PARIS (AP) — In the early days after she was adopted by her grandparents, Simone Biles, a preschooler at the time, put herself in charge of younger sister Adria.
Part of it was Biles doing what big sisters do. Part of it was trying to give Adria something familiar to hold onto as they adjusted to life in Texas.
All of it hinted at an inherent toughness, the kind Biles has relied on time and again over the last quarter century. Through dozens of medals and bouts of crippling self-doubt. Through triumph and trauma. Through it all.
So maybe it’s fitting that in the middle of the second Olympic all-around title the 27-year-old earned on Thursday night in a taut final against Brazilian star Rebeca Andrade, Biles turned inward and leaned on a resolve that often gets lost amid her unparalleled greatness.
It had been a long time since Biles had found herself in second place, let alone third. So when she glanced at the scoreboard and found her name under Andrade and Algeria’s Kaylia Nemour through two rotations after a sloppy uneven bars routine, Biles kind of freaked.
“I’ve never been so stressed before,” she said.
That’s hardly true.
This is the same woman, after all, who came forward as one of the hundreds of sexual abuse victims of former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar, then spent the next several years holding the organization’s feet to a very hot fire.
She wore a leotard while winning the 2018 U.S. Championships that honored fellow survivors and repeatedly called out the national governing body’s leadership as it struggled to find a way forward.
It’s hardly a coincidence that Kerry Perry and then Mary Bono exited as USA Gymnastics president — Bono after just four days — not long after Biles very publicly questioned their competence. Through tears in 2019 she admitted “it’s hard coming here for an organization having had them failed us so many times.”
Two days later, she won the sixth of her record nine national titles.
Then came Tokyo 2020, where trauma that she’s still struggling to properly define manifested itself in “the twisties.” After one wayward vault during the team final, she retreated to the back of the Ariake Gymnastics Centre and told mom Nellie Biles on the phone back in Texas “ I can’t do it.”
There was a lot on the line in the moment. She was the face of the U.S. Olympic movement heading into the Games and leaned heavily — if at times with a wink — into the “Greatest of All Time” moniker. She was well aware of the social media attacks that might come — to be honest, the attacks that still come — and she did her best to ignore them. To a point anyway.
Yet rather than hide from her decision, she exposed her vulnerability for all to see.
There is power in that level of realness. That’s the thing with Biles. For all of her unmatched talent, she doesn’t exist in a bubble. She has long been unafraid to be exactly who she is: “Simone Biles from Spring, Texas, who flips” as she put it late Thursday night after becoming just the third woman in Olympic history to win multiple all-around titles.
Only she has become much more than that. She made the mistake of halting therapy sessions ahead of Tokyo, a mistake she has not made this time around. She meets weekly with her counselor, sometimes more when she’s competing. They talked virtually before the team final on Tuesday. Then again before the all-around final 48 hours later.
She told The AP in February she felt she was better prepared to meet the moment and all the pressure that comes along with it.
And there she was halfway through the final, sitting in a chair with her legs crossed underneath her and her eyes closed trying to re-center herself, literally practicing what she has long preached in front of the U.S. men’s basketball team, Kendall Jenner, plus all the people she knows are only tuning in to see if she will fail.
Biles joked afterward she was “praying to every God out there,” her way of deflecting. Yet it’s telling that on Friday morning, after an adrenaline-filled night that featured little sleep, she shared a picture of herself in that position on social media with the caption “mental health matters.”
While Biles responded with a typically steely beam routine that put her back in the lead, she also stood just off the mat encouraging Andrade during her set with the final result still very much in doubt.
Across the floor, Luisa Blanco of Colombia — a Dallas native and Alabama graduate competing for her parent’s homeland — watched transfixed. The 22-year-old knows only too well what this sport can do to you. The mental toll it takes. The way it makes you question everything, maybe your self-worth most of all.
“I don’t give myself credit, I really don’t,” a tearful Blanco said after becoming the first gymnast representing Colombia to make the final. “I think that’s what gymnastics does to you.”
It’s only in recent years that Blanco made peace with all of it. It makes Blanco shake her head wondering how Biles has shouldered so much attention and the inherent scrutiny that comes along with it so authentically.
“She is a trailblazer and rewriting the script entirely and getting better as years come,” Blanco said. “And all these girls that I met just in these last two weeks, you know, show me that you can do it your own way.”
The little girl who tried to create a protective cocoon for her sister has become a powerful Black woman and Olympic icon unafraid to be who she is at all times.
Sitting next to Lee and Andrade in a packed press conference with her ninth Olympic medal around her neck, Biles talked openly about “the fight that I’ve had for the last three years, mentally and physically” to get back to this point.
A fight that’s been there all along. You just needed to know where to look.
