Simone Biles stood alone and stared at the 25 meters separating herself from the vault table, from her greatest fears, from her legacy. She had just turned to her closest friend on the U.S. women’s Olympic gymnastics team, Jordan Chiles, and asked the question on everyone’s mind: What if it happens again?
Chiles gaped. Biles had been kidding around earlier, reminding her teammates—in case they’d forgotten—that the last time they were at the Olympic team final, her entire world had collapsed. But this quiet moment in Paris last July felt just a bit more serious. “I think maybe half her brain was joking,” Chiles says now. “But the other half was like, Uhhh …”
Her teammates and coaches wondered the same thing. So did journalists, broadcasters and fans. At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Biles contracted a case of the twisties—gymnastics vertigo—and lost her bearings in the air during her vault at the team final, then withdrew from event after event. Eventually she stripped the twisting dismount from her balance beam routine and took bronze. Then she quit gymnastics entirely. When she resumed competing two years later, every performance held drama. Once fans had asked themselves: What will the greatest gymnast of all time do next? Now they thought: Can she do this at all?
No one was quite sure how Paris would unfold. On the day before the opening ceremony, the team took the floor for podium training—their first practice on the hard competition surface—and just about everyone stared at Biles. Volunteers filmed on their phones. Other gymnasts paused their routines. American fans woke up in the early morning hours to watch the livestream. On vault, Biles pulled off a flawless Yurchenko double pike, or Biles II—two flips with her legs perpendicular to her body, giving her no margin for error—drawing gasps from the crowd of journalists. “We’re all breathing a little bit better right now,” said coach Cécile Landi afterward. “I’m not going to lie.”
Three days later, Biles sealed the U.S.’s spot in the team event and qualified first in the all-around and on the vault, floor exercise and balance beam, despite aggravating a tear of her left calf. Her 59.566 was the second-best score of the Olympic cycle among gymnasts in the field, second only to her own performance at 2024 U.S. nationals. (She also owned the other eight spots in the top 10.)
And then came the team final, where the U.S. would start with the vault, the same event that had derailed her Olympics three years earlier. If it was going to happen again, this would be the moment.
You know what happened next, of course. Biles, 27, banished the twisties, and with them any question about her greatness. But you might not know what it took to get there.
Simone Biles is Sports Illustrated’s 2024 Sportsperson of the Year because she won gold, and then another gold, and then another; because she changed the face of her sport and the conversations around athletes in general; because she continues to speak out about issues that matter to her. And perhaps most of all because after she wondered aloud to Chiles whether she was about to re
