The 2024 Paris Olympics are getting closer and closer. We’re exactly one month away from the start of the Games, and we already know a lot of the main stars who will be in France for the event. But we don’t yet know if Simone Biles will be there.

USA Gymnastics will hold their trials starting on Thursday, with the men and women competing to see who will make it to Paris. Although Biles is the heavy favorite to earn the sole automatic berth, which goes to the highest scorer across the two days of competition, anything can happen.

Biles’ participation at the trials drew some intrigue due to her, and the other gymnasts, not getting paid to participate. Not only that, U.S. athletes don’t get paid to compete in the Olympics at all; although winning medals does earn them prize money.

How does Simone Biles earn money?

The athletes are allowed to get money from sponsorships, though, which is easily the biggest source of income for Biles. Biles has nine major sponsors and has worked with various other brands throughout the years. She also has side business ventures, including a couple of companies that sell leotards.

The 2024 Summer Olympics kick off on Friday, July 26 and run until Sunday, August 11. Artistic gymnastics events will be held at the Bercy Arena, which holds 15,000 spectators.

Age is just a number and Simone Biles is living proof of the adage. At the age of 27, Simone Biles is still defying the odds of gymnastics, having achieved unmatched success and aging like fine wine. At the U.S. championships in Fort Worth, Texas, earlier in the month, Biles won her ninth US all-around victory after dominating on all four apparatus. Her recent success shows that she is at her best ever ahead of the Paris Olympics. As she gets better and bigger with each impending victory, she caught the jocular fancy of a certain gymnast and the interaction was funny and quite unusual, to say the least.

In the sport, Biles’ extraordinary talent has created a new benchmark. Although most young athletes reach their prime, Biles seems to have quenched her starlet thirst by receiving a funny request. Former Olympic gymnast Alicia Sacramone Quinn, who currently serves as the U.S. women’s high-performance squad’s strategic lead, noted Biles’ remarkable influence. Quinn remarked, “I don’t know if there will ever be another gymnast who will ever come close to touching her caliber of achievements, difficulty, and just the impact she’s had on our sport.”

Beyond only her technical skills, Quinn is a huge fan of Biles, through and through. Gymnastics has been greatly impacted by Biles, who has inspired a great number of upcoming athletes and shaped the sport’s future. An “icon?” Quinn continued, highlighting how extraordinary Biles’ efforts are. “I don’t even know if that’s the right way to say it,” Quinn noted.

Simone Biles is yet personable and modest despite her enormous accomplishments. “We joke all the time,” Quinn said, describing a funny exchange with Biles. “I’m like, ‘Can you be not as good at gymnastics?’ and she just laughs at me.”?” and she simply smiles. Despite her towering accomplishments, Biles is incredibly grounded, as this playful discussion highlights. However, there’s more on Simone Biles’s way to Paris.

Simone Biles’ road at the Paris Olympics

The focus now turns to Minneapolis, where the gymnastics U.S. Olympic Team Trials are taking place. The Target Center is abuzz with talent and excitement and Biles will be one of the firebrand gymnasts out there so you know who to root for and bet your money on now. Promising a stellar comeback, it remains to be seen how her journey to yonder, ie Paris, will look like provided the trials are the ultimate litmus test for many.

 Elite athletes aren’t supposed to get better the older they get. Certainly not in gymnastics, where the flexibility of youth makes it easier to do gravity defying skills.

Yet here Simone Biles is at 27 at the U.S. gymnastics Olympic trials, better now than she was in 2016, when she won four Olympic gold medals. Better than she was in 2018, when she won a medal on every event at the world championships. Better than anyone, ever, has ever been in her sport.

“I use the phrase, ‘Aging like fine wine,’” she joked earlier this month, after she’d extended her own record with her ninth U.S. championship.

Biles is poised to make her third Olympic team this weekend, and will be a heavy favorite to win multiple gold medals in Paris. Although her longevity alone is a marvel, it’s her level of excellence that is astounding. Just when you think there’s no way she can improve, no way she can top what she’s already done, she … does.

She cracked the 60-point mark on the first night of U.S. championships, something no other woman has done this Olympic cycle. She has mastered her Yurchenko double pike, a vault so difficult few men even try it, to the point coach Laurent Landi no longer feels the need to stand on the mat in case something goes awry.

She has added back her double twisting-double somersault dismount on uneven bars. Her difficulty score on floor exercise is a whopping 7.0, more than a full point higher than most other women.

“I don’t know if there will ever be another gymnast who will ever come close to touching her caliber of achievements, difficulty and just the impact she’s had on our sport. Icon? I don’t even know if that’s the right way to say it,” said Alicia Sacramone Quinn, who was a member of the team that won silver at the 2008 Olympics and is now the strategic lead for the U.S. women’s high-performance team.

“We joke all the time. I’m like, ‘Can you be not as good at gymnastics?’ and she just laughs at me.”

Although some of this is a credit to Biles’ natural ability, to put it all on that does a disservice to the work she puts in. Both in the gym and outside of it.

Biles works as hard as anyone, said Cecile Landi, who coaches Biles along with her husband. She does not skip workouts, and her ridiculously difficult routines appear easy because she has put in the numbers necessary to make them look that way. She also knows her body, and will tell the Landis when something isn’t feeling right or isn’t working.

Perhaps the biggest difference at this stage of her career is that Biles’ mind and body are in sync.

Biles missed most of the Tokyo Olympics after developing a case of “the twisties,” which caused her to lose her sense of where she was in the air and jeopardized her physical safety. Biles now knows this was a physical manifestation of mental health issues, exacerbated by the isolation of the COVID restrictions in Tokyo.

She continues to work with the therapist she began seeing after Tokyo, and says she knows she has to prioritize her mental health as much as her physical health. By doing so, she’s eliminated the one thing that could hold her back.

“I think we always knew she could be better,” Cecile Landi said. “She’s the most talented athlete I’ve ever worked with. And so we just knew if she could get her mental game as well as her physical game, she would be close to unstoppable.”

As crazy as it is to think — given all she’s already done and accomplished — Biles’ best is yet to come.