Of course there was theatre at the very last. Two hours into this women’s artistic gymnastics team final, with the USA coasting grandly at the head of the field, the logistics of competition left Simone Biles with one final act to end the show.
Three years on from Tokyo and The Breakdown, the final act in the current iteration same catastrophic team event was the Biles floor routine. So in front of Bill Gates, Gianni Infantino, Serena Williams and Spike Lee, in front of the eyes of the world as ever Simone Biles go to dance like no one was watching.
Paris 2024 knew what it was getting with these gymnastics, a spectacle that would play out, as it did here, like a cross between the Super Bowl, Las Vegas and a Marvel movie. Mainly it was getting America, American flash, American show, American story‑telling, the key event in a summer Games that has long since been powered by US TV money and US sport tourism. Frankly, there haven’t been this many Americans in Paris since 1945.
And of course, it was getting Biles too, the Biles-industrial complex, and the Biles narrative arc. All of which reached its full extension on a thrilling night of flex and twang and defiance of the elements, ending, naturally, with gold for US women.
That Biles routine at the end was visceral. She played the hits. She did Biles 1, Biles 2. Mainly she produced an extraordinary release of energy, a burst of that familiar explosive athletic grace that looks at times almost like an optical illusion.
What is gymnastics exactly? A performance? A sport? At one point in her balance beam routine Biles did an insane triple backflip (repeat: on a thin, square bar) like a wheel rolling down an incline, the kind of moment where she seems to turn the entire event into something else, movements that are strange, liquid, and basically unlike any other human on the planet.
As the final scores flashed up on the giant screen Team USA were suddenly up there bouncing and beaming and fluttering a flag, gambolling about like kids at Christmas.
It was a lovely moment, but also an extraordinary one, just as Biles and the Biles arc is an anatomy of an industry and culture all in one. All sporting life is there. Or rather three key elements: the beauty of sport, the stupidity of sport and also the violence of sport.
But first, of course, the beauty, and the warmth which was there from the moment the teams came out, the US in white snow-woman suits, Biles in black pumps looking happy and startled and a bit goofy as she missed her cue to wave, but an athlete who always feels the static field, the sense of being spectated.
Jordan Chiles was first up for the US on the vault, producing the usual miracle of spring and flex and total control over every hinge and tendon. And before long there were shrieks and gasps and white noise as over the public address a voice was saying: “Waiting for the green light will be Simone Biles.”
Tokyo and 2021 is of course lurking behind all of this, the ghost Games, an abomination of a sporting event that frankly should never have been staged at all. Tokyo 2020 was essentially an act of corporate violence. So many athletes have spoken since about the toll it took.
after newsletter promotion
Those Covid Games were a huge vacuum into which we threw all our fear and anxieties. The hunger around Biles was endless. But Biles was also in lockdown, asked at the end of an empty year of blind isolation training to perform, to dance for us, to peer down that lens at the world. Adam Peaty has spoken about the strain it put on him, as have Noah Lyles and Caeleb Dressel. Biles talks lucidly about the feeling of overtraining in isolation, the way the movements had become all she had, all she did, until they also became meaningless. Athletes have begun to talk a lot more about why and how, about winning without pain, success without punishment. Perhaps this is the legacy of Tokyo, the Damned Games.
Here the Biles Vault was a simple one, executed perfectly, with a little leap back in the landing that ran straight on into hugs and high‑fives and a ripple of something that felt like mass, shared relief around this huge refrigerated hangar. By the end of the first rotation the USA had already begun to open up a decisive lead, the sense of a victory lap, high‑fives around the bases, starting to form above the figures on the beam and bar and the mat.
By the end of the second round the USA team were larking around to the music throwing some poses, people basically having a really good time, doing this thing that resembles at times a kind of torture, but which can in these rare moments also look like play.
There is of course something unresolved and contradictory at the heart of the Biles arc, the Biles catharsis narrative. What hurt Biles was overexposure combined with losing. The way Biles can be fixed, sport tells us, is even more exposure combined with victory.
Sport is absurd. Sport is bad art. But it is of course irresistible too in its warm wet notes. Biles has reinvented the details of her sport, and given us moments of great beauty along the way. This one, though, was for her.