I remember watching the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Because I was right next door growing up in South Carolina, it felt like the world’s biggest competition was taking place in my backyard. There are so many specific details that stick out: The Coca-Cola advertising, the criticism/admiration around the way Michael Johnson runs, and Richard Jewell discovering a bomb, but the lasting image is of the Magnificent Seven winning Team Gold for the US for the first time. The drama around Kerri Strug taking that final vault has soured a bit in recent years as gymnastics as a sport continues to reckon with the way young girls are abused and punished in the quest for gold, but that moment still ranks as the most exciting, most breath-taking singular event during Women’s Gymnastics at an Olympic Games.
I will go ahead and say that this competition in Paris was more exciting as a whole though. Shonda Rhimes couldn’t script these events and she loves being dramatic for no reason.
Simone Biles
2024 marked the Olympic return of Simone Biles after bowing out of Tokyo. I was always Team Simone for making a decision that was best for her and for her health, but it was her recent documentary on Netflix that really put it in perspective to show just how dangerous the situation was for her. Simone didn’t pull out because she buckled under pressure or didn’t feel like competing — she pulled out because she could have died if she’d continued on.
The twisties is basically like your mind and your body is at a disconnect. The best way I could describe it is — every day you drive a car — if one day you woke up and you had no idea how to drive a car and your legs are going crazy. You have no control over your body. That’s kind of how it feels, like terrifying, because wearing a car without any protection — I am my car.
I didn’t think she’d back to gymnastics. Already the greatest gymnast in history, the one singular act of prioritizing her health over her sport in Tokyo turned a very loud, very angry, very unqualified genre of (mostly) men into gymnastics experts who deemed her a quitter. From couch competitors to sports analysts, Simone Biles became enemy number one to people who can’t even do a cartwheel. Politicians in particular loved to score brownie points with Conservative audiences by putting “Simone Biles” and “quitter” in the same sentence.
Why would she come back and compete for a country that treats her this way? She had nothing to prove. She had already exceeded her own expectations in Rio and continued to cement her legend at World Championships afterward. But, she did decide to come back. After a couple of years off, she popped up in competition like nothing had ever happened. She was at the same level of difficulty she had before she left, but with a new ease gained from her work with a therapist.
Paris still felt like a question mark though. No matter how well she competed in the events leading up to the Olympics, the question still remained: would Simone Biles be able to prove the naysayers wrong and compete. The first rotation of the Team Competition saw our girls on Vault, the very same event and rotation in Tokyo that Simone pulled out of after one badly executed vault where she got lost in the air. This time around, she landed her Yurchenko Double Pike — the single most difficult skill in women’s gymnastics, a skill that only Simone Biles can do — and the question of whether Simone would make it through the Olympics was answered with an exclamation mark.
Team USA breezed through the competition without any real challengers. During qualifications, newcomer Hezly Rivera couldn’t quite rise to the occasion, so all four rotations were left to the veterans. Jade, Suni, Simone, and Jordan were all in Tokyo when the team won Silver (though Jade was there as event specialist and didn’t compete in the team competition). This was a delicious redemption arc for those athletes as they cruised to first place, winning Gold. With this win, Simone became the most decorated American gymnast, breaking a tie with Shannon Miller, and she became the oldest woman to win a gold medal in gymnastics.
In the All-Around, Simone was favored to win, due to her difficulty on Vault and Floor, but Rebeca Andrade has proven herself to be the most consistent gymnast in the world over the past few years. Her feet are glued to the mat on floor and her balance checks on beam are minimal. She’s a much better bar worker than Simone, and she has the best Cheng vault in the history of the sport — a slight delay after her block where she floats in the air before she starts her twist sets it apart from everyone else’s.
After the second rotation, Rebeca was ahead of Simone due to an extra swing in Simone’s bar routine where her feet very nearly grazed the floor. Rebeca put up a flawless routine there, forcing Simone to work for the Gold for the first time since 2013, when she lost to Katelyn Ohashi and Kyla Ross in two different meets.
They were both solid on beam, and Simone’s lead going into the final rotation was less than 2 tenths of a point. A step out of bounds is 1 tenth. Two feet out of bounds is 3 tenths. Rebeca was flawless on her floor routine, which means Simone needed to hit all of her difficult skills the way that only she can in order to keep her streak of 11 years of all-around wins without a defeat. From the US Championships in 2013 through the US Championships in 2024, if Simone Biles competed, Simone Biles won gold, and typically in commanding fashion, sometimes finishing multiple points ahead of second place.
