What You Missed if You Didn’t Watch Olympic Gymnastics (2024)

Even though it has been a remarkably slow couple of weeks for national and international news (… not!), I suppose that some of you still, somehow, had better things to do than wake up at zero dark thirty to watch jacked young people flip upside down on the other side of the world. Maybe you have a “job” or three. Perhaps the small human beings in your charge had to be “kept from cracking their heads open and then setting their own cracked-open heads on fire.” Maybe, for various reasons, you just can’t get up off the couch. I get it! And I got you.

For the past two weeks, I’ve arisen at ungodly hours, and gasped in both awe and horror, as my favorite athletes in the world either triumphed or crashed on the globe’s largest stage. I still can’t believe that it’s over—but as I nurse my gymnastics hangover and Simone Biles babysits her (mild spoiler alert) four new medals, let us review the most defining moments of these Games’ only sport. Wait, what? Really? Sorry, ahem, one of these Games’ best sports.

Women’s Gymnastics Is for Grown-Ups!

The first thing you might notice about the five-woman team the U.S. program sent to Paris this year is that four of those five women (and one of their alternates!) had been to the Olympics before. Multiple unusual circ*mstances, including several unfortunate injuries at Olympic trials, had to align in order to send Jordan Chiles, Jade Carey, and Suni Lee back to the Olympics alongside a mentally and physically top-tier Simone Biles. But what resulted, a team with an average age of 22 (the oldest the U.S. has fielded in modern history!), was actually reflective of a broader trend in the sport toward careers with more longevity. Gone, mostly, are the days of bird-bodied homeschool freshmen, starved and berated and treated as if they are disposable. Why? Well, it’s complicated.

Simone Biles Competed Injured

So much for the pitiful chorus of (mostly) male four-year gymnastics experts who called Biles a “quitter” in Tokyo when she wisely withdrew from several competitions after suffering from the gymnastics version of vertigo. “Maybe if my ankle was fractured,” Biles told the Netflix camera crew in her recent documentary, “I would have still [competed], but that wasn’t the case.” Because Biles suffered from an injury nobody could see, a small but loud-and-wrong minority crowed about her “quitting on her team” until the moment she took the floor in qualifications in Paris—whereupon she promptly injured her calf warming up for floor exercise. There was a point in the competition when the GOAT gave the entire gymnastics world heart palpitations as she literally crawled down the vault runway. But then YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHAT HAPPENED.

The U.S. Men Finally Won a Medal, and a Bespectacled New Star Was Born

Every Olympics, a few surprise heroes emerge for reasons nobody can predict, and Paris was no exception. All at once, the people of this great nation remembered that men’s gymnastics exists, thanks to the last-minute hit from a mild-mannered Rubik’s Cube ace whose dual diagnoses of coloboma and strabismus mean he doesn’t see very well without his glasses—but, like many athletes, he removes them to compete. In Stephen Nedoroscik’s case, his competition placement—last to go on the Americans’ final event, the dread pommel horse, which has claimed the dreams of many a man—combined with his unmistakable Clark Kent vibes, meant that Pommel Horse Guy will go down in history as a star. But how exactly did he find himself in this position, and what exactly is so maddening about the pommel horse? I’m so glad you asked.

The American Women Got Their Redemption! But Was There an Asterisk?

It was on vault, the first event in Tokyo team finals, where Biles suffered the rapid-onset “twisties” in midair and wisely withdrew from most of the rest of the Olympics for the deeply selfish reason of not wanting to break her neck on live international television. So the pressure was on even more than usual when Biles took to the runway three years later, in the Paris women’s team final. And then (mild spoiler) she killed it! And so did her teammates! Boy did the American women win. They won all over the place! They called these Games their “redemption tour,” but as the newly monikered “Golden Girls” proceeded directly from the medal stand to TikTok, one question kept nagging at me. What if the Russians had been there? Was this 1984 all over again? The question nagged at me so incessantly that I did math to find out.

Biles Faced Down Some Actual Competition for the First Time in Her Entire Career

For the overwhelming majority of the decade that I have spent beholding the greatness of Simone Biles, the only actual competition she’s had has been … Simone Biles. She won the all-around in Rio in 2016 by 2 full points; she took the 2018 World Championships by almost 2 points (with two falls and a kidney stone); she destroyed 2019 Worlds, again, by more than 2 points. In every major international competition until very recently, Biles’ margin of error was so great that losing required the possibility (and sometimes reality!) of multiple falls; she threw her stratospherically difficult skills—including five eponymous elements—literally just because she could. And then came Rebeca Andrade. Could Brazil’s superstar actually beat the greatest to ever do it in the individual all-around final? It was possible, and I explained how. And indeed, the GOAT’s margin of error shrank to the point that for a second, I thought it had disappeared—then, on the last day of event finals, well …

Apparatus Finals Ended In an Iconic Moment of Sportsmanship and Joy

On the final day of the gymnastics competition’s grueling six-meet schedule, the athletes’ exhaustion gunned for a gold medal of its own, flinging otherwise-brilliant gymnasts off their signature apparatus left, right, and center. The balance beam and men’s high bar were both obviously jinxed (there is no other explanation), and in the Games’ last gymnastics meet, the floor exercise final, it came down to one question: Can Simone Biles stay in bounds? That question was answered by what turned out to be the most iconic image of the Games: Biles and teammate Jordan Chiles bowing down to their new queen.

The News Cycle Missed Some Stellar Moments, but I Didn’t

With all the excitement of the Biles-led redemption tour and Pommel Horse Guy and a podium moment worthy of the Louvre itself—not to mention, you know, attention drawn to the bonkers U.S. presidential race and a continuing deluge of harrowing news from around the world—there were more than a few gymnastics moments that just didn’t fit into the timeline. Well, I made room in the timeline to give the unsung heroes of Bercy Arena the shine they deserved—and to hazard a guess at the one question Simone Biles correctly refuses to answer: What’s next for gymnastics?

Simone Biles Is Tired but Possibly Not Retired

Biles is sure of only two things right now: that she’s going to savor this moment, and that she is never competing the double pike vault again. (In the Netflix documentary, she revealed that she is afraid she might die literally every time she throws that skill!) And while 27 is by no means old in any universe, for an Olympic champion gymnast it is old enough that Biles is not sure she’ll ever compete again at all. She did, however, refuse to shut the door entirely on the possibility of a home-country comeback. So, not unlike Tokyo, we leave gymnastics in the Paris Olympics on an uncertain note. However, very much unlike Tokyo, that uncertainty brings with it a deep sense of vindication, satisfaction, and relief. And if that isn’t worthy of a rest—whether that nap lasts an hour, four years, or forever—I don’t know what is.