One night in April, at the Pacific Rim Championships, in Everett, Washington, the nineteen-year-old American gymnast Simone Biles approached the balance beam. A competitor from New Zealand had just finished her floor routine, set to the theme from “Game of Thrones,” and now Biles, who wore a pink leotard studded with more than four thousand Swarovski crystals, looked sternly down the length of the four-inch-wide balance beam, on which she was about to perform nine flips. “It comes down to this,” Al Trautwig, the NBC commentator, said.
That wasn’t strictly true. Biles was one of the last medal contenders to compete, but she was so far ahead in the competition that anything short of catastrophe would earn her gold. Since the world last paid attention to gymnastics, at the 2012 Olympics, Biles has become the first female gymnast to win three straight World Championships. If she wins three medals at this summer’s Olympics, in Rio de Janeiro, she will become the most decorated American gymnast of all time. “I feel absolutely terrible saying this,” Paul Ziert, the publisher of International Gymnast, said. “But if she doesn’t win five of the six Olympic gold medals it would be a disappointment.”
A low murmur began to build in the crowd as Biles revolved two and a half times on one foot, her other leg stretched parallel to the beam, then flipped while twisting a hundred and eighty degrees, all on a plank narrower than a standard American curb. The thrill of watching high-level gymnasts comes in part from the threat of disaster underlying the beauty of their routines—a strain that is often evident in the gymnasts’ faces. Biles, however, projects a sense of assured inevitability. “It’s like there’s no effort,” Steve Penny, the head of USA Gymnastics, said, seated next to me in the front row.
Gymnastics is one of the most popular televised events of the Olympics—some fans tune in for the acrobatics, and others for the tears—but its punishing physicality is better understood in person. When Biles executed a flawless back handspring, followed by a pair of backflips, it sounded as if the beam were about to crack in half. Penny convulsed ecstatically. “The beam is crying for help!” he yelled, throwing his hands into the air.
Two seats away, someone from the Canadian gymnastics federation shrugged and laughed in resigned defeat, which is more or less how the gymnastics world has reacted to Biles since she won her first World Championship, in 2013. “All the girls are like, ‘Simone’s just in her own league. Whoever gets second place, that’s the winner,’ ” Aly Raisman, who was the captain of the 2012 U.S. Olympic gymnastics team, and hopes to return for Rio, has said. Mary Lou Retton, the 1984 Olympic gold medallist, calls Biles the “most talented gymnast I’ve seen in my life.”
Biles paused at one end of the beam. “This dismount right here is the hardest dismount in the entire world,” Nastia Liukin, a two-time balance-beam world champion, said on the NBC broadcast. Biles launched into a pair of back handsprings that took her from one end of the beam to the other, at which point she leaped high enough into the air that as she flipped upside down twice, twisting a full revolution along the way, her dangling ponytail would have grazed the top of a basketball hoop. Biles stuck the landing as if she were magnetized to the floor, and Liukin declared her performance, in what is considered Biles’s third-best event, to be the “best routine ever.”
Biles stepped off the mat to a hug from Aimee Boorman, her coach, before striding over to Martha Karolyi, the brusque doyenne of American gymnastics, who has served as the national-team coördinator for the past fifteen years. Karolyi seemed to make a brief attempt at finding a teachable moment before simply pulling Biles into her chest. “That was spectacular,” Tim Daggett, the 1984 Olympic gold medallist and commentator, said. “The Russians, the Chinese—everybody is gonna be watching this, and they’re gonna be, like, ‘Give me a break.’ ”
Biles lives with her parents, Nellie and Ron, in a suburb north of Houston, ten minutes from the World Champions Centre, a fifty-two-thousand-square-foot gym that passersby sometimes mistake for a megachurch. After Biles won Worlds in 2013, Boorman told the Biles family that she wanted to leave her old gym; Nellie, who co-owned a chain of fourteen nursing homes around Texas, suggested that the Bileses build a gym. “My contribution was to say, ‘You should spell “center” differently,’ ” Ron, who is a retired air-traffic controller, told me. The Centre, which opened last November, is a gymnastics Valhalla, with a giant foam pit, forty-foot ceilings furnished with helicopter-sized fans, and a sign on the gym door advising parents that they are not welcome on the mat.
