How Simone Biles and Team U.S.A. Gymnastics Came Soaring Bac

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A sense of doubt had plagued the sport since Biles’s withdrawal from the Tokyo Games. The team’s success in Paris should definitively quash it.

The U.S. women’s gymnastics team has been calling this year’s Olympic Games its “redemption tour.” With the exception of a single newcomer, the sixteen-year-old Hezly Rivera, every gymnast who qualified for Paris was a member of the team that competed, three years ago, in Tokyo: Jordan Chiles, Jade Carey, Sunisa Lee, and, of course, Simone Biles, who entered this year’s Games with thirty world medals and seven Olympic medals to her name. They make up the oldest U.S. women’s gymnastics team, by average age, in more than half a century, and together they’ve had the chance to achieve some of what they missed in 2021. That year, in what became the defining story of the Games, Biles withdrew from most of the competition, citing a debilitating case of the “twisties,” a sort of midair vertigo that’s far more dangerous than it sounds. The U.S. women’s team, which was widely expected to win, finished instead in second place. At this year’s team final, on Tuesday, they once again began the competition on the vault, the same event in which Biles’s trouble in Tokyo had come to a head.