ANTWERP, BELGIUM — Friday night’s all-around final at the world gymnastics championships at Antwerp’s Sportpaleis ended with a one-woman show: Simone Biles on floor.
Her routine, fittingly set to Israeli pop star Noa Kirel’s Eurovision song “Unicorn,” is arguably the best 90 seconds in women’s gymnastics, more art exhibit than sporting effort. Each time the 26-year-old performs the routine, it gets better, her tumbling passes higher and more powerful yet also more controlled. On Wednesday, it clinched Team USA’s seventh straight world championship title. On Friday, despite a stumble at the beginning of her leap sequence, it sealed Biles’ sixth world all-around gold.
“I was emotional because I won my first world title here and now we’re back,” Biles said after the medal ceremony, where she appeared to wipe away tears. “It means everything to me, the fight and everything that I put in to get back to this place and feel comfortable and confident enough to compete. And you guys are never going to believe me, but I’ve also had something in my eye for like four hours today that I could not get out.”
This ending to Biles’ decade-long world championship story — if it is, in fact, an ending — seems predetermined, as if the scriptwriters who crafted her remarkable career planned all along to call back to its beginning. “Full circle,” Biles said after making the six-woman team in September.
She won her first world all-around title in this arena 10 years ago as a 16-year-old virtually unknown on the international scene. She wore braces and a pink leotard and for the last time in her career, was not the favorite to win. When she did, beating multiple Olympic and world champions, the announcer mispronounced her first name.
Now she is a six-time world all-around champion and the leader of Team USA whose first name (and its pronunciation) has become so widely known it’s unnecessary to even mention her last.
Biles, however, insists she was not in the writers’ room when they wrote this part of her story. Instead, she says she’s just going with the flow, blowing wherever the wind — and her coaches, Cecile and Laurent Landi — take her next. “I honestly don’t think I made a conscious decision,” Biles said last month about her return to international competition. “I really don’t think it was set in stone how far I was going to go.”
Last year, Biles walked back into World Champions Centre, the Houston gym her parents own, without a plan. She’d taken more than a year away from gymnastics after withdrawing from all but one event at the Tokyo Olympics because of a dangerous loss of aerial awareness gymnasts refer to as the “twisties,” and wasn’t sure if she would ever return to competition. She didn’t know if she would regain her ability to twist or land the elite skills that kept her at the top for so long.
She’d been working with a therapist and wanted to exercise, wanted to feel the feeling of doing elite gymnastics, wanted to know if she could still do it. Not necessarily because she wanted to compete again, but because she wanted to know that she could.
Then, over margaritas at a Mexican restaurant with Cecile in the spring, Biles tossed out the idea of training in earnest. “She said, ‘I want to give myself a chance,'” Cecile said. “That’s when we knew we had to make a plan without telling her we had a plan. Because we knew the plan would freak her out.”