A few days after Pacific Rims, I met Simone there at nine in the morning, as she began a warmup that involved climbing twenty feet up a rope in five seconds, using only her arms. Biles is four feet eight, but she is all muscle, with jackhammers for legs and a tendency to bounce around a room, whether or not it has mats. The fact that gymnasts wear ribbons and jewel-flecked costumes—Karolyi has sent back leotards because she didn’t think they had enough crystals—can minimize how difficult the sport actually is. When Biles lands on each of her tumbling runs, she hits the ground with the force of two colliding football players, and she spends many nights after practice in a pair of pants that massage her legs with compressed air. She compares the process of getting into shape for competition as “repeatedly convincing yourself you aren’t going to die.”
The physical demands are just one obstacle in the way of a promising teen-age gymnast becoming an élite athlete. “She’s great eighty-five per cent of the time,” Boorman told me. “She is also fifteen per cent teen-age girl.” After her warmup, Biles, who doesn’t dispute the assessment (“I’m nineteen years old—I have emotional problems here and there”), burst into Boorman’s office at the W.C.C. to say that a boy she was not calling her boyfriend, but whom she would kill if he started dating anyone else, had just had his ears pierced. Biles, who is bubbly by default, attends church with her family most Sundays, and admits to enough of a shopping problem that she might need repenting: during a day off at Pacific Rims, she went to the outlets and bought a Kate Spade bag and a Michael Kors iPhone case.
Biles started homeschooling when she was thirteen, and graduated from high school last year, which means that she has been able to devote the past year to training for the Olympics, and to maintaining a hundred-and-forty-day streak of exchanging Snapchats with her non-boyfriend. Boorman said that when she first met the boy she told him, “I think you’re sweet, but if you screw with her mind I will kill you. You can screw with her mind after the Olympics, but not before. I’ve got enough to deal with.”
Biles was born in Columbus, Ohio, but at the age of two she and three siblings were taken from their mother, who struggled with drugs and alcohol, and placed in foster care. Ron, who is Simone’s grandfather, and his second wife, Nellie, agreed to take in the children. After an attempted reunion with her biological mother failed, Ron and Nellie adopted Simone and her younger sister, Adria, in 2003. (The other siblings moved in with Ron’s sister.) Simone considers Nellie and Ron her mother and father.
At the age of six, Biles began taking classes at Bannon’s Gymnastix, in Houston. She progressed quickly, earning an invitation to a junior-national-team camp when she was fourteen. In 2012, she was several months too young for the Olympics, which requires athletes to turn sixteen in the year of the games. “I sucked anyways,” Biles told me. Her natural athleticism was obvious from the beginning, but the sport calls for gymnasts to be both thoroughbred and jockey, and Biles had not yet figured out how to rein in her power. On one of her first competitive vaults, Biles flew over the table without touching it, scoring a zero. “She can fly like a butterfly, but she can’t do a straight-body cast handstand,” Martha Karolyi told Boorman at the time, critiquing Biles’s ability to hit vertical on the uneven bars. At a meet in 2013, Biles wobbled wildly on the beam, crashed to her knees during the floor exercise, and flew off the bars before Boorman pulled her from the competition.
After that meet, Biles consulted a sports psychologist and had a session with Karolyi, neither of which quite explains the fact that, three weeks later, she won the U.S. Championship and, two months after that, a world title. Since then, she has not lost a meet.
Like most athletes, Biles is not illuminating on the subject of her own gifts. “I kind of blow my own mind,” she has said. “I wish I could crawl out of my skin and see it happen from a different perspective.” During her tumbling runs, Biles says, the only thing she sees is the colors of the ceiling and the floor, whizzing past in revolving blurs. (If you want to make yourself dizzy, look up “GoPro gymnastics” on YouTube.) When she vaults, she sees nothing at all. Some élite gymnasts count to themselves while flying through the air, to keep track of where they are, but Boorman says that Biles has no need for such calculation. She never gets lost.
Seeing Biles next to her competition at Pacific Rims, I felt as if Isaac Newton had written a different set of laws on her behalf. She flew higher, spun faster, and landed more firmly than anyone else. As I watched a group of gymnasts from New Zealand, whose every action looked pained, I was reminded of the physical awkwardness of being a teen-ager, but Biles moved from apparatus to apparatus like a shark in open water. In Everett, several people compared Biles to Michael Jordan, for her ability to escape gravity; and to Michael Phelps, for the perfect match of her body to her sport; and to Serena Williams, for her total dominance. I thought of Stephen Curry, who has made a habit of performing impossibly difficult athletic feats with no apparent effort.
