PARIS — Finally, some adversity for Simone Biles.
The greatest gymnast of all time has done enough this week to make you all but forget that a case of the twisties derailed her Tokyo Olympics and cost her a year of practice and two years of competition. But just as she was starting to look unbeatable again, she spent about half an hour on Thursday in an unfamiliar place: third.
After two rotations in the women’s individual all-around final, Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade led, with Algeria’s Kaylia Nemour in second. Biles, who had made a mistake on her uneven bars routine, found herself 0.267 points from gold.
She prayed “to every single god out there, trying to refocus and recenter myself,” she said. Then she nailed her balance beam routine, putting her back where she would end the night: in first place. She blew kisses to the crowd. As she performed her floor routine to seal it, her smile could have lit the Eiffel Tower.
“It means the world to me,” Biles, 27, said after it was done and she had earned her ninth Olympic medal, her sixth gold, by 1.199 points. Two days after leading the U.S. team to gold in the team event, she became the second oldest all-around Olympic champion in history (Maria Gorokhovskaya, representing the Soviet Union, did it at 30 in 1952) and the first two-time all-around Olympic champion since Věra Čáslavská, representing Czechoslovakia, repeated in ’68. Andrade—who overcame three ACL tears to be here—finished second, matching her result in Tokyo; Suni Lee—who won this event in Tokyo after Biles pulled out and has spent the past year recovering from two kidney diseases—finished third.
“I don’t want to compete with Rebeca no more!” Biles lamented. “I’m tired! She’s way too close. I’ve never had an athlete that close, so it definitely put me on my toes and it brought out the best athlete in myself, so I’m excited and proud to compete with her, but uh-uh. I’m getting uncomfortable, guys! I was stressing!”
“I’ve never seen you that stressed,” Lee agreed.
(Andrade said through an interpreter, “I don’t get tired of competing with her, because she is the best. She extracted the best out of me and I hope I do the same for her.”)
Biles was worried enough about Andrade’s prowess that she changed her planned routine to accommodate it. She initially wanted to skip the Biles II—the Yurchenko double pike vault that is one of five skills named for her—but said: “I just know how phenomenal of an athlete she is, and on each event we’re very similar in scores. So I was like, O.K., I have to bring out the big guns.”
After she hit that vault to begin her night, Jess Graba, who coaches Lee, wrapped Biles in a bear hug. “That was a big ask,” Graba said afterward. “And she did it. So I told her I was impressed as hell.”
After she misjudged a transition on her bar routine and had to bend her legs to avoid scraping the mat, knocking her score more than six-tenths of a point lower than it had been in qualifiers and the team final, she was glad she had made the vault change.
“That’s not usually how I swing,” she said. “I’m not the best bars swinger—I’m not Suni or Kaylia—but I can swing some bars.”
The mistake added suspense to a competition that seemed poised to be a coronation. A sense of tension had hung over the arena when Biles first took the floor for the qualifiers last week and the team final on Tuesday; it was at those events in Tokyo that she began to look vulnerable, making uncharacteristic mistakes in the qualifiers and pulling out of the team event entirely after falling out of her vault. But she survived those potential triggers in Paris—“no flashbacks or anything!” she said, sounding thrilled, on Tuesday—and her appearances were back to resembling a Taylor Swift concert. She pulled on a sparkly goat necklace just after the scores were final, later explaining that “some people love it and some people hate it, so it’s the best of both worlds.”
Celebrities turned out on Thursday, from Kendall Jenner to Martha Stewart to half a dozen members of the U.S. men’s basketball team. As the arena shook with U-S-A! chants, French journalists mused that it felt as if they were no longer in France.
Biles’s family was also in the stands, including her husband, Chicago Bears safety Jonathan Owens, who received permission to leave training camp and arrived in Paris in time for the team final. “I know that I probably made them nervous,” she admitted. She made herself nervous, too, in part because coming from behind meant that she had to figure out what she needed to do.
“I was like, ‘I don’t know how to do math in my head!’” Lee said. “She was like, ‘I don’t either!’”
At one point, Biles called up to Owens to ask him where she stood. “You’re third,” he said. “You’re fine.”
But Biles did not become the greatest of all time by feeling fine in third place. So she did what she does, and she returned to where she belongs.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Simone Biles Reclaims Her All-Around Crown and Wins Sixth Olympic Gold.
