Gymnast Simone Biles won the national championship after a two-year pause in her career

The most titled gymnast of our time, Simone Biles, who missed two years after a grandiose mental breakdown at the Tokyo Olympics, has returned to the sport in spectacular fashion. She regained the status of the leader of the American team thanks to a convincing victory in the US Championship.

Artistic gymnastics in America is, in principle, a very popular form, and even domestic competitions in it are in great demand among the public. But the current national championship, held in San Jose, California, was still special in this sense. And ESPN during it was happy to show fans in their reports who, in order to get to the tournament, made a long, thousands of kilometers journey from other states, admitting that, of course, they could not miss such an event. In San Jose, all of them, strictly speaking, rode for the sake of the only participant in the championship, as a result, for the eighth time in her career, she won his main gold medal – in personal all-around, breaking the record held since 1933 by their number Alfred Jokim. Although, of course, all these fans were the last to think about the achievement at stake, going to northern California. He was a tiny part of the intrigue associated with the person they were interested in.

At the end of the last decade, Simone Biles was a living icon of American sports. She reigned in gymnastics for many seasons.

She won four gold medals at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, and she has accumulated as many as two and a half dozen different world championship awards, and according to this indicator she had no equal in history at all. She has always been at or near the top of respected rankings of top athletes. And the Tokyo Olympics, postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic from 2020 to 2021, was supposed to be a new high point for Biles, who was in his prime.

But in Japan, instead of a grandiose triumph, there was a grandiose embarrassment. Even from the qualifying competitions, it was clear that Simone Biles was not at ease: there were too many mistakes, strange posts in social networks about “an unbearable load lying on the shoulders.” And having started performances in the team final with a vault of terrible quality, Biles suddenly left platform. Without their leader, the Americans, who were considered favorites, gave the gold to the Russian team, and Simone Biles explained her unexpected act as a “mental breakdown”, something like a panic attack that caught her at such an inopportune moment.

The consequences of the failure were simply catastrophic. Biles in Tokyo filmed from one start after another. In the end, she nevertheless decided to compete – in the exercises on the balance beam, but she took only bronze with a terribly simplified program.

And after the Olympics, Biles with her, as it turned out, psychological problems disappeared from the sport.

The very fact of her return to the sport, announced in June, was already a sensation. Behind – a pause lasting two years, and 26 years old – the age for women’s gymnastics is veteran, rarely anyone falls short of this. But everything that followed the announcement was even more surprising. The return took place in early August at the US Classic tournament. Biles won it. And if someone thought that under conditions of more serious pressure it would definitely break, then the national championship was obliged to dissuade the skeptic in this. Biles took first place in the individual all-around with a margin, ahead of the closest pursuer, Shilise Jones, by almost four points, and at the same time, on the freestyle and on the vault, she actually showed the firm, from the previous, before Tokyo, times.

Simone Biles’ total of 118.450 points is also impressive. At the American Championship, it consists of two performances in each of the four disciplines with an interval of a day. At tournaments, international competitions are twice as compact, fit into one day, but Biles’ result can still be compared with the benchmark set in her absence. Last year, the gold of the World Championship in the “absolute” went to the Brazilian Rebeca Andrade. Andradi collected 56,899, which is still less than half of the California amount of Simone Biles.

It will be possible to check how competitive she really is at the top international level, how ready she is to fight at the Olympics in Paris next year, very soon.

The next world championship (Russian gymnasts will miss it due to sanctions in effect until January 1) will be held at the end of September in Antwerp, and Biles, thanks to her success in San Jose, was selected in the status of the unconditional first number of the American team, which, by the way, she helps , is essential. The fact is that the US team is now experiencing difficulties with the composition. In addition to Jones, there are by and large no stable gymnasts with experience in it. All the stars who were with Biles in Tokyo are in serious trouble. Sunisa Lee, the all-around Olympic champion, suffers from kidney problems, while Jade Carey and Jordan Chiles lost their form and in San Jose were marked primarily by blunders and falls.

Alexey Dospekhov