As the Brazilian gymnast Rebeca Andrade prepared for her beam dismount, a cry rang out around the Bercy Arena: “Come on, you got it.”
The source of the shout was Simone Biles, the all-time queen of gymnastics. Even though she had already fallen in her own routine, Biles was supporting her leading rival in a manner that transcended national boundaries.
Now, there will be people who find this all too chummy. Who believe that Olympic sport should be about gold medals and gimlet-eyed stares, not united girl power.
Those people are wrong. After a series of horrific abuse scandals over the past five years, gymnastics stands in serious need of detoxification. And by playing up the fun, sparkly, collaborative elements of the sport, Biles is leading the way to a happier future.
Following orders
Rewind to a very different Olympic moment. In 1996, 18-year-old Kerri Strug was the final performer in the women’s team competition. She needed to score an average of 9.493 on her two vaults to carry the United States to their first victory in this event. But she under-rotated on her first attempt, landing awkwardly and tearing two ligaments in her left ankle.
There was never any doubt that Strug would vault again. This time, she completed the rotation perfectly, landed hard on both feet and then picked up her left. The mark – a lofty 9.712 – completed the US’s memorable victory and made Strug a heroine. It was also her final act as a competitive gymnast.
This was the way gymnastics used to be. Young girls had fierce coaches, usually middle-aged men, and they did what they were told. Gymnastics had developed as a form of military display in the late 19th Century and the athletes were treated like soldiers: they followed their orders or their career would be over.
Coercive control was the norm, especially across the Eastern Bloc nations that dominated the sport between the 1950s and early 2000s. It was the perfect environment for exploitation, even if no one had expected abuse on such a scale as Larry Nassar perpetrated over almost two decades as US team doctor.
As the former American national champion Jennifer Sey told Athlete A, the Netflix documentary on the Nassar scandal: “Emotional and physical abuse was actually the norm, and we were all so beaten down by that and made so obedient that when we knew there was a sexual abuser in our midst, we would never say anything.”
Athlete independence
This is why Biles matters, not only as a game-changing performer who has pioneered a series of new moves, but also as a standard bearer for athlete independence.
In Paris, Biles’s whole demeanour projected a sense of collegiality. When Andrade beat her to gold in the floor final – in what was one of the most unexpected results of the whole Olympiad – she and her team-mate Jordan Chiles crouched low and bowed to Andrade on the podium.
The very non-conformity of Biles’s actions can be judged by the rebuke she received from NFL cornerback Marlon Humphrey, who called the bow “disgusting” on X. She replied calmly and convincingly on NBC’s Today show: “It’s all about sportsmanship, and we don’t care whether we win or lose.”
Paris is the second Games in a row where Biles has shown herself to be different to her predecessors – and changed gymnastics in the process.
In Tokyo, the first Olympiad after the horrors of the Nasser scandal became public, Biles had found herself in an even more perilous position than Strug 25 years earlier. In her first contribution to the team final, Biles had intended to perform an Amanar vault with two-and-a-half twists. But she stopped spinning after one-and-a-half, and finished the move in an awkward deep squat. “I had no idea where I was in the air,” she said afterwards. “I could have hurt myself.”
It turned out that Biles was suffering from a little-understood condition called the “twisties” – or, more formally, Lost Move Syndrome – in which her internal guidance computer effectively shut down.
Her response was very un-Strug like. She apologised to her team-mates and removed herself from the competition, returning only to compete in the beam final six days later. Here was an athlete-led response that resonated throughout the sport.
“What happened with Simone in Tokyo was unfortunate,” says Becky Downie, a double European champion on uneven bars. “But it was also a huge platform to bring awareness, and helped the sport change for the better. In our sport, it was previously just seen that you push through anything to get results.”
Age range
After Tokyo, there was no certainty that Biles would return for more. She was already 24, in a sport primarily associated with teenage girls.
The dominance of the so-called “pixies” – tiny athletes with boyish, often prepubescent figures – had not always been the norm in gymnastics. But a succession of eye-catching teenage performers in the 1970s and 1980s – Olga Korbut in Munich, Nadia Comaneci in Montreal, and Mary-Lou Retton in Los Angeles – established a template.
The pixies were pliant in both senses of the word: flexible and biddable, which is exactly how overbearing coaches and potential sexual predators wanted it.
Happily, this trend is in retreat. Ages were slowly rising even before Biles’s emergence, but she has definitely accelerated the process.
She decided to return to the sport last summer and her Paris exploits made her the oldest female all-around Olympic champion since 1952.
“Over the past couple of years, gymnasts have been preserving their bodies for bigger competitions and bigger events,” said Downie. “Athletes have a lot more say with coaches, and they are picking and choosing when and where they compete. We’re also seeing more individual-event specialists and I’m happy to have been part of that change.”
Greater sensitivity
Gymnastics’ detoxification still has a way to go. A week before the Paris Olympics, the Japanese selectors dropped their captain, 19-year-old Shoko Miyata, for a pair of disciplinary offences: one involving alcohol and the other cigarettes.
As Jean McNicol wrote in the London Review of Books: “The Japanese GOAT of men’s gymnastics, Kohei Uchimura … smoked like a chimney during his whole career. Did anyone ever police what he was doing in ‘a private place at a certain location in Tokyo’? It’s different for girls.”
Even here, though, we can see elements of independence breaking through the conformity. As they were introduced for the team final, the four remaining Japanese gymnasts performed a pose – left arm out, right hand on heart – that Miyata strikes at the end of her floor routine.
In the view of Kristian Thomas – the Wolverhampton-born gymnast who won bronze with the British men’s team at the London Olympics – gymnastics finally finds itself at the forefront of a sport-wide trend towards greater sensitivity in its treatment of athletes.
“The last few years have not been good for the sport,” Thomas says. “We’ve had to shift the dial a bit quicker, or move further, than others. I don’t believe that the Strug situation would happen today, and perhaps that is because we are in a better place after the unfortunate circumstances of the last few years. The draconian coaching style now is archaic and hasn’t really got a place in the sport.
“For me, Biles is the greatest female athlete ever. Not just for her performance but for the way she has represented the sport. If you watched her in Paris, her body language transmitted a clear message, ‘I’m not here for anyone else. I’m not even here because I’m good at it. I’m here because I enjoy it, and I want it to be fun’.”
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