Simone Biles 2.0: Somehow, someway, there's nowhere to go but up

If you’re the greatest gymnast of all time, you should dress like it.

When Simone Biles took to the floor for podium training ahead of this weekend’s US national gymnastics championships at Kansas City’s Spirit Center, she was wearing a leotard that more than hinted at her GOAT status. It was grey and white with iridescent flourishes, same as her World Champions Centre teammates, while the back was all Biles. Her surname was embroidered in crystals and underneath was a crystal embroidered head of a goat.

The GOAT wearing a goat. A bit on the nose but facts are facts. Simone Biles is the greatest gymnast of all-time. We – gymnasts, coaches, fans, the media – have been saying it for years so why shouldn’t she acknowledge it?

Schedule

Thu 8 Aug Senior Men 8pm (NBCSN)

Fri 9 Aug Senior Women 8pm (NBCSN)

Sat 10 Aug Senior Men 8pm (NBCSN)

Sun 11 Aug Senior Women 8pm (NBC)

All times Eastern

Last year

At the 2018 US championships in Boston, Biles and Sam Mikulak won their fifth US women’s and men’s all-around titles, respectively. Biles went on to win her fourth world all-around title, as well as the vault and floor gold, uneven bars silver and balance beam bronze medals. Biles also anchored the US women’s team that won the team title.

“I don’t want to be cocky or anything,” Biles told reporters at Wednesday’s training session. “My mom was really worried about the leo today ... I don’t think there will be anything bad [comments] except for some fans and some haters.”

It’s not always so simple for female athletes to openly acknowledge just how great they are. Take what happened to the US women’s national team at this summer’s World Cup. Their exuberance at scoring goals against a weaker opponent was roundly criticized, with some suggesting that the US women should have backed down in the 13-0 rout of Thailand in their opening match of the tournament.

If displays of confidence, bravado even, from female athletes was in any way normalized and embraced, the celebrations from the US women’s national team at the World Cup wouldn’t have made headlines and be viewed as almost an international incident. As many noted, had the players been men instead of women, their on-field celebrations would have hardly registered, much less become fodder for a million takes.

Though Biles has never defeated a gymnast by 13 points, she does win by margins that are unusually large for gymnastics. (Her margin of victory at last year’s worlds was the biggest ever despite two falls and a kidney stone.) And like the USWNT, she shows no sign of backing off. Biles keeps adding new and more difficult skills to her routines even though her Rio routines, with some minor adjustments for the changes in the Code of Points since the last Olympics, would still be enough to defeat the current generation of gymnasts. At the podium training session, wearing that GOAT leotard, Biles showed off two outlandishly difficult skills that, if performed in international competition, will be named for her. The first was a triple twisting double somersault on floor exercise, which only a very few male gymnasts can perform and Biles’ is arguably better than most of them.

And then she went to the balance beam. At the end of her exercise she paused for what felt like a minute before launching into her dismount series of two back handsprings into a double twisting double somersault.

This is a skill that gymnastics have seen Biles do before. In a video that was posted to YouTube in 2013, Biles did the same dismount series she showed during podium training on Wednesday onto a soft landing surface. Not long after asked Aimee Boorman, her former coach, about this and other skills I had seen her mess around with and she characterized them as play, as a way of breaking up the monotony of training. In the run-up to Rio, Biles wasn’t making significant upgrades to her routine. The plan back then was to hold steady, keep Biles injury-free and get her through the unfathomable pressure she was about to face at her first Games.

But Biles is not playing around anymore. Now that she’s won everything there is to win – and many of those things more than once – Biles is pushing the technical boundaries of the sport and amazing herself in the process.

Amazement is how Biles characterized her reaction to her own abilities and performance after last month’s US Classic, which she, of course, won. Afterward she was asked in the post-meet interview by NBC’s Tim Daggett how much better she could actually get. Biles didn’t give the quantitative answer that the question demanded, a unit of measurement for “better”; rather, she offered us a glimpse into her mindset, which is that of a supremely confident female athlete. “I feel like every day in training I amaze myself even more so we’ll have to see what’s to come,” she said of the new, staggeringly difficult skills she performs with seeming ease.

Every day in practice is a little revelation for Biles. She’s discovering just how good she is and, most importantly, she’s telling us. There’s no hiding behind an “I just hope to do my best” persona. When I interviewed her back in early 2016, she would say things like, “If I make the Olympic team” even though her inclusion on the team was never in doubt if she remained healthy. I don’t think her statements were disingenuous; I just don’t think she was ready to fully own just how good she is.

The increased confidence has lead to an outspokenness and, at times, a willingness to be vulnerable. Biles, who came forward last year as a survivor of sexual abuse by Larry Nassar, has openly criticized USA Gymnastics for their failures in protecting and caring for the athletes. Her tweets have led to the closing of the Karolyi Ranch, the place where many of the gymnasts were abused, and played a role in the resignation of very short-lived USA Gymnastics president Mary Bono.

Addressing the media after the training session was over, Biles, her voice breaking, spoke about how hard it is for her to come to Kansas City to compete for an organization that had failed her and so many others. Last week, a new Congressional report was released that charged that multiple institutions, including the USA Gymnastics, Michigan State, the US Olympic Committee, and the FBI had opportunities to stop Nassar and did not.

“We’ve done everything that they’ve asked us for, even when we didn’t want to and they couldn’t do one damn job,” she said. “You had one job. You literally had one job and you couldn’t protect us.”

Biles is often spoken about in superhero terms, with the focus on her tremendous athletic ability, and doesn’t get nearly enough credit for her mental discipline. To be able to perform incredible athletic feats is one thing; to be able to do them under pressure, year after year, and hit as consistently as she has, is as impressive a feat as the double double she showcased off the beam. To do it all while grappling with the trauma of sexual abuse, and competing for the very same federation that enabled your abuse, is another level of difficulty entirely – one the judges can’t factor into your difficulty score. It is, to borrow from her own words, simply amazing.