Of course there was theatre at the very end. Two hours into this women’s Artistic Gymnastics Team final, with the USA coasting grandly at the head of the field, the logistics of competition left Simone Biles with one final act to stop the show.
Three years on from Tokyo and The Breakdown, the only discipline remaining in that same team event was the Biles floor routine. And so in front of Bill Gates, Gianni Infantino, Serena Williams and Spike Lee, in front of the eyes of the world as ever, Simone Biles got to dance like no one was watching.
Paris 2024 knew what it was getting with these gymnastics, a spectacle that would play out, as it did here, like a cross between the Super Bowl, Vegas and a Marvel movie. Mainly it was getting America: American flash, American show, American story-telling, the key event in a Games that has for many editions now been powered by US TV money and US sport tourism. Frankly, there haven’t been this many Americans in Paris since 1945.
And of course Paris was getting the Biles-industrial complex, the Biles narrative arc, which reached its full extension on a wonderful night of flex and twang and defiance of the elements; one that ended, naturally, with gold for the US women.
That final Biles routine was visceral and at times hair-raising. She played the hits. She did Biles 1, Biles 2. She produced an extraordinary release of energy, that explosive athletic grace that looks at times almost like an optical illusion.
What is gymnastics exactly? Performance art? Hard-edge competitive sport? At one point in her balance beam routine Biles did an insane triple backflip (repeat: on a thin, square bar) like a wheel rolling down an incline, one of those moments where she seems to turn the entire event into something else, movements that are strange, liquid, and basically unlike any other human on the planet.
As the final scores flashed up on the giant screen Team USA were suddenly up there bouncing and beaming and fluttering a flag, transformed into normal very happy human beings, gambolling about like kids at Christmas.
It was a lovely moment, but with something widescreen about it too. Biles and the Biles arc is an anatomy of an industry. All sporting life is there. Or rather three key elements are: the beauty of sport, the stupidity of sport and also the violence of sport.
But first of course, the beauty and the warmth, which were present here from the moment the teams came out, the US in white snow-woman suits, Biles looking happy and a bit goofy as she missed her cue to wave, an athlete who always feels the static field, the sense of being spectated.
Jordan Chiles was first up for the US on the vault, producing the usual miracle of total control over every hinge and tendon. And before long there were shrieks and gasps and white noise as over the public address a voice could be heard saying “Waiting for the green light will be Simone Biles”
Tokyo 2020 has of course been lurking behind all of this, the ghost Games, an abomination of a sporting event that frankly should never have been staged at all. Tokyo was essentially an act of corporate violence. Adam Peaty has spoken about the strain it put on him, as have Noah Lyles and Caeleb Dressel.
Those Covid games were a huge vacuum into which we threw all our fear and anxieties. The hunger around Biles was tangible. But Biles was also in lockdown, asked at the end of a year of isolation to perform, to dance for us, to peer down that lens at the world. She talks lucidly about the response to overtraining in that empty period, the way the movements had become all she had, all she did, until they also became meaningless.
More generally athletes have begun to talk a lot more about why and how to do this thing, about winning without pain, success without punishment. Perhaps this can be the legacy of Tokyo, the Damned Games.
It is also important to remember that modern celebrity life is entirely novel, that nobody planned or scaled this, that it is all essentially an unmapped social experiment. Dance. Do the brilliant thing. Create the images we like to see. Biles has lived her whole adult life in that place. But nobody has skin thick enough to resist this. This is a five-time Olympic champion. If they can get to her, they can get to anyone.
That opening Biles vault here was a simple one, executed perfectly, with a leap back in the landing that ran straight on into hugs and high fives and a ripple of something that felt like shared relief around this huge refrigerated hangar. By the end of the first rotation the US had already begun to open up a decisive lead, the sense of a victory lap, high fives around the bases, starting to form above the figures on the beam and bar and the mat.
Soon Biles was up again on the uneven bars. She even seemed to bounce up there, whirling as though under some hidden form of propulsion. She bounded off, high-fived her coach, sprinted along to get her towel, squeezing the juice out of these moments. And before long the US team were larking around to the music in the breaks, throwing poses at the cameras, doing this thing that resembles a kind of torture, but which can in these moments also look like play.
There will of course be so much talk now about closure and catharsis. The questions at the gold medal press conference were about people around the world being inspired, every child wanting to be Simone Biles. Sport is so broad brush in this way. It offers second chances, fixability. The entire story here is outcome-based. Win and you solve something. Win and there is catharsis. Win and we are complete. Sport is not like life.
In reality there is of course something unresolved and contradictory at the heart of this redemption arc. What hurt Biles was over-exposure combined with losing. The way Biles can be fixed, sport tells us, is by even more exposure combined with victory.
But then sport is absurdly hammy. Sport is bad art. But it is also irresistible in its warm wet notes on nights like these. Biles has reinvented the details of her sport across the course of her five Olympic gold medals, and given us moments of great beauty along the way. This one, though, was for her.
