Simone Biles Is So Freaking Back

Three months ago, Simone Biles’ social media feed offered a barrage of content. It was the kind of breathless wedding coverage befitting a young, beautiful celebrity who has no budget: A raucous bachelorette trip to Belize, where Biles holds dual citizenship; a sumptuous blue-and-white-themed shower; a brief courthouse ceremony to ease the paperwork burden for a destination blowout in Mexico, complete with four bespoke gowns (and Air Force Ones) and a private serenade from cellist Andrew Savoia. In every frame, Biles looked luminous, emitting a glow that put even her 32 world and Olympic medals to shame.

Absent, however, from the new Mrs. Owens’ public channels? Gymnastics.

Any gymnast gunning for next year’s Olympics in Paris would have needed to be back in the gym, training hard, for at least a year already … or so I assumed. How could Biles have been doing “two-a-days” with four spectacular gowns to get fitted?

Sure, there had been rumors, and a lot of talk on the “gymternet,” and even one particular loose-lipped coaching spouse all but confirming Biles was, indeed, back in the gym for real—but from the GOAT herself, the story remained steadfast: She was not retired, but she was focusing on her family and health. So as much as I hoped the rumors were true, I also understood that if Biles wanted to hang up her grips for good, well, she didn’t owe us a damn thing.

But then! On June 28, out of the sequined blue, USA Gymnastics calmly released the roster for the Aug. 4–7 U.S. Classic (a domestic meet whose top finishers qualify for the upcoming U.S. Championships), in Illinois. And on that list, nestled among other superstar names such as Suni Lee, Jordan Chiles, and Jade Carey: SIMONE BILES! Our queen had pulled the Beyoncé album-drop of non-comeback comebacks, quietly confirming, without saying a word, not only that she was back in the gym—but that she was ready to compete.

A return to competition of this magnitude with this level of secrecy is impressive in its own right; the gym where Biles trains serves hundreds of athletes and parents, all of whom kept their mouths shut for months. But Biles’ carefully orchestrated silence also speaks volumes. Her return (don’t call it a comeback!) is not just about whatever scores or medals she now adds to her towering shelf. It’s also a significant reassertion of the autonomy she expressed at the Tokyo Olympics. Once again, she has set an incandescent example for the next generation of gymnasts, girls, sportspeople—you name it.

Still, in June, once my head stopped spinning, I had so many questions.

First: If Biles was already Classics-ready, when, exactly, did she return to the gym? Most elite gymnasts need 12 to 18 months to get back to competition form after a hiatus (and even then, it doesn’t always work out). But as her nuptial tour indicated, Biles had been jetting all over creation since Tokyo! (Sure, this particular individual appears to defy the laws of physics, but the space-time continuum is infrangible even to her.) Ahead of the meet, Biles’ answer to this burning question was … nothing. (Well, not nothing-nothing. She did reveal she’d taken “over a year off” after Tokyo in an ephemeral Instagram story.)

My next question proved easier to navigate: How many events would Biles be competing in? Most top gymnasts compete the all-around (vault, uneven bars, balance beam, and floor exercise in women’s gymnastics), but since Tokyo there had been talk that the 26-year-old legend would possibly grace the Paris Games as an event specialist on vault, sparing her the necessity to train for other events, including and especially the dreaded uneven bars (her “worst” event, for which she also happens to hold a world silver medal).

However, soon after her non-announcement, Biles started posting brief training shots and videos, and they included … work on bars! If she was training bars, surely that meant she was also training the three events she enjoys. Indeed, by the time July’s U.S. national team camp rolled around, proof arrived that the GOAT was not just training all four events, but—based on the informal scores the gymnasts earned during the camp—she was once again poised to dominate.

The final question I had was somewhat less pleasant: Would people who don’t know anything about gymnastics be mean about her return, unleashing epic bon mots about “quitting” from the comfort of their Mojo Dojo Casa Houses? A little, but not as much as one might fear.

So, when Biles entered the U.S. Classic competition arena on Aug. 5, the majority of the television audience still had more questions than answers about what, exactly, the GOAT was going to show the world.

And then she stepped onto the competition floor and blew the goddamned roof off the place. After an epic save on uneven bars and a near-flawless beam routine at breakneck pace, Biles made short work of a floor exercise with stunning choreography (possibly the best she’s ever had) and four solidly executed tumbling passes: Three of those were not the highest difficulty she has ever done, but still more difficult than just about anyone else in the world can do. One—a front full-twist through to a tucked double-double—upgraded even her stratospheric 2021 difficulty.

