Simone Biles’ narrative arc reaches full extension on glorious night for USA

American dream played out in piece of irresistible theatre to bury the memories of the Damned Games of Tokyo

Of course there was theatre at the very end. Two hours into this women’s Artistic Gymnastics Team final, with the USA coasting grandly at the head of the field, the logistics of competition left Simone Biles with one final act to stop the show.

Three years on from Tokyo and The Breakdown, the only discipline remaining in that same team event was the Biles floor routine. And so in front of Bill Gates, Gianni Infantino, Serena Williams and Spike Lee, in front of the eyes of the world as ever, Simone Biles got to dance like no one was watching.

Reborn Simone Biles leads way as USA reassert team gymnastics domination

Paris 2024 knew what it was getting with these gymnastics, a spectacle that would play out, as it did here, like a cross between the Super Bowl, Vegas and a Marvel movie. Mainly it was getting America: American flash, American show, American story-telling, the key event in a Games that has for many editions now been powered by US TV money and US sport tourism. Frankly, there haven’t been this many Americans in Paris since 1945.

And of course Paris was getting the Biles-industrial complex, the Biles narrative arc, which reached its full extension on a wonderful night of flex and twang and defiance of the elements; one that ended, naturally, with gold for the US women.

That final Biles routine was visceral and at times hair-raising. She played the hits. She did Biles 1, Biles 2. She produced an extraordinary release of energy, that explosive athletic grace that looks at times almost like an optical illusion.

What is gymnastics exactly? Performance art? Hard-edge competitive sport? At one point in her balance beam routine Biles did an insane triple backflip (repeat: on a thin, square bar) like a wheel rolling down an incline, one of those moments where she seems to turn the entire event into something else, movements that are strange, liquid, and basically unlike any other human on the planet.

As the final scores flashed up on the giant screen Team USA were suddenly up there bouncing and beaming and fluttering a flag, transformed into normal very happy human beings, gambolling about like kids at Christmas.

It was a lovely moment, but with something widescreen about it too. Biles and the Biles arc is an anatomy of an industry. All sporting life is there. Or rather three key elements are: the beauty of sport, the stupidity of sport and also the violence of sport.

A multiple exposure shot captures Simone Biles leaping into the air. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

But first of course, the beauty and the warmth, which were present here from the moment the teams came out, the US in white snow-woman suits, Biles looking happy and a bit goofy as she missed her cue to wave, an athlete who always feels the static field, the sense of being spectated.

Jordan Chiles was first up for the US on the vault, producing the usual miracle of total control over every hinge and tendon. And before long there were shrieks and gasps and white noise as over the public address a voice could be heard saying “Waiting for the green light will be Simone Biles”

Tokyo 2020 has of course been lurking behind all of this, the ghost Games, an abomination of a sporting event that frankly should never have been staged at all. Tokyo was essentially an act of corporate violence. Adam Peaty has spoken about the strain it put on him, as have Noah Lyles and Caeleb Dressel.

Those Covid games were a huge vacuum into which we threw all our fear and anxieties. The hunger around Biles was tangible. But Biles was also in lockdown, asked at the end of a year of isolation to perform, to dance for us, to peer down that lens at the world. She talks lucidly about the response to overtraining in that empty period, the way the movements had become all she had, all she did, until they also became meaningless.

More generally athletes have begun to talk a lot more about why and how to do this thing, about winning without pain, success without punishment. Perhaps this can be the legacy of Tokyo, the Damned Games.