Simone Biles’s legacy is equal parts dominance and resilience

Simone Biles and Team USA are golden again. At the 2024 Paris Olympics, Team USA won the gold medal in the team final on July 30. Biles, along with teammates Suni Lee, Jade Carey, Jordan Chiles, and Hezly Rivera, compiled a score of 171.296 and defeated Italy (165.494) and Brazil (164.497) who won silver and bronze. Two days later, on August 1, Biles took home the individual women’s all-around gold, with a total score of 59.131. These are Biles’s fifth and sixth Olympic gold medals, bringing her to nine Olympic medals in total over three Olympics. Biles’s medal haul, along with her 30 world championship medals — 23 of which were golds — solidifies her as the greatest gymnast that we’ve ever seen and arguably the most dominant athlete in all of sports. Her legacy is punctuated by her power, consistency, and winning record, but it’s her return to the Olympics and gymnastics in general that’s truly remarkable. For the last few years, Biles has openly talked about her mental health struggles and the abuse she endured as a Team USA gymnast. She has been sharing these painful moments in the hope that what happened to her doesn’t happen again. She wants to make the sport safer and better for the next crop of girls following in her footsteps. While that kind of change is not as easy to quantify as a triple-twisting double back, Biles’s resiliency and bravery are just as legendary as her skill. Why Simone Biles is the GOAT To put Simone Biles’s talent in perspective, you have to understand that gymnastics is scored down to decimal points. Biles regularly beats her competitors by roughly two full points. Those margins are like winning tennis matches 6-0, 6-0, outscoring an American football team by multiple touchdowns, or besting another basketball team by 40 points, and so on and so forth. Biles achieves these giant scores because she’s performing the most difficult moves at the most consistent clip. Biles’s two highest-scoring events are floor exercise and vault, both of which allow Biles’s power to take center stage. As experts explained to me back in 2016, headed into the Rio Olympics, and again in 2021 preceding the delayed Tokyo Olympics, Biles’s power on the floor allows her to perform the hardest tricks. Floor routines are usually stacked so that the first tumbling passes are the most difficult, so they can be done when a gymnast has the most energy. However, Biles’s third tumbling passes (which are usually her easier passes) are sometimes the same difficulty as most women’s first passes. Biles has two floor moves named after her: the Biles I (a double back layout with a half twist) and the Biles II (a triple-double: two flips and three twists). As of 2024, no other woman but Biles has landed the Biles II in any competition. [Image: Simone Biles competes on the uneven bars at the 2024 Paris Olympics. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/07/gettyimages-2164431987.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] In addition to the floor exercise moves, Biles has three high-scoring elements named after her: on vault, she has the Biles (two twists and front layout) and the Biles II (a Yurchenko double pike); and on beam, she has the Biles dismount (a double-twisting double backflip). [Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j61F2HucjEw] Ahead of the Tokyo Games, Biles was involved in a scoring controversy. The problem? Her tricks were too good. Judges could not figure out how to adequately score Biles because her moves were pushing the limits of difficulty. Critics said the Tokyo judges were scoring elements like Biles’s eponymous beam dismount too conservatively and not giving her full credit. Giving her the full total of her difficult elements would have made the already huge gap between Biles and her competitors even larger. “They’re … too low and they even know it,” Biles told the New York Times in May 2021. “But they don’t want the field to be too far apart. And that’s just something that’s on them. That’s not on me.” Biles has been so good and so consistent that she’s pushed the sport to a new limit, which has yet to be matched. There are gymnasts and there is Simone Biles. Simone Biles is one of one. In Paris, Biles is nursing a slight calf injury but still earned a 14.90 on vault and 14.66 on floor to help lead the US team to gold. She is still poised to compete in the women’s finals for vault, balance beam, and floor exercise. Simone Biles’s resilience While Biles is a once-in-a-lifetime athlete, her return to the Olympics is nothing short of extraordinary. Three years ago in Tokyo, Biles suffered a mental block known in the gymnast world as the “twisties.” As Biles has explained in articles and extensively in her new Netflix documentary Simone Biles: Rising, the twisties happen when there’s a disconnect between your brain and body. That lack of body awareness, especially when gymnasts are performing difficult tricks, could end in serious injury. As a result, Biles pulled out of the team and all-around competition despite being the heavy favorite. She came back for one event, the balance beam event finals, and won a bronze medal on the apparatus. Yet pundits, primarily right-wing personalities, attacked Biles for withdrawing from competition and failing her team. What the public didn’t fully understand, and what Biles speaks about honestly in Rising, is that she believes the twisties she suffered in Tokyo were a result of unresolved stress and trauma. Because of Covid-19 and the health precautions surrounding the pandemic, families were not allowed to travel with athletes to the 2021 Olympics. Biles’s support system — her family and mom especially — was not present. Biles also explains that she still hadn’t fully processed or gotten sufficient treatment after being abused by Larry Nassar. Nassar was the former doctor of Team USA’s gymnastics team and was charged with sexually assaulting girls and young women. After pleading guilty to federal pornography charges (Nassar was in possession of child sex abuse material) and multiple child sex abuse charges, he was sentenced to 60 years in federal prison and over 100 years in state prison. Biles was one of the hundreds of women and girls who came forward against Nassar. She also spoke out about the FBI’s failure to properly investigate the allegations. In September 2021, weeks after the Olympics, Biles testified at a US Senate Hearing against Nassar. “I worked incredibly hard to make sure that my presence could help maintain a connection between the failures [around the Nassar case] and the competition at Tokyo 2020,” Biles told the sitting senators. “That has proven to be an exceptionally difficult burden for me to carry, particularly when required to travel to Tokyo without the support of any of my family. I am a strong individual and I will persevere, but I never should have been left alone to suffer the abuse of Larry Nassar.” If Biles had walked away from the sport after Tokyo, no one would have blamed her. She’s won almost every medal possible — including the team and all-around gold in Rio. She revolutionized gymnastics, creating moves that judges couldn’t accurately score. The sport itself is emotionally and physically taxing. And speaking about being sexually abused and your own mental health publicly, in the media spotlight, must be incredibly difficult. But in coming back to Paris, Biles has changed gymnastics for the better. She’s helped open the door to an honest, de-stigmatizing conversation about mental health. She’s made us question the pressure we put on athletes, especially young girls (remember Kerri Strugg?) and how stories about their “toughness” and “perseverance” as gymnasts are framed. She and her family have also opened their own gym and are helping change the sport for the next generation of young girls. Because Biles has been so dominant and so talented, we took her greatness for granted. Without her honesty and vulnerability, we may have never understood how resilient she is. And thankfully, we’ve been lucky enough to witness it. Update, August 1, 3:25 pm ET: This story was originally published on July 20 and has been updated with news of Biles winning the women’s all-around individual final.