Simone Biles’ narrative arc reaches full extension on glorious night for USA | Barney Ronay

Of course, there was last-minute theater. Two hours into this women’s artistic gymnastics team final, with the U.S. leading the field in a stunning fashion, the logistics of the competition left Simone Biles with one final act to end the show.

Three years after Tokyo and The Breakdown, the final act in the current iteration of the same disastrous team event was the Biles floor routine. So in front of Bill Gates, Gianni Infantino, Serena Williams and Spike Lee, in front of the world as ever, Simone Biles was going to dance like no one was watching.

Paris 2024 knew what it was getting with this gymnastics spectacle, a spectacle that would play out, as it does here, like a cross between the Super Bowl, Las Vegas and a Marvel movie. It was all about America, American flash, American showmanship, American storytelling, the main event of the summer Games that have long been driven by American TV money and American sports tourism. Frankly, there haven’t been this many Americans in Paris since 1945.

And of course Biles got the better of her, the Biles-industrial complex and the Biles storyline. All of that came to its fullest extent in a thrilling evening of flex and twang and defiance of the elements, ending, of course, with gold for American women.

That Biles routine at the end was visceral. She played the hits. She did Biles 1, Biles 2. Above all, she produced an extraordinary burst of energy, a burst of that familiar explosive athletic grace that at times almost seems like an optical illusion.

What exactly is gymnastics? A performance? A sport? At one point in her balance beam routine, Biles does an insane triple somersault (repeat: on a thin, square beam) like a wheel rolling down a ramp, the kind of moment when she seems to transform the entire event into something else, movements that are alien, fluid, and fundamentally unlike those of any other human being on the planet.

As the final scores appeared on the big screen, Team USA suddenly appeared, beaming and waving a flag, frolicking around like kids on Christmas.

It was a beautiful moment, but also an extraordinary moment, just as Biles and the Biles arc is an anatomy of an industry and culture in one. The whole sporting life is there. Or rather three key elements: the beauty of sport, the stupidity of sport and also the violence of sport.

But first, of course, the beauty and warmth that was there from the moment the teams stepped onto the field: the US in white snowman suits, Biles in black pumps looking happy and surprised and a little crazy when she missed her cue to wave, but who as an athlete always feels the static field, the feeling of being watched.

Jordan Chiles was first for the United States on the vault, producing the usual miracle of spring and flexibility and total control of every joint and tendon. And soon there were gasps and gasps and white noise as a voice over the public broadcasting system announced, “Simone Biles waiting for the green light.”

Tokyo and 2021 of course lurk behind all this, the ghost games, a horror of a sporting event that frankly should never have happened. Tokyo 2020 was in fact an act of corporate violence. Since then, so many athletes have spoken about the toll it took.

Those Covid Games were a giant vacuum into which we poured all our fears and anxieties. The hunger around Biles was endless. But Biles was also in lockdown, at the end of an empty year of blind isolation training, asked to perform, to dance for us, to look at the world through that lens. Adam Peaty has spoken about the pressure it put on him, as have Noah Lyles and Caeleb Dressel. Biles speaks clearly about the feeling of overtraining in isolation, the way the movements had become all she had, all she did, until they too became meaningless. Athletes have begun to talk much more about why and how, about winning without pain, success without punishment. Perhaps this is the legacy of Tokyo, the Damned Games.

Here the Biles Vault was simple, perfectly executed, with a little bounce back into the landing that immediately turned into hugs and high-fives and a ripple of what felt like mass, shared relief around this vast refrigerated hangar. By the end of the first rotation, the US had already begun to take a decisive lead, the feeling of a victory lap, high-fives around the bases, beginning to form over the figures on the beam and joist and the mat.

At the end of the second round, the American team was busy playing poses to the music. People were having a great time doing these kinds of things. Sometimes it looked like torture, but in such rare moments it also looked like playing.

There is, of course, something unresolved and contradictory at the heart of the Biles arc, the Biles catharsis story. What hurt Biles was overexposure combined with loss. The way to fix Biles, the sport tells us, is more exposure combined with victory.

Sport is absurd. Sport is bad art. But it is also, of course, irresistible in its warm, wet notes. Biles has reinvented the details of her sport and given us moments of great beauty along the way. This one, however, was for her.