Ahead of the Tokyo Olympics, Simone Biles’ career had been so remarkable for so long that the only surprises left seemed to be just how many outrageous new skills she’d surprise us with, just because she could do them. Her difficulty and execution have been astonishing for eight years, so it’s hardly surprising that many viewers (some might say too many) took her greatness for granted. Of course Biles is going to do things we’ve never seen any human do before; of course she’s going to whoosh though her astonishing number of twists with amazing power and grace; of course she’s going to push the sport past new frontiers we did not even know were there.
That’s part of what made her withdrawal from the team and individual event finals in Tokyo so shocking. And it’s why her announcement on Monday—that she would compete in the Olympic finals on balance beam, the last remaining event for which she’d qualified—brought such exhilaration (and, for some of us, nerves). Amid arguably the biggest shock she’d ever given the sport, many again took for granted that the past had shown us how the future was going to go—that she was done. But surprise! Lucky us. She came back, (probably) one last time.
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