Simone’s first tumbling pass is the hardest skill currently being competed on Floor, a skill that only she can do. When she stuck it, the competition was won. She was on, and she captured the Gold. That win made her the first woman ever to win the All-Around in non-successive Olympics and the only American woman to win the All-Around twice (only two other women in the world have ever won it twice, and the last to do it was in 1968).
During qualifiers, Simone scored high enough to compete for Vault, Beam, and Floor finals. For Vault, all Simone had to do was complete her Yurchenko Double Pike and she would win gold, whether she actually landed it or not, because he start value was so much higher than everyone else’s. Simone actually lost a World Championship Gold to Rebeca on Vault because, for her safety, Simone competed the vault with her coach standing by to catch her (just in case), which incurred a five tenths deduction off the top. She’s been competing it solo for all of 2024, and she did indeed do what needed to be done, easily securing gold halfway through the rotation.
Everyone who was left to go was just competing for Silver after Simone was finished.
Going into Beam and Floor finals, Simone was a lock for two medals. In Rio, Simone grabbed a bronze on beam and a gold on Floor. In Tokyo, Simone sat out the entire competition, but re-entered for Beam finals with a watered down routine that took out any twists. She managed to grab another bronze medal even when she was not at peak form. A medal on beam is a piece of cake for her, especially now that she is having more fun and competing at the top of her form.
During the competition, the first two gymnasts fell off the apparatus and the third very nearly did so. Italy’s Alice D’Amato broke the streak, barely wobbling, but Simone Biles succumbed to the pressure as well — or the silence. Gymnastics meets are a noisy affair, with different areas of the arena cheering for various gymnasts on other events and a steady stream of music coming from the floor exercise. Bercy Arena was completely silent this morning, and the gymnasts were not happy about it.
“It was really weird and awkward,” said Biles, who finished fifth behind Lee. “We’ve asked several times if we can have some music, or some background noise. I’m not really sure what happened there, but yeah, not our favorite. None of us liked it.”
“It was too quiet. I could literally hear myself breathing,” [Sunisa] Lee told reporters after the event.
(cont. NBC 4)
None of the favorites ended up on the podium: Simone and Suni both fell and Rebeca missed all of her connection bonus points.
Floor was a couple of hours later and an opportunity for both Simone and Rebeca to redeem themselves. During warmup, Simone had a bad landing and rolled out of bounds. She had been favoring her right calf since the very first day of team qualifiers when she crawled away from the Floor Exercise after a landing during warmup. We never got any additional information about what was wrong, but she spent the rest of her time in Paris with her leg wrapped. I’m looking forward to finding out the story when the second half of her documentary comes out in a few weeks!
Floor is also Rebeca Andrade’s best event, but when both gymnasts hit their routines, Simone’s start value is too high for anyone to catch her, including Reb. On Simone’s first tumbling pass, she did her signature Triple-Double and hopped out of bounds, which isn’t uncommon for her on that skill. She has been working with her coaches to slow down during the run into it so that she doesn’t have so much power that she rebounds off the mat. I think lingering nerves from a missed Beam medal as well as triggering her injury during warmups had Simone uncharacteristically battling nerves. On her third pass, she did the same thing, with both feet out of bounds. That combined six tenths of a point from those two landings erased any difficulty advantage she had over Andrade, and sure enough, it wasn’t enough to hold her off! Simone lost her first floor exercise competition ever, and Rebeca grabbed her very first gold medal.
Simone walks away from Paris with four medals (1 silver and 3 gold) and only for an athlete like Simone is this presented as a disappointment. Not only did Simone come back to the sport after advocating for her mental health, she won three gold medals and smashed every record in the book that wasn’t created by a Soviet walking elegantly around the arena doing a couple of cartwheels in the 1960s. And she did it all while being almost twice as old as Dominique Moceanu, Nadia Comăneci, and Mary Lou Retton were at the peak of their careers. I selfishly want her to do another Olympics, perhaps as a Vault and Floor specialist (they need to stop torturing her with bars routines!) but she owes us nothing. Her 4’8″ shadow will loom large for generations.
Suni Lee
Suni Lee came to Paris with one goal: prove to herself that she could do it. If anyone needs a Lifetime Movie after this, it’s Suni Lee. With multiple family tragedies (her father becoming paralyzed after falling off a ladder in 2019 and her aunt & uncle dying from COVID during the pandemic) and various injuries throughout her career, Suni didn’t really put together a solid All-Around performance until the Tokyo Olympics. Having never medaled in the All-Around before, she wasn’t a favorite for the win, especially with Simone and Rebeca in the competition. There was an opening after Simone pulled out, and Suni put it all together to step right through. She secured Gold for the US, continuing the women’s dominance in the all-around going back to Carly Patterson in 2004.
