Paris (AFP) – Simone Biles’s sixth Olympic gold medal hung around her neck, and so did a twinkling little goat — just a reminder to the gymnast hailed as the greatest of all time that she does indeed belong in the pantheon of sports greats.
“I was like, OK, if it goes well we’ll wear the goat necklace,” Biles said after winning a tense all-around final for her second gold medal of the Paris Games. “I know that people will go crazy over it, but at the end of the day it is crazy that I am in the conversation of greatest of all athletes, because I just still think I’m Simone Biles from Spring, Texas, that loves to flip.”
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Biles, who has pushed her sport’s limits on the way to an astounding haul of 39 world and Olympic medals — 29 of them gold — hasn’t been beaten in an all-around competition since 2013, when she won her first all-around world title. She won four gold medals at the 2016 Rio Olympics and looked poised to burnish her Olympic legacy in Tokyo three years ago before she withdrew from most of her events as she was struck by the mental block gymnasts call the “twisties.”
“It’s been eight years,” she said of the gap between her Olympic all-around golds. “It feels amazing. I was a little bit naive in the process. So I appreciate my craft a little bit more.”
Biles, who said she wasn’t sure in the immediate aftermath of Tokyo if she would return to the world stage, credits coaches Cecile and Laurent Landi, her family, and her own willingness to diligently work through mental health issues, with her ability to return from a near two-year absence and be even better than ever. She needed all of her mental strength after a miscue on uneven bars left her in third place midway through the final, albeit just .267 points behind leader and eventual silver medallist Rebeca Andrade of Brazil.
“I was a little bit disappointed in my performance on bars,” Biles said. “That’s not usually how I swing. I’m not the best bar swinger. I’m not like Suni (Lee) or Kaylia (Nemour), but, like, I can swing some bars, you know?”
After a few minutes to “recenter and refocus,” Biles delivered a solid balance beam routine to regain the lead, sealing the win with another dazzling, high-flying floor routine. “I just couldn’t believe that I did it,” Biles said, adding that she was looking forward to three more finals — vault, beam, and floor exercise.
“Now it’s time to have fun and the hard part is over,” she laughed. And just in case she needs it, she said, in her room at the athletes’ village, she has a toy goat “just to get a reminder like ‘You can go out there, you can do it. You’ve done it before, so let’s go.'”
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