Eventually, she decided to try, returning to the gym one casual visit at a time. The uncertainty gradually dissolved. And before the all-around final at these Paris Olympics, she knew she had made it all the way back to the top. She packed a necklace and had a plan. After her final routine, a standout performance that clinched the all-around gold medal, she placed the chain around her neck and showed off a sparkling pendant in the shape of a goat. Biles has proved that she’s the GOAT of gymnastics. And she knows it.
Biles has conquered her sport and herself. There is nothing left to accomplish.
In the tense all-around final, Biles had to perform at her best to earn the title. She didn’t cruise to a win as she has so often in the past. A mistake on bars pushed her into an unfamiliar position: third place at the midway point. For years, she hasn’t had a challenger as strong as Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade. With one rotation remaining, Biles led by less than two-tenths of a point. But then she asserted her dominance. As the final competitor, she soared through her floor routine, flipping and twisting in ways that no woman can match. With that one routine, she emerged as the champion of a dramatic battle for gold.
“I don’t want to compete with Rebeca no more,” Biles said afterward. “I’m tired. She’s way too close. I’ve never had an athlete that close.”
Biles’s final act of this marquee event was more than enough to seal the title. Her score of 59.131 ultimately towered above Andrade’s 57.932, which was good enough for silver, but the margin was that wide only because of Biles’s excellence in the final rotation. It was also a reminder of Biles’s dominance. Even when she is imperfect, she cannot be defeated, and her beam and floor routines proved her mettle. On bars, she struggled through a salto transition from the high bar to the low bar. She had to bend her knees and maintained her rhythm through sheer will. Afterward, with Andrade having climbed ahead, Biles knew she had to re-center herself.
“I was probably praying to every single god out there,” Biles said.
During the meet, Biles and U.S. teammate Sunisa Lee scrambled to do math in their heads — Lee as she successfully won the race for bronze and Biles as she fought Andrade for gold.
“I don’t like that feeling,” Biles said. “I was stressing!”
Lee added: “I had never seen you that stressed in my life.”
But this version of Biles, confident and prepared, could handle the pressure. This was just an error — nothing like what happened in Tokyo. Instead, Biles’s performance was a sign of how far she has come.
When the world watched Biles at the Olympics three years ago, the toll of the extraordinary pressure, plus trauma buried inside, spilled over onto the competitive floor. Biles couldn’t go on. It would have been too dangerous to fly through the air when the usually innate connection between her mind and body had frayed. Many praised how she prioritized her physical and mental health. Others called her a quitter.
Biles took a break from the sport, without a murmur about whether her future would include another competitive routine. She quietly decided to return ahead of the 2023 season, later citing obvious motivation: “You saw what happened,” Biles said, referring to the trouble in Tokyo. But she insisted she was doing it for herself alone. It was a chance to author her own ending.
Over the past year, one successful competition after another, Tokyo loomed over Biles each time she performed. In her carefully limited media appearances, she and her coaches faced redundant questions all centered around the same theme: Would this Olympics be different?
Biles emphatically answered. She led the U.S. women to the team gold, and two days later, she earned the sport’s most coveted medal, its ribbon framing the sparkling goat that remained on Biles’s chest on the podium. Biles, the world’s most decorated gymnast with 30 world championship medals to go with her Olympics haul that now stands at nine, has three more opportunities to win gold in the individual apparatus finals.
Andrade, the Brazilian star, seized the role as a formidable challenger to Biles. But Biles has difficulty scores that are so high that her peers, even Andrade, have a chance only if Biles falters. The single mistake Thursday wasn’t enough to outweigh Biles’s excellence on every other apparatus. Lee, the all-around champion in Tokyo, battled kidney-related health issues last year, with her podium finish here the exclamation mark on an arduous road back to world-class form. Lee posted a 56.465, taking the bronze by a tiny margin thanks to her fantastic floor routine. But Biles’s ascent back to the top of the podium took center stage.
Biles began the competition by launching her body through the air and performing the double-flipping vault that bears her name. Her alternative option is safer, mentally and physically. But Biles performed the Yurchenko double pike Thursday, in large part because she knew she might need that scoring boost against Andrade.
“I have to bring out the big guns this time,” Biles said she thought.
Biles’s mind and body are perfectly in sync. Her competitive repertoire is just as complex as it was before Tokyo. Those difficult skills have solidified her legacy in the sport, and in every competition, they made her unstoppable. That’s what helped Biles return to the pinnacle of her sport. There’s no room for doubt anymore. Tokyo now defines only the magnitude of Biles’s comeback.
