Tim Daggett has been a professional broadcaster for four decades since winning a gymnastics gold medal in 1984, and still it takes him a brief moment to find the proper word to describe his first impression upon seizing his initial opportunity to watch Simone Biles compete.
And then he nails it, like a perfect-10 dismount off the high bar.
“Well, you know, when you get down to it, it’s almost like … the best word I can come up with is: shock,” Daggett told The Sporting News. “It was just shocking to see someone that had all of the qualities that you need to be a tremendous gymnast – and just have more of them, and to a higher degree, than anybody I’d ever seen before.”
There have been seminal figures in the sport of women’s gymnastics since they became an Olympic television obsession with Olga Korbut’s emergence at the 1972 Games in Munich. Soon after, there was Nadia Comaneci, and then Mary Lou Retton, Shannon Miller, Shawn Johnson and Gabby Douglas, all gold medalists and legends.
And what Biles has done over the past decade is make all of their magnificence seem almost quaint. These gymnasts conjured feats humans should not be able to achieve. Biles conjures feats other gymnasts have not been able to approach.
The sport has been around since the very first modern Olympic Games, in 1896. Women have competed for medals since 1928, which means they are one Olympiad short of a full century at the center of the sports universe. It would seem, after all that time, that just about every manner in which a person could twist, turn, spin, tumble or fly long since had been imagined, pondered, designed and executed.
And yet there are five skills in the women’s gymnastics Code of Points that are named for Simone Biles, now 27 and approaching her third Olympic Games. She was the first ever to complete a vault routine that begins with a round-off – a move similar to a cartwheel – into a springboard, followed by a back handspring onto the vaulting table and then a double-pike finish. She first landed it in May 2021. It was named the Biles II and assigned the highest difficulty score of any maneuver in women’s vault competition.
At the Olympic Trials in June, NBC Sports measured the distance between the top of her head and the ground at the peak of her opening tumble pass on the floor exercise. It was 12 feet. She stands 4-8 in her bare feet. Feel free to do the math on how high that means she flew.
Simone Biles accelerates 12 feet up in the air 👏🏽 pic.twitter.com/ES9nGdHkUp
— Live Laugh Love (@x_markdaspot) July 1, 2024
It’s more than power and dynamism, though, that makes Biles extraordinary.
“A whole thing on top of that is being able to put your body in the position so that you can explode higher and faster and quicker than everybody else. And she does that as well as anybody,” Daggett said. “So you get this magic that happens: this super gifted person that also is technically a maestro, and it produces those incredible moments.”
Biles has finished first in various disciplines 23 times at the World Gymnastics Championships since her first all-around championship in 2013, the year of her senior competition debut. She is a nine-time United States champion in the all-around (no other woman has won more than three) and has won 23 times in various apparatus finals, including sweeping all four in 2018 and 2023.
She became The Sporting News choice as No. 5 among the greatest United States Olympians for her dominance in winning four gold medals at the Rio Games in 2016: team, all-around, vault and floor exercise. She also won a bronze medal on the balance beam.
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“She’s a trailblazer in the sport, and as a female athlete – a trailblazer in that respect, as well,” NBC Sports analyst Samantha Peszek, a 2008 Olympian, told TSN. “If you think about all the boundaries she’s pushed, the difficulty alone – with all the skills that are named after her. And her age: being able to be so successful at the highest level of elite gymnastics, with the difficulty …
“There’s a lot of gymnasts in history that have been to multiple Olympics, way back when, but the difficulty was not as high. For her to be competing at this high of a level of difficulty and still be so successful is what makes her really, really incredible.”
Might she rank even higher on The Sporting News Olympics list if not for the issues that developed three years ago at the Tokyo Games? Biles attempted to compete there but withdrew from the team event, then passed on all of the apparatus finals except balance beam. A healthy Simone Biles might have returned from Japan with three or four more golds and more polish on her legend.
Instead, she was presented a silver medal for the team competition, and earned a bronze when she judged herself to be well enough to perform on the beam. That left her with a total of seven Olympic medals, more than half gold, which is a heck of a haul for any gymnast, especially one whose experience was impaired by a health issue.
It was the nature of that issue, though, that made her experience unique – and her return to contend at the 2024 Paris Games even more compelling.
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“It’s a dangerous place to be”
"I really thought that would be the peak of my career."
This statement, from the first of two episodes of the pre-Olympic portion of the freshly released Netflix documentary “Simone Biles Rising”, lands like a left hook to the jaw. Biles turned 23 in March of 2020, just three days after Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz tested positive for COVID-19 and the systematic shutdown of the sports world commenced. That eventually would lead to postponement of the Tokyo Olympics for a full year, which had a profound impact on Biles’ performance when the Games finally began in July 2021.
They were conducted with full COVID protocols. There were few spectators in the audience. In the “Rising” film, there are multiple references to how this led to the lighting of the arena being different than ordinary. And all of this came just a few years after Biles revealed to the world she had been one of the victims of former gymnastics team physician Larry Nasser’s sexual abuse.
Ascertaining the precise origin of Biles’ case of “the Twisties” remains a challenge even years later. Was it the pressure of living up to the gargantuan standard she’d established for herself? The pressure of meeting the expectations of the public? The media?
Biles acknowledges awareness of social-media criticism, even going back to 2016, when her revolutionary performance at the Rio Games was met by some with criticism of, no kidding, her hair. So withdrawing from the 2020 team competition for an unfamiliar condition – with a nickname that, in all honesty, is far too cute to convey the actual danger – unsurprisingly led to an avalanche of ignorant derision in social and traditional media. Which only made all of it worse.