Many gymnasts point out that Biles is at least as singular on the sidelines, where she is often seen joking with her teammates moments before stepping onto an apparatus. “When you look back at a lot of my Olympic teams, the majority of us were either crying or super intense,” Dominique Dawes, who competed on three Olympic teams, told me. After I spent time with Biles—I’ve rarely seen such excitement as when she hopped around her living room after her mother gave her permission to attend a G-Eazy concert—it became clear that her intense focus on the beam was more forced than the giggling. “She doesn’t particularly like to think about what she’s doing,” Boorman said.
When Biles started to get into gymnastics, in the mid-aughts, the sport was undergoing its first great upheaval since the seventies. At the Munich Olympics in 1972, Olga Korbut, then seventeen, made acrobatic use of her eighty-five-pound frame, dismounting the uneven bars by standing atop one bar and backflipping over the other. A sport that had been dominated by women in their twenties and thirties—the gold medallist in 1968 had nine years, three inches, and forty pounds on Korbut—was now the domain of pixies who could fly. Ballet had turned into trapeze. Four years later, in Montreal, the Romanian Nadia Comaneci, who was fourteen, launched off the beam with a double-twisting backflip where Korbut had daintily flipped off the side. Comaneci earned the sport’s first perfect ten, and was followed by a series of equally agile but formidable girls who dominated the sport, many of them tutored by Comaneci’s coaches, Martha and Bela Karolyi.
But by the turn of the century the limitations of the ten-point scale had begun to stunt the sport’s growth. To score well, a gymnast simply had to meet a minimum level of difficulty and not screw up. Gold medals were being given to safe routines that limited mistakes, while gymnasts who pushed the sport’s boundaries received no reward. (At the 2004 Olympics, the men’s competition was stalled for ten minutes while the crowd booed a low score given to the Russian gymnast Alexei Nemov’s high-flying bar routine.) In 2006, the International Federation of Gymnastics did away with the perfect ten, to the initial chagrin of pretty much everyone. “It’s crazy, terrible, the stupidest thing that ever happened to the sport of gymnastics,” Bela Karolyi said at the time. “How could they take away this beautiful, this most perfect thing from us?”
The new system, laid out in the Code of Points, is an open-ended one, in which gymnasts are given two marks: one for execution, worth up to ten points, and another for difficulty, which is theoretically infinite. (The code’s creation is detailed in the journalist Dvora Meyers’s forthcoming book, “The End of the Perfect Ten.”) The scores are then added together, so that Biles’s “best routine ever,” in Everett, received a 15.550. “Fans don’t quite get it,” Comaneci told me. “They’re, like, fifteen out of what? Fourteen out of who?”
Gymnasts began upping the difficulty of their routines, but it wasn’t until Biles’s emergence that the code revealed its potential. At the 2013 World Championships, Biles performed a double layout—two flips with straight legs—to which she added a half twist at the last second, forcing her to land blindly. The maneuver entered the code as “the Biles.” Her primary vault, which is called an Amanar, is of the same type that Kerri Strug performed on a bum ankle at the 1996 Olympics, except that Biles twists an extra time while flipping backward through the air. Comaneci did a single flip off the beam; Biles does two. “The code was a fantasy—a perfect, unattainable ideal,” Jessica O’Beirne told me. O’Beirne runs GymCastic, a wildly enthusiastic podcast that serves as a water cooler for the online gymnastics community, which refers to itself as the Gymternet. “Then Simone was born, and the code became a reality.” In a sport often contested in hundredths of a point, Biles wins by whole numbers.
During her morning training session at the W.C.C., Biles recounted a luncheon she had gone to recently, after her family’s neighborhood association auctioned off a meeting with her at its spring fund-raiser. “One of the girls was like, ‘I just need to ask you one question,’ ” Biles said. “ ‘Are you better than Gabby, or is Gabby better than you?’ I’m like, ‘I beat her, O.K.?’ ”
“At least they’re not asking you if you are Gabby anymore,” Boorman said.
“Oh, I still get that all the time,” Biles said.