And then, my friends, came vault, when Biles revived the monumental Yurchenko double pike, and she absolutely drilled it, landing the impossibly difficult skill in a near-vertical position with only a moderate step. It was miraculous just to see that vault again, but to see it done better, somehow, than its only other showing in competition—at the end of the meet, when gymnasts are tired—turned a triumphant evening into a surreal one.

Biles beat her closest American all-around competitor—2021 Olympic alternate Leanne Wong, who is no slouch—by 5 entire points, with a 59.1. (Most gymnastics competitions come down to tenths of a point.) This means she could have fallen on every event once, plus taken a bonus fall somewhere for fun, and still won. But instead, she fell on zero events, and had no major breaks anywhere, with no sign of the “twisties” or an iota of her previous visible and understandable anguish. (Gone, also, were the taped ankles of 2021, which also meant she was no longer in constant acute pain.)

Having witnessed her double-pike vault and all-around score, we couldn’t have known that bigger bombshells were still incoming. After the meet, Biles revealed the elusive answer: She’d returned to the gym in September 2022—itself a mind-bogglingly short amount of time ago given what we’d watched—but only to “get back in shape.”

After training for a mere month, she then took most of the rest of 2022 off for prior speaking engagements and the holidays, which, after a brief return to “two-a-days” in January, rolled directly into the aforementioned wedding frenzy of early 2023. Taken together, her report means that she’d only been training full-strength since after her April 22 wedding—about three and a half months. (She gave enthusiastic credit to her coaches, Laurent and Cecile Landi, for strategically composing progressively difficult routines and combinations to prepare her.)

It is difficult to express how bewildering this short amount of training time is, to not just compete at a high-stakes elite event, but to clobber it. (There is no reason to doubt her account.) Somehow, Biles looked more polished, relaxed, confident, in control, and abjectly not-miserable than she has in at least three years; she returned to world-domination condition in less time than it takes most of us to prepare for a couch-to-5K, if we even could do that. (I could not, or suffice it to say, I will not.)

But the bombshells were not done dropping. Biles then revealed that in Tokyo, a person or persons on the “inside team” told her, to her face, that she was their “gold medal token,” and that she needed to be more “cheery.” This means that on the eve of the Olympic Games, someone who was supposed to be part of her only in-person support system—COVID restrictions prevented her close-knit family from traveling to Tokyo—blithely diminished the grueling amount of work she’d put in just to be there under difficult conditions. Worse, they’d treated her prospective win not as the remarkable accomplishment it would have been, but as a minimum baseline of acceptable performance. The national program that was blessed to host—had previously proved itself unworthy of hosting—the undisputed greatest athlete the sport has ever seen had treated that athlete like she was currency.

It’s no surprise, then, that Biles stepped away—that she took some time off after getting hit with a perfect storm of pressure, torturous delays, uncertainty, an unsparing physical toll, the terror of the twisties, and a program that took her for granted. She went to therapy.
She got engaged. And eventually, unannounced, she walked right back into that gym, on her terms. It may be tempting for some to think of this return as part of a “redemption arc,” our hero aiming to “correct” for Tokyo by coming back and triumphing one last time for the happy ending her gymnastics career deserves. But Simone Biles has nothing to redeem. She did not need to come back; if she’d retired, she would have remained beloved as the one true GOAT, at least until the next unfathomably transcendent gymnast came along (I suppose, if anything is possible). Her Tokyo exit would and will be remembered by most as the different sort of triumph it was: one of self-determination. But it turns out a 2023 return was always part of the plan: After Classics, she told the press that she had no intention to quit gymnastics after what happened in Tokyo. But she would sure as hell quit being treated like crap.

Given the extent of Biles-related coverage since her return, one might operate under the misapprehension that she is the only gymnast in the world, or at any rate in the U.S. This is incorrect. In fact, the U.S. program boasts a full roster of world-class gymnasts right this second, and it was already favored to win every major international competition in the next two years without Biles. This despite a strong international field and recent changes in the Code of Points that seem specifically designed to minimize our country’s historical advantage. Furthermore, the new national team leadership will not make the same mistake Tom Forster did in 2021: They will not build a team around any one athlete, no matter how dominant that athlete is, because shit happens. Unforeseen events—injury, illness, family emergencies, anything—pull single athletes out of sports all the time, and to not build a team around such contingencies remains unconscionable.

Still, for now, the composite of the future U.S. team is speculation. Biles still hasn’t officially announced that she’s gunning for this year’s world championships or next year’s Olympics. And given her new tight-lipped style, we should not expect to be privy to her timeline. Simone Biles is an individual person, one who does what she wants to do, on and off the mat—deservedly so. She has already given her sport immeasurable enrichment. At the Classics, it was a thrill to watch her compete even one more time. But nobody, not even the Olympic team, is entitled to Simone Biles’ gymnastics.