Simone Biles is so back

Champion gymnast Simone Biles turned in a powerhouse performance at the Olympic trials this week, securing her the top score and a key spot on the US team for the 2024 games in Paris this year. 

Her floor routine and vault, in particular, drew top marks and standing ovations from the audience.

It was a significant victory that follows Biles stepping away from the sport for two years after her early exit from the team competition in Tokyo, when she cited the need to “focus on her mental health.” It’s a testament, too, to the work she’s done since that contest to strengthen her mental well-being and resume a grueling physical training regimen. At the trials, Biles used her win to highlight the immense pressure that elite athletes are under and the importance of being candid about these challenges. 

“We’ve all been pretty open and honest [about] what we’re going through,” Biles, 27, said at a press conference following the meet. “But we’re always going to prioritize mental health and it’s really nice that Tokyo gave us that opportunity to open up that stage for that talk.”

Biles’s recent win marks the third time she’ll head to the Olympics and also makes her the oldest US woman gymnast to qualify for the Games since the 1950s. That Biles is resuming competition once more is a feat in and of itself. She’ll be one of a small group of gymnasts who’s ever participated in three consecutive Olympic Games. Her willingness to confront her mental health struggles also sends a compelling message, normalizing the decision to speak out and showing how athletes can be stronger for doing so.

Biles’s dominant performance at the Olympic trials, briefly explained 

Biles made her Olympic debut in Rio in 2016, where she won three individual gold medals and a team gold. Since then, she’s also won countless other competitions, including the US national championships nine times. Biles is widely regarded as the greatest gymnast of all time because of the heightened difficulty of the skills she performs and her ability to execute them. Her wins at the Olympics and numerous world championships also make her the most decorated gymnast ever.

In Tokyo in 2021, Biles returned to the Olympics as a member of the US team. While there, she experienced what’s colloquially known as the “twisties,” a dangerous condition when gymnasts lose the sense of where they are in the air. Given the complexity and difficulty of gymnastic routines, the twisties are extremely hazardous and can result in serious injury. 

After getting the “twisties” on a vault, Biles opted to withdraw from multiple competitions at the Olympics, including the team contest. Prior to that decision, she wrote in an Instagram post that she felt like she had the “weight of the world on my shoulders at times,” later describing the challenges as the build-up of longstanding traumas that all came to a head.

“It’s like compressing all of this shit for so many years. It just unfolded. You can’t compress trauma that much longer,” Biles said this year on the podcast Call Her Daddy. 

In the years since Tokyo, Biles has said she was “petrified” to get back in the gym and revisit some of the skills she used to do. She’s described engaging in therapy as a major factor in helping her process and recover from the 2020 Olympics, and she’s also talked about taking medication in order to combat anxiety.

“[I’m] continuing to work on my body and my mind, just like I have the past year and a half, and it’s worked,” Biles said on Call Her Daddy. “I didn’t think therapy was going to work, and it’s working.” According to her coach Cecile Landi, Biles also now has a toolkit she’s built of techniques to combat stress during competitions.

Biles made a dominant return to this year’s Olympic trials, which consist of two days of competition, with each athlete doing all four gymnastics apparatuses — bars, beam, floor, and vault — on both days. The Olympic selection committee then considers the scores the athletes have received as well as other factors to determine who should make the team. 

This year, the decision was relatively straightforward: The committee went with the top-scoring athletes across the board, something they don’t always do because they also consider individual strengths on different apparatuses. 

In the end, Biles led with 117.225 points — five points ahead of the next competitor. She was followed by Olympic vets Suni Lee at 111.675, Jordan Chiles at 111.425, Jade Carey at 111.350, and newcomer Hezly Rivera at 111.150. The five of them are the team that’s heading to Paris, while Joscelyn Roberson and Leanne Wong will serve as traveling alternates. 

Biles secured her spot on the Olympic team with two days of stellar routines, particularly on floor and vault. On these two apparatuses, she’s long been known for having some of the highest difficulty scores of any gymnast competing, something that hasn’t changed in her return. 

Her floor exercise, for example, included a jaw-dropping move dubbed the Biles II, which involves three twists and two flips. And her vault, widely viewed as the toughest in women’s gymnastics — featured what’s known as a Yurchenko double pike, something no other female gymnast has been able to do. 

Biles’s focus on mental health sends an important message

Since her experience in Tokyo, Biles has been vocal about the need to care for her mental health and the need for professional athletes who’ve long dealt with intense scrutiny and stress to have outlets to discuss them. 

“I think now athletes are a little bit more in tune and we trust what our gut is saying, and just taking mental health a little bit more serious,” Biles said at this week’s press briefing. 

Elite athletes are under incredible strain to perform, making them more prone to anxiety, depression, and other mental health conditions. In the past, discussing mental health has also been stigmatized and viewed by some as a sign of weakness. Biles’s decision to speak out helps dispel some of that stigma and allows more people, including her teammates, to share their own concerns. 

“Suni [Lee] earlier, she came up to me and she was like ‘I’m not okay,’ and so we walk through it. We tell her, her why, why she’s doing it, and we just give her those reminders that she can do it, she’s done it before, so let’s go out there and get it,” Biles said at the press briefing. 

Lee, too, has emphasized how important her mental health and staying positive has been as she’s navigated recovery from kidney disease in order to compete again this year. 

Biles has also said she’s focused less on external judgment. In Tokyo, some viewers reacted negatively to Biles’s decision to pull out of competition, and if athletes — including her — make similar decisions in Paris, it’s possible it could engender that same response from certain observers. 

“I think it has to be for us, because it can’t be for anybody else because that’s not why we do it. We do it for ourselves, and the love for this sport, and the love for representing the US,” Biles said in the press briefing.