The neighborhood girl was getting a jump on the narrative that will dominate gymnastics coverage this August: whether the twenty-year-old Gabby Douglas, the 2012 Olympic champion, can defend her title against Biles. The tension is largely theoretical, given that Biles’s level of difficulty is so much higher than Douglas’s. But the comparison is inevitable, since they are both black gymnasts in a sport that remains mostly white. After Biles’s 2013 win, an Italian gymnast named Carlotta Ferlito told reporters that “next time we should paint our skin black, so we could win, too.” (Five Caucasians, three Asians, and Kyla Ross, who is of African-American, Japanese, Filipino, and Puerto Rican descent, also finished ahead of Ferlito.) Ron Biles, who grew up in public housing in Cleveland, responded with what should have been the final word—“Normally, it’s not in her favor being black, at least not in the world that I live in”—except that a spokesperson for the Italian federation backed up Ferlito, saying she had simply been referring to “the current trend in gymnastics, which is going toward a technique that opens up new chances to athletes of color, well known for power, while penalizing the elegance typical of Eastern Europeans.” (Both of the Italians later apologized.)
The racial argument was both offensive and gymnastically ignorant—Douglas, who flies on the bars, is stylistically closer to Comaneci than to Biles—but it reflected a divide in the gymnastics world. Some fans, many of them European, grumble that modern gymnastics has forsaken artistry for the sake of athleticism. In turn, Americans sometimes complain that European judges favor the “international look,” meaning those who resemble the fluidly lithe competitors of the past. While the seventies and eighties were dominated by Soviet and European gymnasts who combined balletic elegance with supple acrobatics, the rise of American gymnasts featured air time and daredevilry at the expense of toe points and grace. “The Soviet style was very much embedded in the culture of Russia—the relationship to ballet, the ideas of risk, originality, and virtuosity,” Elizabeth Booth, a lecturer at the University of Greenwich, who writes the blog Rewriting Russian Gymnastics, told me. “The American style is about executing elements to maximize the score, rather than considering a routine as a whole.”
If Biles ever approaches clumsiness, it’s in the moments between her leaps on the floor or the beam, when her dancing can look stilted, as if she were in a rush to move on to her next athletic feat. Comaneci told me that she is a fan of Biles, but worries that the new code leaves little room for more creative gymnasts. The Gymternet was recently abuzz about Eythora Thorsdottir, of the Netherlands, whose wildly imaginative floor routine would not be out of place at the Bolshoi, but whose tumbling, and thus her difficulty score, is dwarfed by Biles’s. “There’s very little artistry anymore,” Comaneci said.
But artistry is subjective, and few who argue for a return to the Soviet era would also endorse a floor exercise by the U.C.L.A. gymnast Sophina DeJesus that incorporated the Nae Nae, the Dab, and several other contemporary dance moves, and which caught fire on YouTube earlier this year. “I’m pretty sure Martha’s jaw would drop,” Biles said, when asked about the chances of her adding the Stanky Leg to her routine. The code, which is regularly recalibrated, has tried to placate both sides by rewarding points for difficulty while also deducting points from gymnasts who do not “play a role or a character” in their floor routine or don’t match their motion to the music. (An example from the code: “ ‘Tango’ music, but ‘Polka’ movements.”) The penalties are minor—“She could do her routine to ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ and still win Olympic gold,” Daggett said of Biles—but modern gymnastics seems to demand opposing virtues from its athletes, as if Tom Brady were expected to execute a plié between onrushing defensive ends. “You’re never supposed to show that it’s difficult,” O’Beirne said.
Biles was dutifully trying to perfect the “artistic” elements of her routine. “I need to work on my facials,” she told me at Pacific Rims, after her floor routine, in which she had winked at her teammates between tumbling runs. “You have to train it,” she said. “It’s hard to train smiling.”
One afternoon in April, I drove an hour north of the World Champions Centre to a ranch on the edge of the Sam Houston National Forest, where Bela and Martha Karolyi have trained gymnasts for more than thirty years. The Karolyis greeted me at the door, and Bela told me to get into the passenger seat of a four-by-four so that he could show me the ranch, an experience for which Biles had tried to prepare me. “The camels and peacocks don’t really mess with you, but one time there was this big ol’ snake,” she said. “And I got chased by a chicken.” Bela barrelled past several wood-frame dormitories named Athens, Beijing, and London, pausing to address Samson, a camel that was blocking our path. “Pardon, sir,” Bela said.
The Karolyis defected to the United States in the early eighties and quickly became the dominant figures in American gymnastics, coaching Mary Lou Retton and three of the six gymnasts on the 1992 Olympic team. In 1999, Bela was named America’s first-ever national-team coördinator, tasked with bringing order to a disorganized system, which he did by introducing gruelling monthly training camps.
