PARIS – The scene looked dramatic. To the thousands of people inside Bercy Arena on Sunday during women's gymnastics qualifying — from the A-list celebrities to the fans who had traveled from all over the globe to catch Simone Biles — it certainly felt dramatic.
To Biles, her teammates and the Team USA coaches? Not so much.
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Sure, the sight of the 27-year-old American gymnastics superstar walking off the floor with USA Gymnastics team doctor Marcia Faustin during Olympic qualifying evoked images of the 2020 Olympics, when Biles removed herself from the team final to focus on her mental health.
There was one critical difference this time around.
As Faustin followed Biles off the floor, she carried athletic tape in her hands. A short time later, Biles gingerly returned, the lower half of her left leg wrapped up to deal with a calf injury she aggravated during her warmup on floor exercise.
What followed were three rotations filled with her typical brilliance.
A floor routine that remains the most difficult in the world by a wide margin. Two vaults — including the Yurchenko double pike that carries her name in the sport's Code of Points — that require her to explode off the board with enough power to rotate and flip multiple times in a split second. An uneven bars set that ended with Biles waving to the crowd and dancing alongside good friend Jordan Chiles.
By the time Biles was done, she had produced an all-around score of 59.566, well clear of Brazil's Rebeca Andrade in second.
Afterward, Biles' longtime coach Cecile Landi grew uncharacteristically frustrated when asked about the injury and how it might impact the rest of the Games, starting with the team final on Tuesday night.
A final Biles certainly seems to be up for. She will start on all four events for the Americans and shared a post on social media early Monday that she remains “grateful to be doing what I love.”
Maybe why Landi grew so annoyed while fielding questions the day before, questions that focused on one thing Landi hardly considered news.
No, Biles never talked about sitting out the competition.
No, there was no discussion about watering down her routines to take a little bit of pressure off the calf, which she initially hurt a few weeks ago before tweaking on Sunday.
Yes, she started to feel better as the meet went on.
After about two minutes of questions phrased differently but all with the same intent — how is Biles — the unfailingly polite Landi grew a little exasperated.
“I am not a doctor,” said Landi, who is also serving as head coach for Team USA. “I will not be answering any more questions about Simone's foot. If you want to talk about the whole team, I’ll be happy to.”
The peppering stopped soon afterward.
A short time before, USA Gymnastics co-lead Chellsie Memmel — a 2008 Olympic silver medalist — shook her head while talking about what she'd just watched.
“What (Biles) was able to do, with looking like she had some soreness or something in her lower leg, is remarkable,” Memmel said.
And also, in some aspects, common in a sport where the injury rate is 100%.
Pain is as much a part of gymnastics as leotards and chalk. It's what happens when you spend hours a week, year after year, throwing yourself against an uneven bar, trying to keep your balance on a piece of wood four inches wide, tumbling along a floor that asks all the tendons and bones in your arms, your wrist, your knees, your ankles, to work in unison.
No one knows this better than Biles.
As if she or anyone else needed a reminder, the U.S. Olympic trials — where the path to Paris ended with injury and heartbreak for leading contenders Shilese Jones, Skye Blakely and Kayla DiCello — provided them in droves.
The reality is, what happened on Sunday was unusual only because of the stage and who — namely those who stop by only every four years — was watching.
To Biles, it was just another day in the life of a sport that requires many things, perhaps pain tolerance most of all.
This is the same gymnast, after all, who won six medals at the 2018 world championships in Qatar — one in every competition, four of them gold — while battling a kidney stone she nicknamed “the Doha pearl.”
The disruption the “pearl” provided — she spent some time in an emergency room before the meet began — didn't stop Biles from being more than a little upset with herself for uncharacteristic mistakes.
The fact that she won the fourth of her now record six world all-around championships hardly mattered. Afterward, she fumed that she “bombed."
She could have used the kidney stone as an excuse. She didn't. That's simply not her way. Things happen in the gym and outside of it. The sport offers you two choices: quit, or deal with it and keep going.
Biles simply keeps going, and not just when the world is watching.
Three years ago on a warm spring day inside World Champions Centre — the spaceship of a gym the Biles family owns in the northern Houston suburbs — Biles was on floor training with the rest of her WCC teammates.
At the end of one tumbling pass, her feet hit the mat and seemed to crunch underneath her. She bent forward, sticking her hands out to protect herself during a landing that was more about survival than anything.
The greatest gymnast of all time groaned a little as she pulled herself up, rolling her eyes more than a little bit. She walked around for a few minutes and stretched.
Then, she did the tumbling pass again. And again. And again. And again.
This wasn't in Paris at the Olympics. It wasn't during a major meet like a world championship. It wasn't even during a national team camp. It was a normal Tuesday in May.
Asked a while later what happened when she fell, Biles paused trying to remember. Then she laughed and offered an answer that could have come from anyone who's ever walked onto the mat.
"That's gymnastics.”
Yeah, it is.
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AP Summer Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games