The Olympic Gymnastics Finale Rescued a Day of Total Carnage (2024)

This is part of Slate’s 2024 Olympics coverage. Read morehere.

Do you enjoy watching the best gymnasts in the world compete on the best events that they can do—even if they do it in a deeply exhausted (some might say dangerous) state? If so, then you’re in luck, and Olympic apparatus finals are for you!

By the time the beleaguered competitors, men and women both, took to Paris’ Bercy Arena for the third and mercifully final day of these finals Monday—parallel bars and the dread high bar for men; floor exercise and the accursed balance beam for women—the games of the XXXIII Olympiad had already played host to five grueling days of meets per gender, with precious little (or sometimes no) rest in between.

Sure, the apparatus final-touch warmup is back, meaning that at least these gymnasts no longer have to risk medals (and limbs) both exhausted and having not touched the competition apparatus the day they compete, but still. Adrenaline can carry a person only so far, and by the end of a six-competition international meet, the gymnasts are crashing as hard as my 2013 Nissan Leaf when it drops below 10 miles of charge. I’m exhausted just watching them.

And this is why event finals are often a chaotic, shocking mess. They’re meant to showcase each apparatus in all its best possible glory, along with the gymnasts who either excel on said apparatus or don’t even train on the others. But after more than a week of competition, they instead feel at best like a bonus meet, and at worst a Hell House put on by your local megachurch, except every Hell Room is just your favorite gymnast in the world eating mat on their signature skill, over and over again.

All right, let me calm down for a second. The final two days of gymnastics in Paris were not all carnage. We got to see Suni Lee return to the medal podium (bronze, on uneven bars on Sunday), and the first gymnastics medal for the entire continent of Africa, thanks to a breathtaking, otherworldly bar routine by Algeria’s Kaylia Nemour. (The French Gymnastics Federation’s big mistake is world history’s gain!) Also Sunday, on men’s vault, we got to see Carlos Yulo win the second gymnastics medal in history for the Philippines (both in this Games, gold, and by him). And on parallel bars Monday, we got to see Ukrainian Illia Kovtun serve difficulty worth an unthinkable 7.0, to win a silver medal for his war-torn homeland. We also got to see a meteoric new talent on high bar, Ángel Barajas, a Colombian teenager whose gamble to throw every possible skill he knew in succession paid off for another historic medal. We got to see Italy’s Alice D’Amato, who missed out on all-around bronze by a heartbreaking 0.132 points, be the last (and just about only) woman standing on balance beam to make history, once again, for her country. And of course everyone’s favorite glasses daddy Stephen Nedoroscik came back 8 million years ago (on Saturday) to clinch yet another bronze medal for the U.S. men.

But then, good Lord, there were the falls. Especially on that final day, and especially on the high bar and balance beam, it felt as if more people put their faces on the mat than their feet! The beam in particular was—how you say?—le cursed! First, gold-medal favorite Zhou Yaqin, whose breathtaking difficulty and gorgeous form should have made her a shoo-in to win, fell; then Suni Lee did; then, horror of horrors, Simone Biles. To add a deeply petty insult to injury, Biles, who would not have medaled anyway, was docked an absurd 0.3 for not saluting the judges for long enough after she finished. (Numerous incredulous replays and screen grabs have shown that this was potential judge saltiness about Biles’ understandable “bad attitude” for three seconds, after she had had a gold medal in her sight and lost it.)

Lee’s fall was more painful—the dreaded “splitting the beam,” which is exactly what it sounds like and really smarts—but Biles’ was more shocking. Yes, she has historically had trouble on some beam skills; in 2016 the difficult Barani knocked her down to bronze, and afterward she downgraded to an aerial that has still caused multiple issues. But in more than a decade of beholding her compete, I have never seen more than a vague wobble on her backward series—a back handspring into two layouts—which Monday went so off course that she had to not only balk the second layout but come off the beam entirely.

