thinking I was coming home with an Olympic medal. And I’m coming home empty-handed with a lot of heartache for five years worth of work.”

The winning-is-everything philosophy of Bobby Knight and Vince Lombardi is on the wane. The Karolyis made Shannon Miller “a tiger” and the U.S. a world power but are ostracized today. Helping athletes cope with anxiety and self-doubt is one of the most important aspects of a coach’s job, said former University of Miami women’s basketball coach Katie Meier.

”Ten years ago you’d say, ‘I don’t feel right,’ and the coach would say, ‘Put that on the shelf because we’re playing Duke tomorrow.’ Tough it out,” said Meier, who is at the Olympics with the Belgian women’s team. “But today we have so many resources to define and deal with mental issues. We used to blow it off too much. We always considered the ability to handle pressure the great separator between champions and losers.”

Are athletes becoming too soft? Too many head cases and not enough clutch players like Michael Jordan? On the contrary, Meier said. Developing skills such as visualization and meditation can make athletes more resilient.

“The best thing about what Simone changed is that 20 years ago, she would have just stopped competing. We never would have heard from her again. There were a lot of athletes like that - the burden got too heavy, they didn’t know how to climb out of a hole. Maybe more awareness of mental health will create healthier endurance and longer careers for athletes.”

Ashleigh Johnson listened to Biles’ message. The U.S. water polo goalie, a Miami native and Ransom-Everglades grad, said she took a sabbatical after the Tokyo Olympics to reevaluate her passion for the sport.

“It was a long, hard quad dealing with COVID,” Johnson said of the five-year period between the Rio and Tokyo Olympics. “We were spent. There’s such a big buildup to the Olympics you naturally feel depression when it’s over. You think, ‘What’s next?’ I came home, spent time with friends and family, got back to my roots coaching the Riptides kids, and that was really energizing.”

Swimmer Caeleb Dressel, who trains in Gainesville with Katie Ledecky and Coach Anthony Nesty, walked out of the 2022 world championships in Budapest a year after winning five gold medals in Tokyo. He later said he was overcome by anxiety. He took eight months off and worked on his 10-acre farm in Green Cove Springs. He stayed away from the pool. Said he could not stand the smell of chlorine.

Dressel didn’t qualify for 2023 worlds but his comeback is on track in Paris, where he anchored the U.S. men to gold in the 4 x 100-meter freestyle relay. He said the break made him realize he wanted to return to swimming because he still loved the sport and not out of an obligation to be the best.

“I would say after he came back, he’s just been on fire -- happy and healthy and positive and just a real light on the pool deck,” Dressel’s Gator Swim Club teammate Ledecky told the Washington Post.

Pro franchises and organizations like the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee have recognized the need to make sports-psychology counseling as available as physical therapy. The revelations of Biles and Michael Phelps have led to the construction of support networks.

”There’s still progress to be made,” Julie Kleigman wrote in the New York Times. She is author of ”Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes.“

“Sport psychology, until recently, was not taken seriously by many coaches, executives and fans. The century-plus history of the field has been erratic: There have been fleeting moments of public interest (as when Babe Ruth sat for psychological tests in 1921); the ascent of blowhards with suspect credentials (such as the hypnotist who worked with a Major League Baseball team in 1950); and a general sense of skepticism about the endeavor from many athletes.”

On Sunday at Bercy Arena, U.S. gymnast Jade Carey had a rough qualifying round. She was ill.

“I just have not been feeling well the past few days and haven’t been able to eat or anything,” she told Olympics.com.

Shiffrin, who knows what it’s like to stumble when you’re expected to soar, immediately sent reassuring words: “Get well soon!”

The response was telling from retired gymnasts who weren’t allowed to admit they were sick or hurting or afraid of failing.

Dominique Moceanu: “Jade, continue pushing forward. Your perseverance is an inspiration to many. Thank you for sharing your journey with us.”

“You did so well today and I’m so proud of you,” Ally Raisman said. “It breaks my heart that our society is so hard on athletes that you feel the need to explain yourself. You’re human. It’s OK to make mistakes.”