The Simone Biles Revolution
Her return to elite gymnastics is a hopeful sign that the sport is changing.
Elite women’s gymnastics has long been criticized for the way it treats its athletes, who, in recent decades, have typically been young girls and adolescents. In 2017, USA Gymnastics’ official team doctor, Larry Nassar, was convicted of molesting athletes while ostensibly treating them for injuries. In 2020, the Netflix documentary Athlete A accused USA Gymnastics of complicity in a culture of abuse and psychological intimidation. After its release, gymnasts came together to call for a revolution, one that might bring with it more ethical coaching and a sustainable approach to gymnasts’ careers, with less focus on the prepubescent thinness that contributed to rampant eating disorders. The return of Simone Biles to the sport is a hopeful sign that the revolution might succeed.
Biles was Nassar’s most famous victim. But she has always resisted being a victim of the sport itself. “Her superpower is resistance,” said the sports journalist and Atlantic contributor Jemele Hill in the 2021 show Simone vs Herself. Specifically, Biles resisted “a system,” as Hill put it, in which female gymnasts are expected to be “delicate,” girlish, and compliant. “She has basically just smashed all the tropes and archetypes that they have for the sport by being confident, by being bold, by choosing to do dangerous moves, by not being shy about the fact that she is the greatest of all time,” Hill said.
Biles shattered records at the U.S. Gymnastics Championships in San Jose, California, this weekend by winning her eighth national all-around title and becoming, at the age of 26, the oldest female gymnast to win that title. (Previously, the record for most all-around titles had been held by Alfred Jochim, who won his seventh title in 1933.) Over two days, she hit eight out of eight events almost flawlessly; a few wobbles on the beam the first day were gone by the second. On floor exercise, she performed what one of her coaches considered “the best floor routine I’ve ever seen her do”—tumbling and dancing with such rousing verve that the crowd gave her a standing ovation. She won all-around by 3.9 points, an enormous margin in a sport where athletes are often separated by tenths of points.
Biles’s performance at the championships followed a two-year hiatus from the sport, marking the kind of return that is almost unheard-of in women’s gymnastics, let alone in one’s mid-20s. At the Tokyo Olympics in July 2021, she dramatically withdrew from the team finals and the individual all-around events. She later revealed that she had a case of the “twisties,” an informal term for a phenomenon in which gymnasts lose their ability to tell where they are in the air, making it hard to twist safely. She was open about experiencing mental-health issues stemming from the pressures of the sport. One can only imagine the role that her former sexual abuse played. As she told the late-night host James Corden in a September 2022 appearance, she remained unsure she would train for the Paris Olympics because she “still has to heal mentally and physically.”
Biles hasn’t just shattered records; she has upended norms. Not only does she speak openly about the mental-health pressures of being an elite gymnast; she has publicly criticized the institutions that govern women’s gymnastics. In 2019 and 2021, after pioneering a move that was later named after her and then performing a Yurchenko double pike for the first time on vault, she accused officials of undervaluing those skills. She even got a bit snarky on Simone vs Herself, noting that the deciding authorities were “older” and had probably only ever done “layouts” (a relatively easy skill) on vault. During Senate hearings on the FBI’s failures in the Nassar investigation, just two months after the Tokyo games, in September 2021, Biles did not mince words: “I am also a survivor of sexual abuse,” she said, “and I believe without a doubt that the circumstances that led to my abuse and allowed it to continue are directly the result of the fact that the organizations created by Congress to oversee and protect me as an athlete—USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee—failed to do their jobs.”
Biles blamed Nassar, but she denounced “an entire system that enabled and perpetrated his abuse.” She became emotional contemplating the need to speak out: “I don’t want another young gymnast, Olympic athlete, or any individual to experience the horror that I and hundreds of others have endured before, during and continuing to this day, in the wake of the Larry Nassar abuse.” In December 2021, after the Senate hearing—among others, the stars Aly Raisman, McKayla Maroney, and Maggie Nichols testified about the abuse they had suffered—USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee reached a $380 million settlement with survivors of Nassar’s abuse, including Biles. (At the time, Li Li Leung, the president and CEO of USA Gymnastics, said in a statement: “USA Gymnastics is deeply sorry for the trauma and pain that survivors have endured as a result of this organization’s actions and inactions.”)