Katie Walsh, director of “Simone Biles Rising”, told The Sporting News she has covered gymnastics closely since 2007 and became acquainted with Biles along the way. But she knew little of this peculiar affliction when it struck the world’s greatest gymnastic on sport’s grandest stage.
“When this took place in 2020, and she explained what the Twisties was, it was a learning for me,” Walsh told TSN. “As I went back and spoke to athletes and began to unpack what the Twisties was, there was a certain understanding among gymnasts, like: Yeah, of course, we all go through this.
“But it’s unspoken. There’s a little bit of a taboo. You don’t want to speak of it because you don’t want to create it in your mind.
“Simone’s experience with the Twisties was so public … whereas often gymnasts will experience the Twisties in practice, in some less significant time in their careers. So it’s not quite under the spotlight Simone’s was under.”
Daggett and Peszek both told TSN this was common in gymnastics, and not nearly the same as the “yips” in golf or the paralysis some baseball players have developed in relation to making routine throws.
“It’s scary as all get-out,” Daggett said. “When you have the yips in golf, you just can’t make a shot, but you don’t risk life and limb.”
“You just feel lost in the air,” Peszek said. “You have no idea which way is up and which way is down. So it’s really scary, because you know how fast you’re moving and how high you are, so you know that it’s a really dangerous place to be.”
Biles afterward detached herself from the sport. She did not engage in gymnastics competition through all of 2022, and only periodically made the trip to the gym. She acknowledged working with a therapist to fight through this.
Here’s the thing, though. Therapy can benefit a lot of people in a lot of ways, including Biles in her healing from the Nasser abuse. But Biles could live a fulfilling life without necessarily recovering from a condition in which a competitive gymnast loses the ability to orient one’s self toward the ground while tumbling through the air, which could lead to a disaster, even death.
Getting better there only has one practical application: returning to the sport.
And we have seen the success.
She executed the harrowing Biles II maneuver on vault at the 2023 World Championships, where her goal, she said in the film, was “just to get back out there and compete again." She won four gold medals. Biles’ performance at this year’s Trials was not her best, but her not-best still was better than everyone else’s best, even reigning Olympic all-around champ Suni Lee.
“Gymnasts train to peak at exactly at the window of the Olympics,” Walsh told TSN. “It always surprises me how detailed the schedule is, how specific it is. You don’t peak for a season, you don’t even peak for a month. You peak for the two weeks of the Olympics. So there’s building blocks.
“But the other thing at Trials is there were many athletes who were getting injured. It was an unusually sad couple of days, with many of the real candidates for the Olympic team falling to injury. And I think that impacted all of the athletes’ mental states … It is hard not to think: What if I’m next?”
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“It’ll only make her star brighter”
Biles’ legacy and life would have been far less complicated if the 2021 Twisties never manifested. And there doubtless would have been even more honors on her resume. There would be more medals to accommodate at the home she has been building with her husband, Jonathan Owens, an NFL safety now with the Chicago Bears.
If her return to competition results in Rio-style dominance, though, Daggett contends he would not want the Tokyo experience to become a footnote to her story.
“I kind of hope people don’t forget,” he said. “I don’t know if Simone feels that way. I believe she’s going to have a great performance in Paris, and I think it’s going to be just another testament of how amazing she is. She was clearly the best in the world, clearly the best that had ever been, and then she had this huge problem in front of the world.
“And she’s going to come back. You know, she already has done it. She’s already been to the Worlds, competed against all of the best athletes and dominated again. So in some ways, it’s important to remember it. It’ll only make her star brighter.”
Comaneci was not yet 15 when she dominated the competition at Montreal 1976. Douglas was 16 when she won the all-around 2012. Korbut was 17 at Munich in 1972, when she won four gold medals. Four years later, she managed a single silver.
For a variety of reasons, women’s gymnastics over the past half-century have been dominated by younger – sometimes much younger – athletes. There has not been an all-around women’s champion in her 20s since Ludmilla Tourischeva in 1972. She was only 20, although perceived as a seasoned veteran in comparison that year to Korbut. The average age of the gold medalists in this category: 16.8.
So if Biles can win again, she will be a pioneer in an entirely different area of gymnastics competition. She talks in “Simone Biles Rising” about the importance of ending this career on her terms. It’s apparent she does not want Tokyo to stand as the lasting memory of her time as a competitive gymnast.
“When you are that great at your craft, and you have mastered it, to go to a competition and not do what you know you are capable of – I think it’s very challenging, and not the way she wants to walk away from a sport she has dominated for a decade,” Walsh told TSN.
“This one in Paris is really for her … and for her to prove to herself and show herself that she is capable of doing what she knows she can do. Yes, if she does what she can do, she’s going to win a whole bunch of medals. But I don’t think it’s about the medals. I think it’s about showing up, about being present, and fully realizing her abilities on this competition floor.”
Biles is doing this boldly, in a sense. After all the criticism she received for Tokyo, which obviously had an impact, she agreed to film this documentary and open herself to the possibility of even more. And however it goes in Paris, there will be two more episodes to be released at some point after the Games conclude and “the youth of the world” are invited during the closing ceremony to assemble in Los Angeles in 2028.
“That’s the cool, interesting and challenging component to this series is -- I don’t know how the movie ends,” Walsh said. “Very rarely do you make a film where you’re talking about a film, promoting it and premiering it, and you don’t know the ending yet.”
We do, in a sense. At minimum, it will end with Biles ranking as the greatest gymnast and among the greatest American Olympians across 128 years of the Games. These elements already have been established. She only can climb higher from here.