She fell on each of the first three events. She was a newly minted senior elite at the U.S. This wasn’t the first time she felt like this. Her vault was even worse, as the planned 2 1/2 twists of her Amanar became 1 1/2 instead. They lingered when she walked onto the floor Tuesday for the team final. And rather than brush them back, she accepted their presence.
The doubts that have cropped up at times during her career re-emerged. She carried so much momentum on her beam dismount she took three huge steps backward. She bounded all the way off the competition mat following one tumbling pass on floor. Biles topped qualifying as usual but an uncharacteristically messy block on her Cheng vault sent her nearly sideways off the table. Olympic Trials in June, she actually finished behind Olympic teammate Sunisa Lee on the final day of the competition, the first time that’s happened in eight years. She also fell off uneven bars the same night. Yes, she drilled her Yurchenko double pike vault when she unveiled it in May. Her performances during the spring competition were … OK, at least by her standards. Internally, however, things were shifting. Outlets asking for a piece of her time came and went, asking her the same questions over and over again.
The acronym for the post-Olympic Gold Over America Tour she is headlining this fall is not a coincidence.Ī room overlooking the massive gym her family runs in the northern Houston suburbs turned into a TV studio over the spring.
It takes a special kind of swagger to compete in a leotard with a bejeweled goat you’ve nicknamed “Goldie.” A documentary series has spent the last two years chronicling her path. She’s embraced - winkingly, most of the time - her status as the Greatest of All-Time.
To be fair, in some ways she helped build the walls. Much like Olympic greats Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt, the 24-year-old became a prisoner of her own excellence. Critics - both internal and external - to silence. She fended off depression, steeling herself to go on.
Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, pushing the Games back a full 12 months. She won a world championship in 2018 despite battling a kidney stone that left her in agony and became the most decorated gymnast ever with a five-medal haul in Germany a year later.Įverything was primed for a golden goodbye in Japan last August. She spent much of the run-up to Tokyo desperately trying to hold onto that vision. She made a promise to herself when she came back that she would be doing it on her terms. Something that’s been increasingly difficult since her return to the sport in the fall of 2017. “So, I knew for myself that I had to take a step back.” “I didn’t want to go out there and do something dumb and get hurt and be negligent,” she said after the Americans took the silver. Spooked when she couldn’t get comfortable on vault and burdened by what she described as the “weight of the world,” the 24-year-old instead took herself out of competition. “I’m like, ‘Guys it’s still a medal for the country and it’s still a medal for myself.’ If anybody else was going to get bronze they would have been cheering but it was Simone so they were, like, pissed.”įast forward to team finals in Tokyo on Tuesday night, when the “demons” Biles has been grappling with for years proved to be too much.
“People were really upset,” Biles told The Associated Press in May. She reached down to steady herself, preserving a bronze in the process. Midway through her set, the then 19-year-old lost her balance, as tends to happen when trying to execute world-class skills on a piece of wood narrower than the average iPhone. The American gymnastics star had already won three gold medals at the 2016 Olympics when she began her routine in the beam finals. Simone Biles received a crash course on it five years ago in Rio de Janeiro. TOKYO (AP) - When you spend the better part of a decade redefining the possible within your sport, the standards change.