MINNEAPOLIS — 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.
Get Olympics updates in your texts! Join USA TODAY Sports' WhatsApp Channel
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.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why Simone Biles is 'close to unstoppable' as she preps for Olympics