Until recently, Biles’s return to the sport seemed uncertain. This summer, after USA Gymnastics announced that she would compete in August’s U.S. Classic, a qualifying meet for nationals, Biles addressed her fans directly, noting that she was “overwhelmed with all of your messages” and “excited to get back out on the competition floor.” She held a Q&A with her fans on Instagram. When one asked how she was “handling the mental side,” she wrote that she went to weekly therapy for “almost two hours,” and noted, “I’ve had so much trauma, so being able to work on some of the traumas & work on healing is a blessing.”
Her return would have been notable no matter how she performed, but she came back better than ever. At both the U.S. Classic and on the first night of the U.S. nationals, she did the Yurchenko, a skill so difficult that no other women and only a handful of men compete with it. She danced and pumped her arms after landing it at the Classic, emotionally buoyant, while her former Olympic teammate Jordan Chiles shimmied and pumped her arms with her. Watching Biles compete during nationals, NBC commentators said she “continued to amaze” and exclaimed that they were having a hard time finding the words to describe her: They knew that what was unfolding was extraordinary. Event by event, Biles performed at a shockingly high level of technical difficulty. Her execution was also superb. In competition, she dominated on vault and floor. By the time she finished the second day’s rotation, with a final floor exercise, Biles seemed to be in her element, smiling and moving with ease, confidence, and authority that she didn’t have in Tokyo. Chiles, coming to the floor for her own final routine, waved the crowd on to cheer Biles, her facial expression clear: This is historic. Let’s recognize it, Chiles seemed to be saying.
At nationals, Biles elected not to do her Yurchenko double pike on the second day of competition. When she performed it on the first night, she had her coach on the mat for safety reasons—even though it meant incurring a half-point deduction. She has retooled some of her routines and changed up some of her most difficult skills for others. By doing so, she has modeled the most impressive aspect of her return: not her physical prowess but her psychological maturity as an athlete, demonstrating self-knowledge and confidence. She has not pretended that the return is easy; on Sunday, she spoke about working on her confidence, even as she seemed to embody authority. In other interviews, she has used the word trauma to invoke the horror of what she endured at Nassar’s hands, but she has also invoked the “power” she has to help protect younger gymnasts.
No wonder that some fans online raved that she is the greatest of all time in more ways than one. She didn’t have to have dominated the nationals to have won. She won by showing that women’s gymnastics can be the sport of mature athletes, that it was within her power to reshape her story. By showing up, she transcended the limitation imposed on gymnasts by a constraining system that had them peaking at age 16, suffering physical and mental injuries along the way.
Over the championship weekend, NBC commentators said that if there had been any questions around Biles’s return, her dominant performance had answered it. She was back. But the official discourse around Biles rang a bit oddly, focusing on the difficulty of her routines and not the difficulty of surviving the culture of intimidation and fear that has been a front-and-center subject for those who follow gymnastics. During the meet, I caught only one vague mention of this aspect of Biles’s story: The commentator Samantha Peszek, a former elite gymnast, noted, with feeling, the good “and the bad” of elite gymnastics.
At nationals, the gymnasts vied not only for the top title but also for spots on the team that the United States sends to the World Championships, which helps determine who goes to the Olympics. After the competition, John Roethlisberger, an NBC commentator and a retired gymnast, asked Biles about her plans. She responded by saying that she was trying to “move a little bit differently” now, keeping things more private. The deeper question went unasked: Will gymnastics become a safer sport, in terms not of physical difficulty but of the psychological well-being of its athletes? For now, Biles was triumphant alongside Shilese Jones, age 21, and Chiles, 22. They didn’t just excel; they danced, they smiled, and they appeared to be rewriting the institutional norms that had once constrained them. As Peszek mused, the joyful expressiveness they demonstrated on the sidelines had usually been “acceptable in the college scene” but was rarely seen in the “elite world.” You could almost hear the thought bubble: Perhaps change was finally here. In this sense, Biles wasn’t just back; she was somewhere new.