How Simone Biles transcended gymnastics to become a true Olympic great

Staring down the paltry four inches of wood beneath her feet during Friday’s all-around gymnastics final, Simone Biles shuffled on the spot to steady herself one final time before she completed a nerveless beam routine.

Occasionally when the pressure mounts, before she ends her beam set with her famous full twisting double somersault dismount, Biles will calm her nerves and sharpen her concentration with a deep, full-body exhalation. But this time it was notably absent. During the most consequential routine Simone Biles will ever complete in her career, she felt no need to waste the breath. She was ready. And so the American shuffled, she whipped her body back into two back handsprings, and then she catapulted straight into the most effortless, most difficult beam dismount in the world.

From the beginning of 2015, it has been clear that there would be almost no chance, barring injury or a complete meltdown, that Biles would fail to win the Olympic all-around title. In a sport where the greatest championships are decided by scores which are separated by the tiniest tenths, Biles wins by full points and with the heartening knowledge that, in most cases, she could fall and still win the major titles. But if she was ever going to even entertain the prospect of failure, it would have been right there on the beam. The floor routine that followed is so easy for her that when she conquered the beam, nothing else needed to be resolved.

Biles did indeed waltz through her floor routine to victory, and since then she has taken her total gold medal haul to four, with vault and floor event final titles accompanying her team and all-around triumphs. And even when she briefly revealed her humanity in the individual beam event, landing on a front somersault with half of both feet dangling off and throwing her body weight off the beam, her fight kicked in and she grabbed onto all four inches of wood for dear life, somehow holding onto a bronze medal in the process.

In a sport so niche and specific that gymnasts achievements are usually only endlessly compared between each other, Biles this week has managed to transcend it all. Her week will go down as one of the greatest Olympic performances in history from one of its greatest athletes.

There is one central factor behind her domination in Rio and an unprecedented three consecutive World Championship all-around titles in 2013, 2014 and 2015, in addition to a haul of 14 world medals across those three years. At its most basic ethos, the entire concept of Olympic-level gymnasts is to execute the most complex, seemingly impossible tricks, and to ensure they appear as effortless and seamless as possible.

This has only been heightened in recent years with the change of the gymnastics code of points. Gymnastics has always been associated with the perfect 10, this year marks the 40th anniversary of Nadia Comaneci’s iconic haul of perfect 10s in the 1976 Montreal Olympics, but in 2006 the sport changed its’ ‘code of points’ to become a scoring system with no limits. Where gymnasts previously had a ceiling to their potential scores, today those scores are infinite. They rest on the difficulty value the gymnasts construct for their routines, then the judges mark the execution of every skill out of 10.

It was generally assumed that gymnasts performing higher-difficulty routines tend to commit more execution errors in the attempt to complete these stratospheric skills, but with the ease with which she completes exceptionally tough routines, Biles has essentially cracked the code of modern gymnastics. Armed with sculpted muscles that bulge from every inch of her tiny 4ft 8in frame, Biles combines the most difficult skills in the world on floor, vault and beam with technique so pure that, in stark contrast to messy power gymnasts like Aly Raisman, Biles simultaneously possesses the greatest execution with the fewest form errors. The combination is unbeatable, and it’s why she hasn’t been beaten in three years.

It is for this reason that Biles’ concluding floor routine was regarded as infallible. In Tuesday’s final, the eight best floor workers in the world congregated to decide the best in the world for another year.

On the floor, gymnasts usually put their strongest tumbling passes up first and descend to their weakest passes at the tired end of the routine. Drawn to compete seventh out of the eight finalists, Biles watched gymnast after gymnast throw down the current supremely difficult first tumbling pass of choice, the double twisting double back somersault. Some barely eked around their double doubles, others landed with their head level with their knees. When it was finally time, Biles stepped to the podium and, for the umpteenth time demonstrated exactly why she is so far beyond the rest.

Her own double double was the highest, it was the cleanest and the one landed with most ease. It was also her third and penultimate pass, her third-ranked pass behind two others that include her own eponymous skill, the Biles.

After building her career and palmares in the vacuum of the gymnastics world, the American’s transition into superstardom has been more seamless than could have been imagined. Her Twitter follower list has more than quadrupled and she graces multiple commercials in each maddeningly frequent US advert break.

But at the end of her Olympic experience, there are still questions to be asked of her. Biles is only 19 and in her fourth year as a senior competitor, but the shelf lives of gymnasts are so notoriously fleeting that she was considered a veteran even before she stepped foot in Rio.

Before 2012 all-around champion Gabby Douglas successfully qualified for the US Olympic team this year, no all-around Olympic champion had returned to competition since Nadia Comaneci in 1980 and most hadn’t even bothered. After achieving the highest honour in the sport, most female gymnasts find that the pounding and destruction the uniquely gruelling training required of a gymnast wreaks on the body is simply not worth it.

Biles has been fairly injury free and her routines remain far from the limits of her ability, but a decision to continue would be as significant as one to stop, and there is no doubt that her newly acquired sponsors will push her to the former. Until then, Simone Biles clocks out of her first Games simply as the greatest to ever do it, the woman who stared down the beam and conquered the Olympics. No matter how her story ends, this chapter has been legendary.