Simone Biles leads US women’s gymnastics team to Olympic gold

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Simone Biles and her US compatriots won gold in the women’s team gymnastics event at the Paris Olympics on Tuesday, in a remarkable return for the 27-year-old star who has pushed the boundaries of difficulty and longevity in the sport.

The team, which also included past Olympians Sunisa Lee, Jordan Chiles, and Jade Carey, finished with 171 points, followed by Italy with 165 for silver and Brazil with 164 points for bronze. Great Britain narrowly missed out of a medal by less than 0.3 of a point.

The US gold comes three years after Biles withdrew from the same event at the Tokyo Olympics with a dangerous bout of the “twisties”, a disconnect between mind and body that left her unable to perform her skills.

“I started off with therapy this morning and I told my therapist I was feeling calm and ready,” Biles said on Tuesday night. “As soon as I finished vault, I was so relieved . . . I was like, ‘oh yeah, we’re going to do this’.”

Known for performing elements of unparalleled difficulty — including a triple-twisting double backflip tumbling pass she completed to thunderous applause in Paris — Biles has since emerged as an advocate for mental health and a modern Olympic star. Tuesday’s team gold brings her career games medal haul to eight, including five golds.

The Texas native performed four safely executed routines with minor deductions for wobbles, opting for consistency over her most difficult skills on some apparatuses. On vault, the discipline that triggered her mental block in Tokyo, she successfully performed a Cheng skill that carried a lower overall point value than her newest signature skill, a Yurchenko double pike.

She was cheered on in the audience by A-list American celebrities including the actor Natalie Portman and retired swimming champion Michael Phelps.

Biles took two years away from the sport before returning to competition last year. She spent that time working with a therapist and focusing on other areas of her life, including marrying American football player Jonathan Owens. She is the subject of a Netflix documentary whose first episodes were released this month, in which she described being terrified to perform some of her best moves after the Tokyo Olympics.

US gymnastics has amended its culture and tweaked its media policies to allow Biles and her teammates more privacy in the run-up to the games, limiting their availability to reporters and giving Biles the leeway to decide on which apparatuses she wanted to compete. Three of her four teammates in Paris were also on the Tokyo team, which earned silver after her withdrawal. Two of them, Lee and Chiles, spoke of the 2024 games as a “redemption tour” for the group.

Italy also secured its first medal in women’s team gymnastics in nearly a century, avenging its heartbreaking fourth place in Tokyo, while Brazil narrowly secured the bronze on the final rotation thanks to the strength of star Rebeca Andrade’s vault.

Biles, Lee, and Andrade return to competition on Thursday for the individual all-around final. It will be the first time that two defending women’s all-around champions — Biles in 2016, and Lee in 2020 — compete against one another in the event. Andrade won silver in the event in Tokyo.