PARIS – It was a familiar site: Anna Wintour, the longtime Vogue editor-in-chief, sitting in a place of prominence amid a constellation of stars from the entertainment industry next to a Parisian runway.
Only this wasn’t Paris Fashion Week but the opening day of the Olympic Games women’s gymnastics competition.
“It is important always to have really original talent,” Wintour once said. She was talking about designers, but she could have just as easily been speaking of Simone Biles, the most original and transformative talent the sport of gymnastics has ever seen.
Wintour is expected to be among the who’s who of Oscar winners and nominees, Grammy winners, super models and heads of state at the Bercy Arena Tuesday on a night the sport has waited three years to watch Biles and the U.S. attempt to reclaim the Olympic team gold medal.
And an audience that is expected to include Tom Cruise, John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, will see Biles in all four acts of Tuesday’s epic.
While there was speculation that Team USA might hold Biles, the 27-year-old four-time Olympic and 23-time World champion, out of one of the four rotations Tuesday after she limped through parts of Saturday’s opening round after straining a calf muscle in training, USA Gymnastics confirmed that she will compete in all four events in the team final.
Jordan Chiles, Biles’ training partner and one of four returning members of Team USA’s silver medal squad at the 2021 Olympic Games in Tokyo, will start the Americans off on the vault, followed by Jade Carey, the Olympic floor exercise champion three years ago, and Biles. Chiles and Biles will set up reigning Olympic champion Suni Lee on the uneven bars. Biles will anchor the U.S. on the final two rotations, the balance beam and floor exercise. Chiles is scheduled to lead off on the beam followed by Lee with the pair switching the order on the floor.
“She’s bringing the sport to a whole new level,” Sanne Wevers, the 2016 Olympic beam gold medalist for Netherlands, said of the 2016 Olympic all-around champion. “It’s not just the level (of skills) she shows, but also the awareness she brings about things like mental health. That makes the sport even better.”
Despite the sore calf, Biles became the first female gymnast to successfully land–or even attempt – a Yurchenko double pike vault also known as the Biles 2.0. Her 59.566 all-around score was the highest among all of Saturday’s qualifying sub-divisions.
“It was pretty amazing – 59.5(66), four for four, not perfect,” said Team USA coach Cecile Landi, who also coaches Biles at World Champion Centre in Spring, Texas. “So she can improve even.”
Improvement has been a recurring theme within a Team USA determined to erase the bitter memory of a controversial silver medal finish in Tokyo.
On the opening rotation of the team final, Biles suffered “the Twisties,” a psychologically induced gymnastics form of vertigo, on the vault and had to cut her routine a rotation short. She touched down but still found no direction of home. How could she with so many pointing her in so many different directions?
Biles withdrew from the remainder of a team competition in which the U.S. finished second to Russia as well as the individual all-around, vault, uneven bars and floor exercise finals.
“This is definitely our redemption tour,” Biles said. “We all have more to give and our Tokyo performance wasn’t the best. We weren’t under the best circumstances either, but I feel like we have a lot of weight on our shoulders to go out there and prove we’re better athletes, we’re more mature. We’re smarter, more consistent.”