After the Olympics, Suni was committed to Auburn University where she competed in college gymnastics. She cut her season short to take care of her health after swelling in her entire body forced her to seek medical treatment. She was diagnosed with two kidney diseases and had to find a way to simply function again, let alone compete in an elite sport. Throughout 2024, Suni showed up to meets, doing a little better each time, showing a little more endurance, incorporating a few more tricks, competing in a few more events. By the time the Olympic trials came around, Suni knew that if she hit her bars routine, she was a lock for the team, with bars being a weak spot for Team USA in a crowd of power competitors on Vault and Floor. She was right, and the delegation picked her to compete in her second Olympic Games.
Suni qualified for the All-Around, Uneven Bars, and Beam Finals during the first week of competition, and after helping the team win Gold, she was focused on defending her All-Around title. No American woman had ever won the All-Around and then medaled in the All-Around at another Olympics. With Simone in the competition (and hitting), a gold medal was out of the question, but if Suni could hit all of her routines, she could end up on the All-Around podium at a second Olympic Games. Going into the last rotation on Floor exercise, Suni was one of the last to go, with only Rebeca Andrade and Simone Biles competing after her. That math means Suni needed to hit her routine and pass everyone else — she had to be in first place at the end of her Floor routine in order to guarantee herself a medal, because Rebeca and Simone both had higher start values (and one more tumbling pass than Suni) which would put them at first and second. The actual math of that event was even more nerve-wracking: Suni needed to score higher on this Floor routine than she had scored on any Floor routine she had performed during the competition. She needed to do the best Floor routine of her entire life on her very last event of the All-Around competition.
Please watch this Floor routine. (NBC won’t let me embed it, but skip to 4:30 for the Floor Exercise.)
The smile on her face when she sticks her first tumbling pass is probably my second-favorite image of the Olympics (my favorite is later). The joy on her face!!!!! She knew she was on and she was living!!
Simone may have won the Gold, but Suni was right there with her, jointly becoming the first American women with two Olympic medals in the All-Around.
Uneven Bars has become Suni’s signature event, but she wasn’t necessarily a favorite to medal, as her start value put her way down the list at number five. She would have to be perfect — and a couple of other competitors would have to make mistakes — for Suni to find herself on the podium. Plus, she was last on the list to compete — her muscles would be cold by the time the other women finished. During her warmup, Suni fell off the bars, which is frighteningly common for her. I’ve never seen anyone fall so many times during a warmup only to hit her routine.
And she did indeed cook. No one in the world can match the high-flying difficulty of Kaylia Nemour (who won the first gymnastics medal for Africa in this event) or the precision of Qui Qiyuan, but Suni Clutch Lee put in one of the best performances of her life to secure third place and win another medal. With her bronze, she became the first American woman to win multiple Olympic medals on uneven bars (she won Bronze in Tokyo as well).
I already mentioned her fall during the Beam final so we don’t need to go back to that, but Suni can be very proud of her return to gymnastics. Most people didn’t even expect her to make the team, let alone make history. Twice.
Rebeca Andrade
Whether Rebeca won a gold medal at these Olympic Games or not, I was already prepared to hand her one based on the strength of her eyeliner game.
The Brazilian gymternet informed me that Reb does it herself, so I say hand her any medal she wants.
Rebeca Andrade has been around for a long time, for just as long as Simone Biles. She was at the Rio Olympics too, where Brazil finished 8th in Team and she qualified for the All-Around in third, behind Simone and Aly Raisman. She ultimately came in 11th on the big night, and over the next two years, she tore her ACL twice (which would be three times total, as she had also torn it in 2015.
Three ACL tears should be enough to put anybody out of commission, let alone a gymnast who is constantly punishing their joints. Not Rebeca. Somehow, she came back better than ever. Brazil missed out on the Tokyo Olympics because, without Reb at the 2019 World Championships (she was recovering from her last ACL injury), the team wasn’t able to qualify. Rebeca was able to compete solo where she was the top qualifier for the All-Around after Simone pulled out. She finished second behind Suni which made her the first Brazilian woman to win an Olympic medal in gymnastics. She improved on that in the Vault, winning Gold.
