PARIS (AP) — Simone Biles huddled with Sunisa Lee. She looked to her husband Jonathan Owens in the stands. Lost in the moment. And maybe a touch frantic.
The American gymnastics star knew she was trailing Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade and Algeria’s Kaylia Nemour through two rotations during the Olympic all-around final Thursday.
After a sloppy uneven bars that included a mistake Biles can never remember making in competition, she sat in a chair, closed her eyes, ignored the sea of cameras around her and attempted to refocus.
She and Lee tried to do the math. How bad was it? They weren’t sure. It had been a long time since it was this tight.
Biles checked with Owens, who reassured Biles that she was fine, even though she was in third. His wife of 15 months might not have believed him in the moment.
“I’ve just never been so stressed before,” Biles said. Maybe because she hadn’t been pushed — not in a long time anyway — the way Andrade pushed inside an electric Bercy Arena.
Yet the jitters eventually faded. The 27-year-old who is redefining what a gymnast can do and how long she can do it went to work.
One stoic beam routine and one floor exercise that is unlike anything ever done in her sport later, Biles found herself accepting a gold medal from IOC president Thomas Bach for a second time, this time with Lee standing next to her with a bronze.
Eight years ago in Rio de Janeiro, Biles was a teenage prodigy.
Now, she’s an icon. One who remains peerless even when she’s not perfect.
Biles now has nine Olympic medals, six of them gold. And while she says she doesn’t keep track of these things, she sort of does. The GOAT necklace she rocked in the aftermath isn’t a coincidence, even if she maintains she’s just “Simone Biles from Spring, Texas, that loves to flip.”
Maybe, but she’s also the third woman to become a two-time Olympic champion, joining Larisa Latynina of the Soviet Union in 1956 and 1960 and Vera Caslavska of Czechoslovakia in 1964 and 1968. Oh, and the oldest to finish atop the all-around podium since then 30-year-old Maria Gorokhovskaya of the Soviet Union won the first-ever Olympic all-around in Helsinki in 1952.
The sport then is not what it is now. The days of “little girls in pretty boxes” are long gone. Biles has fueled that transformation one performance at a time. There’s a reason stars like the U.S. men’s basketball team and Kendall Jenner flock to watch her Thursday.
Biles has said repeatedly over the last three years that what happened in Tokyo is a part of her past, not her present, and if critics have a problem with it, that’s their issue, not hers.
She’s moved on to bigger things. Like setting a standard that may never be reached. In her gymnastics for sure, and maybe others too. When trying to count the number of active Olympians who have stood atop their sport for 11 years and counting, no math is required.
There is only one.