Russia beat the United States, champions in 2012 and 2016. A surprise, yes, great news, yes, but not the news of the Olympic night in Tokyo. Finishing the jump, Simone Biles disappears from the great gymnastics room. Downcast, her head lowered, and it even seemed that the bright tricolor leotard, fiery red, silver, dark sea blue, was fading. On her way to a dark corner in the pavilion, away from the white light bulbs that damage the eyes, she is accompanied by an assistant.
Where is Biles, where ?, whispers among the journalists’ tables, dozens of them, many North Americans who have arrived hours before prepared to live one of their best Olympic nights, the one that would begin the second apogee of their Simone Biles in a few Games, the brightest star in the universe.
In the jump, the only device in which he participates, Biles looks so bad that for the first time in his career he goes off on a tangent. He leaves the Amanar (deadly on the plank after entering Yurchenko and two and a half pirouettes) in just one and a half pirouettes, and, despite everything, with his feline sense, he falls on his feet. He never does things without art, not even the worst. Due to its failure, the United States comes out with a disadvantage of the first apparatus of the four in the team final.
“After that, I couldn’t go on, no,” he explains later. “I was not injured. Well, yes, my pride had been injured ”.
More information
Biles returns a few minutes later, when her three teammates, Grace McCallum, Jordan Chiles and Sunisa Lee, are already in the corner of the asymmetric. Her coach, Cecile Landi, from Marseille, hugs her. The gymnast then goes straight to her backpack. She takes out a white tracksuit and puts it over her leotard, and some flip-flops for her feet. He will not contest the asymmetric ones. And neither did the remaining two devices, bar and floor, briefly announce her team in a statement, in which they allege “medical reasons” that prevent her from continuing and that they will be evaluated daily before authorizing her to participate on Thursday in the individual final of the contest. complete and Sunday and Monday in the four finals by apparatus.
You are not experiencing the apogee of the brightest planet in the solar system. The Ariake Gymnastics Pavilion, a temporary wooden construction on Tokyo Bay, is experiencing an unexpected but perhaps unsurprising eclipse. On Sunday in qualifying, Biles made unusual but not dramatic mistakes and Russia finished ahead. It was the nerves, the absence of the public, the premiere … All the arguments were valid for what everyone wanted to happen on Tuesday, for Biles to lead his teammates and for the United States to hit the stage and win again, and that she, Biles, continue to add gold medals to the four with which she left Rio de Janeiro five years ago.
True life followed another course. On Monday, the eve of the final, Biles wrote on his Instagram: “Many times I really feel as if the weight of the world is on my shoulders. Yes, I know, I pretend it’s nothing and it even seems that the pressure doesn’t affect me, but heck, sometimes it’s too difficult ”.
After five years, since he returned from Rio and the scandal of Larry Nassar broke out, the doctor of the gymnastics team of the United States convicted of sexually abusing hundreds of girl gymnasts, Simone Biles has been determined, and even believed to achieve it, to be what the world thought she was, a perfect woman, capable of assuming leadership without batting an eye in the fight for any cause, against all injustice, against sexual abuse, against racial discrimination, to ensure that all women, all women gymnasts, lose their fear of speaking, that all release their language, that they denounce without fear. And she managed to make the world change as she had achieved with her strength, her power, that female gymnastics also ceased to be gymnastics for anorexic girls to become the sport in which women best express themselves, strong, powerful, without fear.
More information
Biles is the best gymnast in history and a reference for all black women. He arrived in Tokyo carrying the final jump in his suitcase, the Yurchenko with a double somersault in a tent, so difficult, so dangerous, that few men dare to do it. It would be, its realization, like the final fireworks session, thunderous and definitive. It was the moment of rupture. The jump that miraculously saved without falling made him see, clearly, the truth. What it was. So he said at the press conference: “We have to protect our bodies and our minds and not always do what the world wants us to do.” And also: “I think the problem of mental health is more prevalent now than ever in sport.” And his words echo, precisely, those of the great Japanese sports star, tennis player Naomi Osaka, who months after retiring from Roland Garros and speaking, for the first time, of the great taboo of mental health, and of her concerns , agreed to be the athlete who lit the cauldron with the torch at the opening of the Games. On the same day of the eclipse of Biles, Osaka was eliminated from the Olympic tournament, and returned to speak of the demon of pressure. Precisely, two of the magazines with the largest circulation and the most influence on world public opinion, Time Y Sports Illustrated, they chose the tennis player and the gymnast, respectively, as protagonists of the Games on their covers.
With the tracksuit, in flip-flops, chatting non-stop in the corridors, joking, restless, unable to sit up, shaking her companions, who were pursuing an impossible comeback in the face of cold as ice, cold as Russia is cold, that is always said about Russian girls and that’s the way they are, unflappable Angelina Melnikova, 21, Vladislava Urazova, 16, Lilia Ajaimova, 24, and Viktoriia Listunova, 16 just turned 16, still a girl, Simone Biles was the woman who, perhaps, has always wanted to be, cheerleader, cheerleader, number one fan, unconcerned about the outcome. A girl happy to help her classmates.
“I don’t know if I will participate in the full contest on Thursday,” says Biles, who had set herself the challenge of being the first gymnast, since Vera Caslavska in 1964, to repeat victory in two Olympic Games. “We are going to go day by day. I was coming back for the team and they were up to the task ”.
His strength, even in flip flops, in white tracksuit, is tremendous. It is the raw and free Biles, and the quartet of the Russians loses their nerves on the balance beam, the third apparatus, which has reached an advantage of 2.5 points after some asymmetrical in which for the United States only shines the great Sunisa Lee. Two of the Russians, the best of them, Melnikova, and Uzarova, fall off the bar. Even the most failing North Americans, McCallum and Jordan Chiles, solidly save the way. The North Americans reach the ground with only 0.8 points of disadvantage. Biles gets excited, screams, hugs, talks incessantly. She looks like a happy chick. The comeback is possible. Simone Biles stops being Simone Biles and dances. Until precisely her best friend, Jordan Chiles, who trains with her in the gym in Spring, Texas, falls to the ground. Neither him ohhh tremendous, and its echo, released by the North American journalists of disappointment, is as expressive as the face of Biles, who minutes later rises to the podium for the first silver medal in his Olympic history (he left Rio, his hatching, with four golds and a bronze) and the first one congratulates Melnikova, the head of the Russians, hugs her and tells her not to worry about her, that she is very well, she even seems to get excited, inevitably, who does not, with the notes of the concert for piano by Tchaikovsky that replaces the Russian anthem to celebrate the victory of his gymnasts, who are not Russia, but ROC, while smiling at the glitter of a silver medal he had never won.
“Now I have to focus on my mental health. I don’t trust myself that much anymore, maybe I’m getting older, ”says the 24-year-old gymnast, who perhaps involuntarily is taking on another burden, that of leading female athletes in the fight for mental health. “We are not just athletes. At the end of the day we are people and sometimes we have to step back. Yes, and I think that talking, saying everything, helps. We are in something so big, it is the Olympic Games, that if you are not 100 or 120% at the end of the day they have to take you out on a stretcher, because you will end up hurting yourself ”.
Perhaps, in the end, Simone Biles will not be the goat (GOAT, the best of all time), but it will be by her own choice, because she will want to be happy, perhaps. Or so it seemed in a tracksuit and flip-flops, just living his life.
Subscribe here to our special newsletter about the Tokyo Games
–