“They killed each other,” Bela said. “They fight to the death, and there are those who did not survive. But I have a lot of them.” He was talking about three deer skulls on the floor of a garage, but a number of retired gymnasts would be forgiven for thinking he was referring to the monthly retreats, which one coach has called “death camps.” The Karolyis have been criticized for their harsh training methods, including accusations of abuse in the name of motivation. Trudi Eberle Kollar, who competed for Romania at the 1980 Olympics, later told the Associated Press that the Karolyis had slapped and kicked her. “It can be done in a healthier way physically and emotionally,” Dominique Moceanu, who won gold as part of the 1996 American team, said in 2008. Other gymnasts have defended the Karolyis, saying that their training was firm but not abusive.
After the American gymnasts underperformed at the 2000 Olympics, and coaches complained about Bela’s domineering style, Martha, who had always been the couple’s technical guru, took over the job. Since then, American gymnasts have won nearly twice as many Olympic medals as any other country. “It’s a brutal system,” Paul Ziert, the International Gymnast publisher, told me. “That said, so far no one has been able to come up with a system that can produce these results and be more civil.” The accusations of ill-treatment have largely gone away, but Martha has retained the monthly camps and held to her husband’s exacting standards as well. She once chastised Biles for not wearing a bow in her hair during a competition, and, after Biles had a subpar workout before Pacific Rims, Martha asked her, “Why are you being a prima donna, you spoiled brat?” Biles says that although she can block out screams from a crowd, she can always hear her mother and Martha.
Boorman says that Martha was initially skeptical of her coaching strategy for Biles. By the standards of élite gymnastics, it has a tinge of Waldorf School: Biles trains for thirty-two hours a week, fewer than many gymnasts, in part because Boorman worried that if she pushed her too hard Biles would simply take her freakish athleticism elsewhere. Boorman once declined an invitation to the ranch, because Biles had come away emotionally bruised from Martha’s criticism at a previous camp. “I know Simone’s coach Aimee lets her smile, which I’m just super jealous of,” McKayla Maroney, a 2012 Olympian, told GymCastic earlier this year.
Bela Karolyi now spends most days tending to his horses and guineafowl (“Animals are way easier”), although he still follows the sport. “I mean, Simone Biles, I’ve never seen anything in my life even close to her,” Bela told me, once we got back to the couple’s house. “Unbelievable! Unbelievable!” We joined Martha in the living room, which is decorated with mounted animals that Bela killed on various hunts. “We’re not permanently clapping,” she said, of her sometimes stern treatment of Biles. “Occasionally we clap, because she can really be phenomenal, but, at the same time, we try to make her more and more perfect.”
Still, Martha had come around to Boorman’s style. She may have had little choice. After the American team delivered an underwhelming performance in qualification at the 2015 World Championships, in Glasgow, Biles told reporters that she thought the team, which had been training every day for three weeks, was exhausted. “We’ve just been going for so long, and I think we need a little bit of a mental break,” Biles said, a mild rebellion that “shook the gymnastics world,” according to Jessica O’Beirne. No other gymnast could have safely spoken up against Martha, who has announced that she will join Bela in retirement after Rio. “Simone was like, ‘Why does she care so much how I do?’ ” Boorman said. “And I was like, ‘Because you’re her swan song.’ ” The day after Biles’s revolt, Karolyi allowed Biles and her teammates to take a walk around downtown Glasgow. Twenty minutes later, they returned to the gym.
Earlier this year, I met Biles at a gym in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where she was doing a photo shoot for GK Elite, the world’s largest supplier of gymnastics leotards. “I like lots of crystals,” Biles said, after emerging from behind a blue folding mat she was using to change into one of six Biles-themed leotards that GK planned to release leading up to Rio. “Sometimes beauty’s a pain.”
The months before the Olympics are a sprint to reap endorsement deals from the corporations that line up every four years to recruit prominent athletes. During three days in New York in April, Biles squeezed in appearances with a few sponsors, including a brand of laundry detergent, a gymnastics supplier that was manufacturing a line of mats printed with her signature, and a breakfast cereal. “I’m sorry, guys, I can’t feel my toes,” Biles said, one cold morning, as she stumbled on a balance beam that had been set up in the middle of Union Square by Special K Red Berries, which had apparently won her services over Wheaties.
