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.
