Simone Biles is leading the charge of older gymnasts at the Olympics who are redefining their sport

It still happens to Simone Biles. Even now, after two Olympics, six world championships, and a decade-plus in the spotlight.

The most decorated gymnast of all time and the face of the U.S. Olympic movement will be chatting with someone when her age comes up.

“They’re like ‘Oh my god, you’re so cute, you’re a kid’” Biles told The Associated Press with a somewhat exasperated laugh. “Like I want to say ’I’m grown. I’m an adult now. I’m 27 years old.’”

Yet the perception of Biles as a pony-tailed prodigy persists even as the demographics at the top of her sport shift.

Maybe it’s because all but one of the last 13 Olympic champions have been teenagers, including Biles when she triumphed in Rio de Janeiro eight years ago and U.S. teammate and good friend Sunisa Lee, who was 18 when she edged Brazilian star Rebeca Andrade in a taut final in Tokyo in 2021.

They’re both back on what they’ve labeled a “ redemption tour.” When Biles and Lee step onto the floor at Bercy Arena on Sunday for Olympic qualifying, they’ll be joined by 2020 Olympic floor champion Jade Carey (24) and 2020 Olympic silver medalist Jordan Chiles (23) along with newcomer Hezly Rivera, at 16 by far the youngest member of the oldest team the Americans have ever sent to the Games.

Gone are the days when six-time Olympic medalist Aly Raisman was dubbed the team grandma in 2016 at all of 22, a moniker Biles jokingly admitted she now needs to apologize for using.

“Like I’m ancient now,” Biles said. “Forget grandma, we’re past that.”

A rapid evolution

Improved training, the easing of rules around name, image and likeness rights for college athletes, and the power of social media are allowing the top Americans to extend their careers.

Carey, Lee and Chiles have spent a significant portion of their time since Tokyo competing at the NCAA level, once thought of strictly as a way for former Olympians to gently ease into retirement.

Not so much anymore. Relaxed NIL rules meant Chiles, Lee and Carey could cash in on their Tokyo success without sacrificing their college eligibility. The frequency of NCAA meets and the emphasis on execution over difficulty let Chiles refine more basic skills while also getting invaluable competition experience without burning out.

“Like, now you can do college and you can go back to elite and go back and forth,” she said. “I think that is something that’s cool, and all because you can rest your body in a way.”

A new paradigm

Perhaps the biggest reason may be more fundamental and perhaps more impactful and lasting.

The climate and the culture around elite gymnastics are evolving. So are the power dynamics as the sport becomes more athlete-centric, moving away from a paradigm of authoritarian coach and talented-but-dutiful prodigy that defined success at the highest level for so long.

“People have stopped telling them that they can’t do it,” said Aimee Boorman, who coached Biles earlier in her career and is the co-founder of GIGA, a professional women’s gymnastics league that will launch in 2025. ”They’ve stopped telling them they’re washed up at 17 or 18. … The stigma of ‘little girls in pretty boxes’ is not a thing anymore.”

Biles has been asked repeatedly since she returned to the sport last summer why she’s doing this far closer to her 30th birthday than her 20th. She keeps coming back to some version of the same answer: “Because I can.”

“Nobody is forcing me to do it,” Biles said after U.S. Olympic trials. “I wake up every day and choose to grind in the gym and come out here and perform for myself.”

It’s the way that she grinds, however, that has changed. She uses her time more efficiently at the gym, partly out of choice to help a body that’s been at this for 20 years and partly because her crowded personal schedule demands it.

A worldwide trend

The reality is what Biles and company are doing in the U.S. has been increasingly commonplace internationally.

While Oksana Chusovitina remains an outlier — the 49-year-old Uzbek will miss her first Olympics since the 1988 Games but is still pointing toward 2028 in Los Angeles — there are plenty of women in their 20s and 30s who will try to join the Americans on the medal stand.

Andrade is 25 and the biggest threat to Biles’ claiming the all-around title. Sanne Wevers of the Netherlands turns 33 in September but remains one of the finest balance beam workers in the world. Ellie Black of Canada will be 29 in September. Paris marks her fourth Olympics, but in some ways she comes as good as ever.

Perhaps happier than ever too, a not unimportant part of the equation.

Black spends less time practicing on a given actual apparatus and more time focusing on “strength conditioning,” something she wouldn’t mind seeing adopted by younger athletes.

“I think it’s just finding that balance, making sure that we’re strong,” Black said. “We’re not overtraining. We’re not doing an insane amount of reps. We’re also not spending our whole complete lives in the gym.”

The other side

Laurent Landi, who has coached Biles alongside his wife Cecile since late 2017, believes there is another element at play too as gymnasts wrangle with how to best prepare for competition.

There was a sense in the U.S. in the wake of the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal that the training pendulum swung from too strict to too loose. Biles told the AP in 2021 that it felt like “a horse out of the barn: you can’t get it back in.”

While Biles’ stance has softened of late, describing it more as a generational difference and that there is no one right way to succeed, Landi thinks one of the reasons the U.S. team is so veteran-heavy is because the next wave isn’t ready or willing to push themselves to the top. Though he allows the concern is American-specific.

“This is why you see the older generation, they are hanging in,” he said. “They realize that, ‘Oh yeah, if you want to (excel) you should do ‘This, this, this.’

“Is it going to be hard? Yes. Is it going to be hell? Yes,” he continued. “But you need to stick to it to (get) to a stage where, ‘OK, I can do it.” And those kids don’t even know anymore how to really push themselves to that limit.”

Landi stressed that no athlete wants to reach the point where it needs to get hard before it starts to get easy but believes “that’s part of sports, that’s part of life, too.”

How long can they go?

The end will come soon enough for Biles and everyone else. She’s keeping quiet for now on whether Paris will be her final competition. While the pull to dive fully into her next chapter with her husband Chicago Bears safety Jonathan Owens is real, she’s also aware that once the ride is over, there is no hopping back on.

It can be a difficult path to navigate, one Elisabeth Seitz is pondering as she spends her fourth trip to the Olympics as a TV commentator after narrowly missing making the five-woman German team.

Like Biles, Seitz is hit with questions back home that run along the lines of, as she put it, “you’re still a gymnast, get a real job.”

The thing is, the 30-year-old Seitz believes she’s in the best shape of her life after recovering from a torn Achilles tendon last fall. Her experience helped her recover from an injury in eight months. She knows what she can do, and what she can’t do.

Why would she want to walk away from something that still has a powerful hold on her before she wants to? Before she has to?

In that way, she sounds just like Biles and the rest of her peers helping redefine who can — and who can’t — do this for a living.

“I just love gymnastics,” she said. “I just love the sport. That’s why I’m still doing it.”

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AP Summer Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games