2024-08-02 17:10:01
This is part of Slate’s 2024 Olympics coverage. Read more here.
Well my friends, I said it might happen, and for a few minutes there during the women’s all-around gymnastics final in Paris’ Bercy Arena, I thought it actually would: Simone Biles, the greatest gymnast the sport has ever seen, was briefly behind. I said it, and I meant it: Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade was within Biles’ margin of error! But after a competition filled with more twists and turns than—wait, what’s a sport that features many literal twists and turns? I can’t think of one—the all-around podium had Biles at the top, continuing her run as the most decorated American Olympic gymnast of all time.
With this gold, at 27 Biles also becomes—well, let’s be polite: the female individual with the, er, number highest in age to have won a gymnastics all-around gold since Maria Gorokhovskaya did it in 1952 at 30, doing what, I am sorry, now look like playground tricks because my, has the sport evolved! Biles’ triumph is not some sort of freak occurrence, by the way; elite gymnastics careers now last far longer than they once did. Also, 27 is only “old” if you’re Andrew Tate.
The meet started off with a sizable Biles advantage. Although Andrade threw a magnificent Cheng—she is, I’m going to say it, the best to ever do that particular vault—the Cheng’s difficulty value of 5.6 paled in comparison to you-know-what: That’s right! The Biles 2, or Yurchenko double pike (difficulty: 6.4), the skill Biles has said makes her scared she might die literally every time she does it. After she landed this monster on her feet with only one sizeable step back—do not come for me with “but her landings!”; this vault under-rotated could break both of her legs—the meet was hers to lose. And then she went to the accursed uneven bars and came as close to losing it as I have ever seen her do.
Biles entered the second rotation with a lead of more than half a point—which she promptly chucked straight into the garbaggio after pulling through a truly heroic save, when her high-to-low-bar transition went awry. It was a testament to her nerves, experience, and teeny tiny height that this mistake did not put her onto the mat; instead, she swung through on the low bar with bent knees (one large deduction) and then had to insert corrective skills (another whopper). In the end, she somehow wrangled a respectable 13.733 (a fall routine would be somewhere in the 12s), but her margin of error shrank to a negative amount. With Andrade’s bar routine coming in at 14.666, this erased Biles’ lead, and then some. In fact, at one point, after Algeria’s magnificent bar worker Kaylia Nemour pulled a 15.533 on her signature event, Biles stood, horror of horrors, in third place. (This was because Nemour’s a bar prodigy, and her other events score in the human range—but that didn’t stop a lot of chatter!)
Meanwhile! The gold race wasn’t the only thing that made me consider talking to my doctor about whatever hypertension drug was advertised between events. For between Nemour and Italy’s wonder-twin Alice D’Amato, our very own Suni Lee, who wasn’t even supposed to be here today, was finding herself in a dead heat for the bronze after a solid (but comparatively small) vault and a stunning bar set. (A year ago, Lee was diagnosed with two separate chronic kidney diseases, and told she might never do gymnastics again.)
What better way to assuage the nerves of a world collectively about to barf than everyone’s favorite event, the very chill balance beam? (At least it wasn’t pommels!) However, the second I saw Biles ace the mount that’s been dogging her recently, I knew she’d be OK. Her only deductions of note, in fact, were a small wobble after the side aerial that briefly derailed her in team finals, and an utterly heroic muscle-through save on her accursed wolf turn, which normal people probably didn’t notice because wolf turns are funny looking even when done right.
So now the meet was Biles’ to lose again. Would Andrade provide an assist? She would not! Her beam routine, though great, was not as difficult and scored a 14.133 to Biles 14.566. Simultaneously, would any of the bronze-medal contenders be offering Lee any tenths to spare? No they would not; it was Lee who offered numerous small corrections and issues throughout her beam routine.
At this point my blood had returned to a human level of pressure, because I knew that while Biles’ fluke on bars had made things interesting, this meet was now squarely in the GOAT’s bailiwick. The last event was the floor exercise, on which no gymnast has ever come close to her difficulty. And while it’s gymnastics, so anything can happen—minutes before, Brazil’s Flavia Saraiva had bounced so hard out of a double tuck that she literally belly flopped out of bounds!—Biles could have, in the end, counted an out-of-bounds on all four tumbling passes and still walked away with the gold. (Biles is so good on floor—her basics so flawless, her amplitude unparalleled, and her in-air execution usually perfect—that overdoing her tumbling is usually the only notable mistake she makes.)
After Tokyo I take nothing for granted, and possibly like many of you, I found this meet nearly impossible to watch. As much as I know she does not need a single medal more to cement her status as the greatest to ever do it, I also know that Biles would not have come back to these Olympics if she did not want to win them. Still, as much as I wanted this for her—the redemption she has been after for three years—I also understood that it was exactly this precise expectation from the world that broke her before. So, although Biles has not scored below a 14 on floor at any time during the 2024 quadrennial—and although, after Andrade posted a gorgeous but not-as-difficult floor routine (alas, no secret new tumbling, which she had been rumored to be debuting in Paris), the American needed but a 13.868 to win. It was imperative that on behalf of the entire world that I calmed my hormones.
Well, maybe I did and maybe I didn’t! Because I may or may not have caused a minor commotion in my house when Biles absolutely drilled her floor routine, obliterating any scintilla of hater doubt about whether she was worth the hype. When all was flipped and twisted at the end of the floor rotation, not only had Biles landed at the top of the podium, but with some minor assists from D’Amato and Nemour on floor, Lee clawed her way back up there too. (Lee needed to do the literal best floor routine she had ever done since Tokyo, and she did—in, I should mention, her literal first international competition since Tokyo.)
With Biles and Lee bookending Andrade (all three women’s all-around medalists are returning to this podium, for the first time in history!), this might not have been the podium that some curmudgeonly international fans were hoping for—more folks in the deep “gymternet” were rooting for a “Simone flop” than I will ever dignify in print again—but it was the podium that each of these phenomenal athletes earned. There is also no imaginary time travel math needed to prove Biles’ greatness; Andrade circa 2024 was, and remains, the only real all-around competition she has had in more than a decade. And while Andrade was magnificent and spent the entire meet within Biles’ margin of error, in the end the GOAT’s errors remained marginal enough to keep her on top.
This Olympics has gone phenomenally well for the U.S. gymnastics team, with only event finals now left. Now, everyone (including, perhaps, me?) gets a whole entire day to rest, before each remarkable apparatus becomes the center of attention in the event finals. Said event finals may be the last time we ever see Biles or Andrade face off, or possibly—sniff—compete at all. So let’s all be grateful for one more brilliant weekend—as we hope our blood pressure holds out.
