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The all-around team final is a wild circus of a night with flips and spins and falls in all directions, and you need four eyes to watch. But at 8.20pm there was only one routine left to perform, and for 90 seconds the room belonged to Simone Biles.
She performed with spring and extraordinary height, the highlight of which was a triple twisting double-back somersault which is hard enough to write, let alone deliver in an Olympic final. The routine contained some flaws on landing but it is a measure of her otherworldly skill that her score of 14.666 was still the best all night by a distance. She sealed gold with a kiss and the Bercy Arena erupted.
Eight years after winning her fourth Olympic gold medal, Biles now has her fifth. It is her 38th world and Olympic medal, if anyone is still counting at this point. She did it with cameras inches from her face at every turn. She did it performing slightly within herself, stepping back from the edge. And she did it as part of a phenomenally talented team.
After losing to Russia in Tokyo following Biles’s dramatic withdrawal, the USA regained their women’s all-around team crown. Biles top-scored on the vault with a slightly easier degree of difficulty than the “Biles II” she dazzled with in qualifying. But it was Suni Lee who top-scored on the uneven bars and the balance beam in what was a group effort alongside Jade Carey and Jordan Chiles, whose Beyonce-inspired floor routine locked victory before Biles’s finishing touch.
The US finished with a score of 171.296, almost six clear of their nearest rivals Italy. Brazil took an emotional bronze, the first Olympic team medal in their history, but it was to Britain’s cost, losing out in fourth by just 0.034 despite some stellar performances through the evening, particularly Alice Kinsella’s near-immaculate floor.
But no one could touch the Americans. The world had come to see Biles win gold: queues fed back to the Seine as fans and VIPs arrived to witness her talent in the flesh. Serena Williams and Bill Gates took their seats. Backstage, inside the call room, Biles led her team through some stretches and had a sincere conversation with her coach. Watching on, it felt like this was the real Biles: no smile for the camera, no wave to her adoring public. She looked understandably nervous. She looked almost normal.
And perhaps the entire night revealed another side of Biles. She is the best, of course, and watching her launch her body at the vault is both terrifying and thrilling in equal measure. But she is also human. She wobbled on the beam just a touch and the audience gasped. She played it safe, for her, on the vault and uneven bars too. Her mesmerising floor routine contained little falls which teetered out of bounds. She will probably win much more this week and she will make gymnastics look easy, so it is worth taking this moment to remember: it is not, and her journey has not been.
The word redemption has been used a lot this week to describe Biles’s Games, but redemption requires sin: this gold medal was not redemption but an act of liberation, freeing herself from others’ expectations, from external pressure, from the judgement of anonymous social media accounts, from the organisations that failed to protect her and her fellow victims of sexual abuse, from the hold that abuse had over her mental and physical self.
She called therapy her “fifth rotation” in training, as important as practising the bars or the beam. When the US team landed in Antwerp for the World Championships last year, her friends went out to find chocolate ice cream while Biles stayed in her hotel and spent two hours speaking to her therapist on Zoom.
She has slowly rebuilt herself and she has done it with the help and support of her teammates, in training and in competition. It was with her team that Biles first suffered the twisties in Tokyo and uttered that now famous speech, said through a mask while holding back the tears. “I’m sorry, I love you guys, but you’re gonna be just fine,” she told them before leaving the floor. “You guys have trained your whole entire life for this. I’ve been to an Olympics, I’ll be fine. This is your first – you go out there and kick ass, OK?”
This time they were together at every turn, high-fiving and hugging their way to victory. Biles is the face but this US team were more than the sum of their parts, and they each stand for something greater than gymnastics. Lee has been battling a rare kidney disease which forced her to stop competing last year. Chiles suffered racism as a young black gymnast and was body-shamed by a childhood coach who made her want to quit. “I would always leave a note before I went to school on the kitchen counter and saying, ‘I’m done!’ But I still went to practice that day,” she said recently.
Here they each delivered when needed, all contributing to the gold, and it was the strength of the team which meant Biles could afford to hold back just a touch. When Carey nailed her opening vault, it allowed Biles to reel in her effort, mindful of the many challenges still to come in Paris. America are back on top of the gymnastics world, Biles is an Olympic champion again, and perhaps the most tantalising part is that her best is still to come.
