HOFFMAN ESTATES, Ill. — As she felt something she feared she would never feel again, Simone Biles heard something she feared she would never hear again. She was twisting. And the crowd was cheering.

It was only during Friday’s practice before Saturday’s U.S. Classic, her first competition in two years and two days. But it meant that by the time the greatest gymnast in history launched herself onto the uneven bars on Saturday to open the event, officially marking her return, she knew she could do it.

It seems hard to believe now that she obliterated the competition with a score of 59.1, ahead of second place by the same margin as No. 2 to No. 17, while the sold-out audience of about 7,200 thundered like it was a Taylor Swift concert—on the same day she brought at least one young gymnast to tears just by saying hello. But Biles began the weekend unsure of how they would receive her.

“What shocks me the most is everyone’s so supportive,” she said. “In the crowd, all the girls, all of the signs … the outpouring of love and support that I had on Twitter, on Instagram and in the arena was just really shocking and surprising to me, that they still have so much belief in me, they still love me and it just makes my heart warm. Because it’s nice to come out here and have all that support, especially in a time like this where I was really nervous to compete again. I can’t ask for more.”

In some ways Biles was the favorite on Saturday, the way she has been at every event she’s entered for more than a decade. But after what happened at the delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021, no one was quite sure what to expect. The pressure and isolation ate at her there, and at some point “the wires just snapped,” she said at the time. She lost her ability to locate herself in the air, an ailment gymnasts call the “twisties”—a mental block akin to the yips in golf and baseball, but if yanking a putt could cause you to break your neck. She withdrew from event after event. Finally, after jettisoning the twisting elements from her balance beam routine, she gutted through it to earn a bronze medal.

She headlined her post-Olympic tour, performing only skills she could land safely. Then she stopped. Most fans and pundits had supported her, but a vocal minority called her weak. The slights wounded her. And she felt she had let down even the people close to her—the person who had called her a “gold medal token,” she said, and the people who sometimes criticized her for not being cheerful enough when the other athletes were down. She declined to name those people but said they were on “our inside team. That was really tough.”

Gymnastics scared her, and it was not much fun anymore. But in September, she tentatively returned to the gym, partly to regain her fitness, partly to prove to herself that she could. She took off most of October and November, then played around with some combinations in December.

“I really feel like [coach Laurent Landi] is always one step ahead of me,” she said. “So every time I would come into the gym, he was like, ‘O.K., so I have some set routines for you.’ And I’m like, ‘What? I’m literally just trying to get in shape!’”

But by January, she was ready to return to practicing twice a day. In March, around the time she turned 26, she took her other coach, Cecile Landi, to dinner at a Mexican restaurant to discuss a return to competition.

“When [margaritas] get in the mix, who knows what you’re gonna say?” Biles recalled with a laugh. They decided that after her May wedding to Green Bay Packers defensive back Jonathan Owens, she would “go full force,” she said. “Kind of put life on hold.”

So it was that after two months of full-time training, as she continues to recover from the most challenging stretch of her career, with watered-down versions of most of her routines, Biles produced a score that would have won the 2022 world championships. (She also qualified for the national championships later this month. USA Gymnastics will select the five-woman world championships team in September, and that event runs into early October.)

“I think I’m in better shape than I was in 2021,” she said. “Mentally and physically.”

Biles is so physically superior to her competition that the International Gymnastics Federation has artificially devalued her skills, likely to discourage other gymnasts from trying them and hurting themselves. Her biggest problem when she does the Yurchenko double pike on vault, which no other woman has ever even attempted in competition, and which will become the fifth skill named after her when she lands it in an international competition, is that she is too powerful and sometimes overrotates it. But the mental side has required her to do a kind of work she has never done before. She meets with a therapist once a week. She has overcome the twisties by sheer will.

“I still get a little bit nervous, but I think it’s just, like, subconscious,” she said. “But other than that, I know my body is capable, prepared, all of that stuff. So I just have to trust my training.”

She trusted her training on Saturday, although not at first. “I thought I was gonna shit bricks,” she said, laughing. But she and her teammates at the World Champions Centre, the Houston-area gym her family owns, kept one another light. She lost $200 betting 17-year-old Zoe Miller the younger girl would not dance after finishing her bar routine. Biles cracked jokes and did quite a few of her own dance moves. She briefly got lost as she trotted in for introductions, and she cackled at herself. And then as she completed each routine, she felt calmer. By the time she finished, dramatically, with the Yurchenko double pike on vault, she was grinning. Her parents and her coaches and her agent and the medical staff felt emotional at that point, she said, because the vault was the apparatus on which her twisties first manifested in Tokyo. But she was just having fun.

She got about 30 seconds of that before someone asked what this means for the Paris Olympics, which kick off in 51 weeks.

“Right now, I think I should just embrace what happened today,” she said. “Be happy for me, for my teammates. We’ll go into championships in a couple of weeks. Work on those tweaks that we have [from] today. But I’m in a really good spot and who knows? I’m not going to think so far ahead. It’s just like when you get married, they ask you when you’re having a baby. You come to Classics, they’re asking you about the Olympics. I think we’re just trying to take it one step at a time.”

Still, she later talked about Paris as if she would be there. “I do feel a little bit more positive going into this cycle, or I guess if I jump into it, with the resources that we have and everything going,” she said. “I think it’ll just be different. We’re still dealing with COVID but not to the [same extent]. We’re gonna get to have our family and our friends go and we’ll get to be in the village. So the experience will be so different. We won’t be stuck in our thoughts all day. We’ll get to focus on our gymnastics and that’s it. Because I think Tokyo was really hard for a lot of athletes, because after what happened to me, walking around the village, all the athletes [were] coming up to me, [telling me they were] having similar experiences, but it was unspoken. It was just kind of silent demons that we were all fighting. But getting to talk to people and realizing we’re kind of all going through this together was nice, but it’s sad because it’s the pinnacle of your career. 

“You should be on top of the world, and everybody’s kind of dreading it and so sad. But I feel grateful that I get this opportunity to come back out here and compete in front of a crowd, because I truly didn’t believe I’d be back here competing at all.”

Her joy, and the fans’, seemed to peak as she completed that Yurchenko double pike on vault. As she stuck the landing, the crowd roared and she beamed. She danced off the mat. She flung her fists into the air. And then she did a little twist.

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