The gym in Lancaster was filled with gymnasts in every variety of ponytail trying not to sneak glances at Biles, who was posing for photographs on a beam—a good chance to practice her smile. (She got in a brief workout beforehand, which included walking across the gym on her hands.) Biles was still not used to her looming celebrity. “Sometimes I forget who I am,” she said. She had recently been surprised to discover fan fiction on the Gymternet, some of which imagines her in relationships with other female gymnasts.
After the shoot, when I told a gymnast friend that I had just met Biles, her first question was “What did she eat?” The answer was a chicken sandwich, which my friend insisted was a decoy meant to fool me. Moceanu says that she was often limited to nine hundred calories a day during competitions, and, at a meet in 2009, Martha Karolyi congratulated a gymnast by hugging her and saying, “You lost some weight—now don’t put it back.” The American gymnast Christy Henrich, who once overheard a judge say that she needed to lose weight, died in 1994, at twenty-two, of organ failure. At one point, she weighed forty-seven pounds.
The dietary situation has improved, in part because the athletic nature of the sport now suits muscular bodies more than waifish ones, but gymnasts are still expected to stay trim. One day at the W.C.C., Biles told Boorman that a gymnast who was recovering from an injury had been texting Biles with complaints that her parents and her coach were pushing her to stay thin, in an effort to make a run at this year’s Olympics. “Her parents are going crazy,” Biles said. “They’re making her get up at five in the morning to swim and then go to the sauna.”
When I shared my friend’s chicken-sandwich theory with Boorman, she insisted that she has never monitored Biles’s diet. “She knows that if she doesn’t eat well she doesn’t feel good,” Boorman said. Unless there is a Watergate-level conspiracy afoot, I can confirm that at dinner one night, at the Bileses’ expansive Tuscan-style home, Simone and her sister split a very large pork chop stuffed with dirty rice. When they couldn’t decide which flavor of Fanta to share, each had her own. (Coca-Cola, which distributes Fanta as well as a protein shake that Biles endorses, had sent a stack of twelve-packs.)
Many credit Boorman’s more flexible regimen not only with keeping Biles in the sport but also with keeping her healthy. Compared with other gymnasts, Biles has been fortunate; she has had only one surgery, to repair bone spurs in her ankle. But a consequence of the code, and of how far Biles has pushed it, is that less physically gifted gymnasts have been pressured to attempt more difficult skills. Earlier this year, Maggie Nichols, who is an Olympic contender, was practicing Biles’s Amanar vault when she under-rotated and tore the meniscus in her knee. Several promising gymnasts who routinely beat Biles earlier in their careers have been sidelined with injuries.
The Gymternet spends considerable time discussing the ages of promising gymnasts—“She peaked when she was about 14.5”—because many gymnasts retire around the time that professional athletes in other sports are beginning their careers. “It’s such a short window,” Boorman said. “You’re washed up even before you’re old enough to know you’re washed up.” Olga Korbut has blamed her failure to challenge Comaneci in 1976 in part on her changing body, while Bela Karolyi once said he wouldn’t train a gymnast because she hadn’t yet emerged from “the storm of puberty.” Gymnasts prefer to grow either early or late—Biles has barely grown since she was thirteen—and although being tall is not a death sentence, a spurt at the wrong time can force a gymnast to relearn each of her flips and twists with weight in different places. Kyla Ross, who was the youngest member of the 2012 Olympic team, had hoped to compete in Rio, but she grew four and a half inches and retired from élite gymnastics earlier this year, at the age of nineteen. Lanna Apisukh, the 1992 U.S. junior national champion, was on track to make the 1996 Olympics until puberty hit, and she suffered a series of pulled hamstrings, rolled ankles, and stress fractures, which required cortisone shots in her elbow. “It’s harder to twist through the air when you have hips and boobs,” she told me, over beers in Brooklyn, where she is now the marketing director at a technology company.
Biles insists that she doesn’t dream about the Olympics. “Everyone else does that for me,” she said. The American team is expected to win gold, and, barring injury, Biles will be the overwhelming favorite on both the floor and the balance beam, as well as in the all-around competition, where her combined level of difficulty is so much higher than that of her competitors that the Gymternet believes she could fall twice and still win gold. She is unlikely to win a medal on the uneven bars, which is her weakest event—she once finished fourth at the World Championships—meaning that the most serious obstacle on her quest for five golds is the vault.