After the competition, Biles and other athletes explained that the Bercy was eerily quiet, too quiet, unsettlingly quiet, for athletes who usually incorporate background noise into their concentration process (really!). Instead, the primary sounds they could hear were, ironically, the incessant shushings from the phalanx of middle school librarians who were apparently airlifted in to cause havoc. These were, however, not excuses; all athletes involved remain steadfastly aware of the balance beam’s general motto, which is sh*t happens. And did it ever, with not only Zhou finishing in second (which, trust me, for her level of mastery is disappointing!) but no Americans on the podium at all. (Italy’s Manila Esposito won bronze, though! Happy for her!)

Then came floor. I have spent this entire Games hammering home the straight-up fact that the resplendent Brazilian superstar Rebeca Andrade—in addition to having the best leotards, the best makeup, the best hair, and the best pronunciation of my given name (HHHHEY-BEY-cah)—has competed the entirety of this time testing the boundaries of Biles’ margin of error. Until Monday, Biles had not committed enough errors to test this hypothesis. And then, she did.

To be fair, Biles was competing injured; she has competed these entire Olympics sporting tape on the calf that gave her so much trouble in qualifying that at one point she was crawling down the vault runway. After she tweaked that calf once again while warming up her Biles 2 (a double flip with three twists that often flies 12 feet in the air) and finishing square on ass, I knew two things for certain. One: Simone Biles did not go through all that therapy and training not to beast through one more routine! And two: Her landings were not going to be that good.

As someone who once competed an entire season on a sprained ankle, I can tell you firsthand that when an injury screams at you on takeoff, your body is going to reflexively wince on landing, and that is what Biles did on two of her four passes when her turn came, hopping out of control and, more importantly, with both feet out of bounds. Andrade, though her difficulty is considerably lower than Biles’, competed possibly the best floor routine I have ever seen her do.

Still, a hit routine is a hit routine—and sportsmanship is sportsmanship—so, despite Biles knowing in her deepest soul that those four feet out of bounds (–0.6), plus numerous landing hops and steps, meant that the gold medal was likely out of play, she was all smiles, first when she saluted the judges for a full 30 seconds in a deeply petty-meets-petty moment straight out of the classic gymnastics movie Stick It, then when cameras caught her audibly saying, “I think Rebeca’s got this one.” And Rebeca, indeed, got that one, by a mere 0.033 of a point, reversing the two front-runners’ podium order for their final matchup and allowing the Hino Nacional Brasileiro to ring out in Bercy—but not before Biles and surprise bronze medalist Jordan Chiles literally bowed in unison to their competitor and friend.

That silver on floor makes Biles’ total Olympic haul 11 medals, putting her behind only Věra Čáslavská and Larisa Latynina on the all-time-most list (and the sport has evolved in difficulty a lot since they competed). But on that one event, the GOAT also leaves Paris having been not so much unseated as co-GOATed. I am comfortable saying that Andrade is the second-greatest gymnast of her (or possibly any) generation, by what has turned out to be a much smaller margin than casual fans could ever have expected. She is, by most measures, better now than Biles was in 2016, when the GOAT epithets started getting thrown around. Of course, Biles herself is now also better than she was as a 19-year-old in Rio because she has spent the better part of the past decade pushing the difficulty and excellence of this sport so far that for most of that time, everyone else has just been trying to catch up. And when Andrade finally did? Biles said Andrade was “queen” and that she herself leaves Paris “very happy, proud, and even more excited that it’s over, the stress of it.”

So what, pray tell, is over? This may be the last we ever see of Biles or Andrade—though both have pointedly left the door open for 2028, when Andrade will be 29 and Biles 31. However, Biles has already said that her terrifying, exhilarating double-pike vault is as retired as Tom Brady (who watched her compete it); Andrade has also said that although she won’t yet retire, she will probably not compete the all-around again. Will the Brazilian return to the vault, treating Los Angeles to the mythical Yurchenko triple twist? Will Biles come back just to stay in bounds on floor? It will be worth waiting four years to find out. I just hope that if we are lucky enough ever to see these two gymnasts again, for what will certainly then have to be their last time out—it has to be, right?—they rest up plenty for their rematch.