Simone Biles left the floor with an injury, got her left leg taped from ankle to mid-calf, nailed a floor routine including two skills named after her, threw and hit a vault no one else in the world can do, and then after landing her uneven bars dismount with ease, blew a kiss to the crowd and moved on with her day.
Perhaps finally that will silence any questions about her being a quitter.
Three years after Biles withdrew from the Olympics because of a mental block that is commonly called the “twisties,” Biles decided to go on. It will make for an easy story of the 180-degree pivot from Tokyo to Paris, but while everything is different, nothing has changed. Biles drove her stake in the ground in 2021, declaring herself not OK to go forward. From that moment on, she decided that her why would be hers and hers alone — not to satisfy anyone else, not to carry any burden placed on her. Biles came back to competition because she wanted to. She is here, at 27, in Paris, because she has chosen to be.
And she went on during qualifying because she decided she could.
This, then, was her why come to life. “Incredible,’’ said Chellsie Memmel, the team’s technical director. “She is an outstanding gymnast and person. What she was able to do with some sort of soreness, it’s just remarkable.’’
As she warmed up for floor, Biles appeared to land awkwardly. She walked away in apparent frustration, shrugging off her coach, Laurent Landi. She left the floor briefly with team doctor Dr. Marcia Faustin, returning to get taped. On the TV broadcast, Biles could be heard expressing her frustration. “As soon as I took off, I felt it. It’s right there on my calf. Right where I had that f-ing tear.’’ Later after the competition ended, her other coach, Cecile Landi, said Biles in fact had injured her leg “a couple of weeks ago, but after that it stopped, and then a little bit again today.’’
Yet Biles not only continued competition, she dominated it. Biles executed her floor routine with just one step out of bounds on her first pass, the one that finishes with her height-defying Biles II, also known as the triple-twisting double back tuck.
