Biles’s coach Cecile Landi said she “knew the lights and all that were going to be maybe a trigger for her.” But once the American gymnasts practiced in the venue three days before they began competing, Landi felt relieved. Biles was in her element, comfortable and confident.
“She handled it like a champ,” Landi said.
Biles left Antwerp with five medals — four of them gold — and reassurance that the mental block that rattled her in Tokyo wouldn’t reemerge whenever she returned to a similar event. The 2021 Olympics no longer are Biles’s most recent memory at a major competition. This past week has replaced it. And here, Biles performed one of the best floor routines of her career to clinch the team gold. She won another all-around title, became the most decorated gymnast ever and hardly had major mistakes. Ever since she returned to competition in the summer, Biles has looked dominant.
“If you keep remembering what happened in Tokyo, it’s not good for you,” said Laurent Landi, who coaches Biles alongside his wife. “So you want to take that away [from] your brain. It’s just a fluke.”
Competitively, the Paris Games will be similar to these past two weeks. Both the Olympics and world championships feature the same marathon of gymnastics events, starting with qualifying and then finals for the team, all-around and individual apparatus medals. With that busy slate in Antwerp, Biles excelled.
The difference next year will be the intensity of the spotlight. Even though a similar pool of talented athletes gathers at the world championships, the event itself doesn’t have the same cachet as the Olympics. Biles will enter Paris as one of the most famous U.S. Olympians. She will headline NBC’s promotions for months. Her trouble in Tokyo, where she withdrew from the Olympic team final after feeling lost in the air during a vault, will resurface as a prominent storyline. Biles will have to navigate it all.
Biles said her showing at the world championships “makes me feel a lot better” entering next year.
She’s careful not to directly mention the Paris Games, seemingly a calculated decision all season. Biles said she and her coaches will continue a “meet-by-meet” approach and “we’ll see where we end up.” Biles, if healthy and capable of performing how she did in Antwerp, is nearly guaranteed to earn a spot on the Olympic team. But that won’t be official until after the trials.
Biles is back because she wanted to move forward from Tokyo, where she said she was “having a little bit of the twisties,” referring to a yips-like mental block in which gymnasts feel disoriented and are unable to complete twisting elements as usual. She withdrew from every other medal event except for the beam final. On that apparatus, Biles altered her dismount to avoid twisting and won the bronze medal, ending an Olympics that veered far off course from what had been expected.
“I had to prove to myself that I could still get out here, twist,” Biles said. “I could prove all the haters wrong, that I’m not a quitter. … As long as I’m out there twisting again, having and finding the joy for gymnastics again, who cares?”
She still hears from critics on social media, but she tries to keep the X app, formerly known as Twitter, from being prominently displayed on her phone. Her interviews have been carefully regulated, with none scheduled until after her competitive return. She has media availability sessions during meets less often than most other athletes. Biles said she also has tried to limit sponsorship obligations.
Of all the changes since Tokyo, the most important has been “blocking out a lot of the outside noise and not letting that bother me,” Biles said. “And also doing things that I really enjoy doing and not saying yes to everything. I had to learn how to say no. And that’s usually the first response now. And if it doesn’t fit into my time or my schedule, then I’m not going to do it and I’m not going to force it.”