Coming into Paris, Rebeca was Simone’s only competition. She had won Gold in the All Around at the 2022 World Championships, but Simone hadn’t come back from her sabbatical. In 2023, with the two competing together, Simone came out on top with Rebeca taking Silver. This Olympic Games would be the final showdown, the two best gymnasts in the world, both on their third Olympic run.
In the Team Competition, Rebeca led Brazil to their first team medal in gymnastics, securing Bronze. In the All-Around, Simone came out victorious, but Rebeca, going into the final rotation, was closer than anyone had been in a very long time, the only competitor to ever make Simone Biles nervous.
During the Vault Final, Simone landed her Yurchenko Double Pike, so the rest was history, and in the Beam final, Reb succumbed to the same nervous silence that affected so many other gymnasts. She didn’t fall off the beam, but she didn’t make many of her connections and didn’t have enough bonus points to make it to the podium.
The Floor Final was the last matchup between these two legends. With a high level of difficulty, Simone was expected to win, but she left the door open a crack when she landed two passes out of bounds. Rebeca needed to go out onto the floor and hit her routine. If she could do that, under pressure, with the whole world watching, she would beat the legend Simone Biles for a gold medal in her best event. She did, and her competitors rightfully gave her her flowers.
^ This is my favorite image from the games, by the way. I just love how much they all love each other! I know they had a good ol time at the Olympic Village tonight.
With her win over Simone, Rebeca became the first Brazilian (of either gender) to win a gold medal on Floor and she became the most decorated Brazilian Olympian in any sport.
Controversial opinion:
Rebeca Andrade is a better all-around gymnast than Simone Biles. On two of four events, Simone does skills that no other woman can perform — they are big swings that she can’t perfect, but doesn’t need to, because they’re so much harder than anything anyone else can do. On four of four events, Rebeca Andrade does the hardest skills that any other gymnast can do, but she does them perfectly with more consistency.
If this were basketball, Simone would be taking all of her shots from halfcourt, not necessarily sinking them, but getting enough of them into the basket to be a good show anytime she’s on the court. Rebecca is posting nothing but net at the three-point line over and over.
Simone’s advantage over the rest of the field is her insane difficulty scores. Rebecca has slowly been closing that gap, not by going for the huge skills (no triple double on Floor, no double pike on Vault), but by packing her routines with a lot of difficult skills that add up when you put them together. Anytime Simone misses a half-court shot, Rebecca is at the line, sinking baskets. She was bound to catch up to her eventually, and today she did.
There are some who say Rebeca is overshadowed by Simone, and that in any other era, she would be a much bigger star. I don’t disagree with that, but in any other era, would Rebeca have pushed herself as hard to catch up with Simone? Can you reach your highest potential if you’re only competing with yourself? Simone Biles may be inclined to say “yes, yes you can, I’ve been doing it,” but Simone didn’t need a Yurchenko Double Pike (a vault that scares her to death every time she competes it) to beat the rest of the field: she only needs that in her pocket to beat Rebeca Andrade.
I don’t know anyone in Brazil, but I see a little bit of the excitement on Twitter, and I feel like Rebeca Andrade is returning home as one of the biggest sports celebrities in the country. Whenever she performs, I feel like she’s a star, and I hope she capitalizes on that. With three ACL tears at 25 years old, it’s highly unlikely that we’ll see her at another Olympics, but I think if she has even the least bit of musical talent, she should immediately get in the studio and start putting out bops. I just know Reb can give a killer music video and I’m not ready to live in a world where I don’t get to see her on my TV screen!
There were so many other athletes you could talk about from this cycle. Italy won their first Team Medal in 96 years. Alice D’Amato, keeping her nerves on balance beam, won Italy’s first gold medal. Kaylia Nemour, competing for Algeria, won Africa’s first medal in gymnastics. Jordan Chiles won her first individual medal in very dramatic fashion, petitioning the judges after an unusually low score which, after review, pushed her from 5th to 3rd — proving you should always advocate for yourself when you know something isn’t quite right. And after that Floor Final, for the first time in history, three Black women stood on the podium for gymnastics at the Olympics.
All in all, I had a great time. I’m a little sad it’s over, but I’m looking forward to seeing how this all plays out on Netflix and I can’t wait to meet the girls waiting to step into the shoes of the legends.
PS:
There was drama on the men’s side too, but I don’t really follow them because too many of the male gymnasts for Team USA are rabid Republicans. Sorry if you wanted coverage of that — find somebody else to do it for you.
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