Simone Biles Takes the Bronze

Last Tuesday, after Simone Biles withdrew from the women’s gymnastics team final, officials from Team U.S.A. announced that she would undergo regular health checks to determine whether she could compete in the individual event finals. On the Gymternet, fans waited, day after day, for updates on Biles’s condition. On Wednesday, she pulled out of the all-around competition, opening up an opportunity for her friend and teammate Sunisa Lee, who ended up taking the gold. In an Instagram video posted after that event, from a gym in Tokyo, Biles documented her ongoing struggle with the “twisties,” a mental disconnect that causes gymnasts to lose their bearings in the air. Video clips showed her attempting flyaways off the high bar and landing haphazardly on a blue mat far more forgiving than the Olympic floor. “It’s honestly petrifying trying to do a skill but not having your mind & body in sync,” she wrote. Last weekend, Biles missed the finals on the uneven bars and on the vault, where she had planned to début a Yurchenko double pike, a move that no other woman has attempted in international competition. Throughout the week, she was seen cheering from the stands and, in particularly nail-biting moments, using her mask as a blindfold. On Monday, she sat out the final for the floor routine, which is usually her best event. It seemed likely that she would leave Tokyo without returning to the mat.

But, in the lead-up to the last final, on Tuesday, on the balance beam, Biles’s name appeared on the start list. Less than twenty-four hours before the competition, U.S.A. Gymnastics announced that she would compete after all. On NBC’s live broadcast, as the finalists prepared to make their way onto the competition floor, Biles looked antsy, shifting her feet and blowing a cursory kiss, over her mask, to the camera. When she mounted the beam, though, she looked like her old self, completing a triple wolf turn, a front aerial, and an acrobatic series in close succession. To avoid risking the twisties, she performed a modified dismount—a double back pike instead of a full- or double-twisting back tuck. Upon landing, she raised her hand to her chest in visible relief. Her score, a 14.0, put her temporarily in second place, behind Tang Xijing, of China. But there were still five athletes left on the roster. The beam is a testy and unpredictable event, in which an errant toe or a low shoulder can instantly dash the chances of a gold-medal favorite. Several of the remaining athletes made uncharacteristic errors in their routines, and Biles held on to her silver-medal placement almost to the end. Then the final competitor, Guan Chenchen, of China, delivered a stunning routine, nailing a notoriously difficult sequence of front flips. Her score came in: 14.633—enough to take the gold. That left Xijing with the silver and Biles with the bronze. At a press conference after the competition, Biles reflected on her ordeal: “It’s been a very long week, a very long five years,” she said. “I just wanted to go out there for me.”

Even before Biles’s exit from the competition, this year’s Games had thrust concerns over the mental health of athletes to the fore. In June, the runner Sha’Carri Richardson was disqualified from competing after she tested positive for marijuana, which she said she’d used to cope with the death of her mother. “People don’t understand what it’s like,” she said, “to have to go in front of the world and put on a face and hide my pain.” In past years, the Games have become somewhat notorious for the debaucherous exploits of athletes staying at the Olympic Village. Reporters have chronicled the prolific use of dating apps on the compound and the sheer quantity of condoms distributed to competitors. Competing at the Olympics was harrowing, but it also seemed fun. This year, because of the pandemic, the Village has resembled a penitentiary more than a clubhouse. Athletes eat in a cafeteria partitioned by plastic dividers and sleep on beds made of cardboard, which has led commentators and some competitors to speculate that they were designed to discourage hookups. They are screened twice a day for the coronavirus, and those who test positive are confined to isolation units in a fever clinic. Candy Jacobs, a Dutch skateboarder who tested positive, described the conditions of her quarantine, at a Tokyo hotel, as “inhuman.” The pandemic has made it harder than usual to idealize the Olympic spectacle. Suddenly, the athletes seem less like glamorous celebrities than like overworked entertainers, performing for fans at significant risk to themselves.

Gymnasts, in particular, are used to the drastic gap between the experience and the appearance of élite competition. In the years since the revelations of the physician Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse, athletes at every level of the sport have found ways to push back against its punishing orthodoxies. Chellsie Memmel, the 2005 world all-around champion, made a surprising comeback earlier this year, at the age of thirty-two, appearing at nationals and inspiring discussions about the expectation that gymnasts peak in their teens. In Tokyo, members of the German team swapped out their leotards for less revealing uniforms, as they had at the European championships this spring—for “all gymnasts who might feel uncomfortable being sexualized in normal suits,” one said. Gymnasts from around the world have voiced their support for Biles’s decision to prioritize her well-being over the demands of competition. “Simone is not a robot, she’s human,” the Russian legend Svetlana Khorkina said. In the past week, some conservative pundits have tried to cast Biles as a quitter, a loser, a selfish snowflake. But it’s hard to make such insults stick to an athlete who once competed in the world championships—and led the team to gold—the day after being hospitalized for a kidney stone. “There’s this weird thing where people think that these athletes are being dramatic,” the two-time Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman told me in an interview last week, ahead of the Tokyo Games. “If you’re at that level, you’re not dramatic. You don’t work so hard to say your foot hurts when it doesn’t.”

Biles, who is twenty-four, has hinted that she may return as a vault specialist at the 2024 Olympics, in Paris, as a tribute to her coaches, who are French. But she has also indicated that the Tokyo Games could be her last. As of Tuesday, she has tied Shannon Miller’s record as the most decorated U.S. Olympic gymnast of all time, with a total of seven medals. The one she earned on Tuesday is her second bronze. Her first is from the beam competition at the 2016 Games, in Rio, during which Biles ended up in third place after nearly falling during a front tuck. In “Simone vs. Herself,” a Facebook miniseries about her road to Tokyo, Biles described the strange disappointment of that finish. Fans had become so accustomed to her coming in first that third place didn’t seem like a victory at all. “I was so happy with my bronze, but I couldn’t be happy, because nobody else was happy for me,” she said. At the 2020 Games, she added, presciently, “I don’t have to prove anything to anybody, and that feels nice.”

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