Simone Biles re-announced herself at the Paris Olympics on Sunday with a typically stellar all-round performance.
She qualified first for Thursday’s individual all-round final, helped Team USA qualify first for Tuesday’s team final, finished first in the women’s vault and floor exercise qualifying and second in the balance beam qualifiers.
The 27-year-old is one of a select few in sport to truly transcend their discipline, with her youthful dominance, longevity, honesty and glamour typifying the model modern athlete. Her longevity is unprecedented but she came into the 2024 Olympics in unique circumstances, having withdrawn from all but two of the events at the Tokyo Games three years due to suffering ‘the twisties’.
However she has rebuilt her confidence and dominated the 2023 World Championships to arrive at the Games in red-hot form. She could end the event with five gold medals which would enhance her legacy as the most successful female gymnast of all time.
When does Simone Biles compete next?
July 30
Artistic gymnastics team final – 5.15pm
August 1
All-round final – 5.15pm
August 3
Vault final – 3.20pm
August 4
Uneven bar final – 2.40pm
August 5
Balance beam final – 11:38am
Floor exercise final – 1.23pm
Why is Simone Biles so special?
The American is the most successful gymnast of all time. Her Olympic and world championship pedigree is undoubted, having won 37 Olympic and World Championships medals. She won her first medals in 2013 at international level, taking two golds, a silver and bronze at the World Championships in Antwerp, Belgium. Ten years later, she went back to the same city and won four golds and a silver to exemplify her unprecedented longevity in a sport in which the average age of medal winners at the Tokyo Olympics was 20.6.
She has been a pioneer within her sport, innovating several new moves and skills, and has helped lead the conversation about sexual abuse within gymnastics and mental health.
Biles’ profile beyond the gym is also immense. She is an ambassador for huge global brands such as Beats by Dre, United Airlines, Uber Eats, Athleta and Visa. She is married to American Football star Jonathan Owens and wore a leotard worth £2,333 thanks to the 10,000 Swarovski crystals stitched into the material on Sunday.
What is the ‘Biles’?
Such is Biles’ all-court excellence, the Biles can refer to multiple skills that she invented.
The Biles exists in vault, balance beam, and floor exercise. In the vault, it corresponds to a move she invented in 2018 with a 6.0 difficulty rating, with 6.4 being the most difficult rating possible – more on that below.
In the balance beam, the Biles is a move rated 8/10 for difficulty and represents one of the hardest dismounts at the end of a routine possible.
The third and final ‘Biles’ refers to a floor exercise move that she debuted aged just 16 in 2013, where she performs a double backflip and twists 180 degrees in the second flip. It has a difficulty rating of 7/10.
What is the ‘Biles II’?
Symptomatic of her insatiable appetite for success, two of the above moves needed development, most notably the vault ‘Biles’.
The ‘Biles II’ has a maximum 6.4 difficulty rating, and has been added to the arsenal over the last Olympic cycle, meaning her execution of it in Paris was a world first and helped her achieve a huge score of 15.800.
The ‘Biles II’ also refers to her maximum difficulty-rated move on the floor that she introduced in 2019. Staggeringly, it sees her spring into a backflip in which she rotates 1080 degrees before landing.
What happened to Simone Biles at the Tokyo Olympics?
Three years ago, Biles withdrew from five finals at the Tokyo Olympics, citing mental health concerns that were materialising with ‘the twisties’.
The twisties refer to a mental block in which a gymnast loses their sense of space whilst in the air, opening up the possibility of falling and injury. The incident occurred live during the team final, shortly after she had admitted on social media that she was feeling “the weight of the world on [her] shoulders” after qualifying.
Despite a torrent of backlash, with critics labelling her a quitter and trolls sending racist and sexist abuse, Biles was open in her prioritisation of mental health, an approach vindicated by her return to success in the following years.
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