The skills are back—and so is the smile. Simone Biles spent most of Friday’s U.S. Classic practice session wowing the 200 or so fans in attendance, and the rest of it beaming.
Saturday’s event will mark her first competition in two years and two days, since she finished a tumultuous Tokyo Olympics. A week earlier, she had lost her ability to locate herself in the air—a mental block gymnasts call the twisties—and, after bailing out of her vault in the team competition, she withdrew from that event, the individual all-around, the individual vault, the individual uneven bars and the individual floor exercise. She jettisoned the twists from her balance beam routine and, in a testament to her status as the greatest and most decorated gymnast of all time, earned a bronze medal.
At Friday’s podium training, there were no traces of the young woman who wept as she told reporters she just wasn’t having fun anymore. She worked through her Yurchenko double pike on the vault—a skill so difficult that no other woman has even attempted it in competition, and so dangerous that she has accused the International Gymnastics Federation of artificially devaluing it to discourage other gymnasts from trying it and hurting themselves. She shadowed friend and teammate Jordan Chiles’s flourishes as Chiles danced through her floor routine. And as Biles and her teammates left the floor, she greeted a camera crew by chirping, “Welcome to our vlog!” She said she would answer questions after competition.
Her coaches, French wife-and-husband duo Cecile and Laurent Landi, said Biles, 26, was in a good place mentally and physically.
“We wouldn’t be here if she had any hesitations,” said Cecile. “It’s her will to be here. We’re supportive.”
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Laurent declined to go into specifics about the Yurchenko double pike—a laughable attempt at secrecy given that no other woman on the planet can do that skill—but said that this was Biles’s first time practicing it on a hard surface since Tokyo. Biles had been playing around in the gym for months, but early this spring, she and Cecile went out for Mexican food and she told her coach she “really wanted to give herself a chance to do it,” Cecile recalled. After Biles’s wedding to Packers defensive back Jonathan Owens in May, she dedicated herself fully to her comeback.
The U.S. Classic, which this year is called the Core Hydration Classic, has been the site of a Biles comeback before. After the 2016 Olympics, in Rio de Janeiro, in which she won four gold medals and a bronze, Biles took a two-year hiatus from competition, then returned for this event. She earned the highest score ever recorded under that version of the code of points, then won four golds at the ’18 world championships and five more at the ’19 event.
Unfortunately for her competition, she seems to be in similar form this time around.
“She can do everything that she could do before,” said Cecile, although she acknowledged that they had eliminated some twisting elements from her routines. “She’s not doing really the triple double or the double double,” the coach said. “When we looked at it, it was maybe a tenth or two higher. And on the landing, they’re so strict right now that it’s not worth it. Might as well stick something a little bit easier than trying the hard tricks.”
Cecile added that the main difference between the Biles from three years ago and the Biles of today is her motivation. A younger Biles felt crushed by the outside pressure. Now, Cecile said, “She really wants it for herself.”
Shortly after the Landis spoke, they gathered with the team from World Champions Centre, the gym outside Houston that Biles owns. The group debated lunch options and settled on a local place over Panera. Biles posed for photos and signed autographs for a few event volunteers. She greeted her parents. Then she climbed into the backseat of a silver Hyundai piloted by her dad, Ron Biles. They drove off. She was grinning.