Unlike the other events, the vault requires a gymnast to perform just two skills in two separate attempts, rather than an entire routine, and although Biles’s Amanar is the world’s best, her second vault was merely above average. A number of gymnasts have devoted themselves to the apparatus, on the premise that even a weekend warrior could get lucky and take a game off Roger Federer. At last year’s World Championships, Biles finished behind gymnasts from Russia and North Korea who hadn’t qualified in any other event.
On the day I visited the Karolyi ranch, Martha had received an e-mail from the Gymnastics Federation of India, asking if she might help train Dipa Karmakar, the country’s first female Olympic gymnast, who had qualified for Rio on the strength of a vault called the Produnova, which requires a gymnast to flip two and a half times and comes with a higher difficulty score than Biles’s Amanar. (“Maybe next year,” Karolyi joked.) Karmakar, like several other gymnasts who have attempted the vault in practice and in competition, can typically rotate the last flip just barely, so that her butt nearly touches the floor when she lands. But if she can pull it off cleanly just once, in Rio, she has a shot at the podium. The problem is that, if she misses, Karmakar risks a fate worse than returning home without a medal. “You land too far, you break your leg,” Boorman told me, of the Produnova. “You land too short, you break your neck. Or you die.”
The subject of mortality comes up surprisingly often when gymnasts talk about their sport, and the Produnova seemed to mark some kind of peak in the willingness of the competitors to risk debilitating injury for the sake of glory. Elena Mukhina, the 1978 World Champion, became a quadriplegic after breaking her neck while practicing a risky tumbling run just two weeks before the 1980 Olympics, and a 2015 study of college athletes showed that women’s gymnastics has a higher injury rate than football. (Equipment changes meant to aid athlete safety have, ironically, enabled gymnasts to attempt ever more dangerous maneuvers.) When I asked Biles why she didn’t try the Produnova, she raised an eyebrow and said, “I’m not trying to die.”
Instead, a few days before Pacific Rims, Biles announced that she would be débuting a new second vault—as if Federer had perfected a left-handed forehand, just in case. The new vault requires Biles to twist in one direction while performing a roundoff, before immediately reversing course and twisting the opposite way into a back handspring. The combination seemed impossible, and I found myself watching a clip of the vault over and over to figure out how she had pulled it off without ripping apart her upper and lower halves. In Everett, Biles earned a higher score for this vault than she did for her Amanar. “She did O.K.,” Boorman told me afterward, with a knowing smile.
“I didn’t even envision life after the Olympics,” Nastia Liukin told me over coffee in the East Village. Now twenty-six, she was finishing her final semester as an undergraduate at N.Y.U., where she had tried going by the name Anastasia in class, but had given up after she kept forgetting to respond when she was called on. After the 2012 Olympics, Aly Raisman went on “Dancing with the Stars,” while Gabby Douglas appeared in both a Lifetime bio-pic and a reality show. Nellie Biles says that her family will never do a reality show, but Simone, who adores the Kardashians, is open to the idea. Mostly, she prefers not to consider her post-Olympic life, saying only that she’d like to go to college at some point, and perhaps score a cameo on TV. She wouldn’t mind if she grew an inch or two.
Liukin tried to come back for a second Olympics, in 2012, an attempt that ended when she missed the high bar during trials, landing on her face. But the athletic style of gymnastics that Biles has ushered in is more welcoming to mature gymnasts, leaving open the possibility that she could stick around for the 2020 Games, in Tokyo, when she will be twenty-three. Comaneci and others told me that they expected the sport to hit some physical threshold, beyond which humans could not possibly do anything more death-defying, but Biles’s ability to conjure a new skill just before the Olympics gave off the sense that there were no limits on what she could do. The Gymternet has long speculated about when Biles might push the sport to even greater heights, becoming the first female gymnast to attempt such mythical skills as a triple-twisting double backflip, or an Amanar with an extra half-spin. Boorman says that Biles has landed those in practice, but that her willingness to take risks had decreased with age. “On any given day, she could have three new skills named after her,” Boorman said. “When she’s ready and she’s decided she can do something, she’s going to do it. But we’re not going to convince her.”
“People say I’m the best, but I still don’t think that,” Biles said. “I guess if I go to the Olympics and do well, maybe I’ll believe it.” It was surprising to hear a top athlete admit to doubt, but Nellie Biles said that the uncertainty went back to Simone’s complaint that she couldn’t watch herself do the things that she does. If only she could see what the crowd sees—her body flying farther and higher than anyone else’s—there would be little left to doubt. ♦
