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A FULL REVOLUTION
In the run-up to the Olympics, Simone Biles is transforming gymnastics.
A new scoring system rewards difficulty, and Biles is taking advantage.
One night in April, at the Pacific Rim Championships, in Everett, Washington, the nineteen-year-old American gymnast Simone Biles approached the balance beam. A competitor from New Zealand had just finished her floor routine, set to the theme from "Game of Thrones," and now Biles, who wore a pink leotard studded with more than four thousand Swarovski crystals, looked sternly down the length of the four-inch-wide balance beam, on which she was about to perform nine flips. "It comes down to this," Al Trautwig, the NBC commentator, said.
That wasn't strictly true. Biles was one of the last medal contenders to compete, but she was so far ahead in the competition that anything short of catastrophe would earn her gold. Since the world last paid attention to gymnastics, at the 2012 Olympics, Biles has become the first female gymnast to win three straight World Championships. If she wins three medals at this summer's Olympics, in Rio de Janeiro, she will become the most decorated American gymnast of all time. "I feel absolutely terrible saying this," Paul Ziert, the publisher of International Gymnast , said. "But if she doesn't win five of the six Olympic gold medals it would be a disappointment."
A low murmur began to build in the crowd as Biles revolved two and a half times on one foot, her other leg stretched parallel to the beam, then flipped while twisting a hundred and eighty degrees, all on a plank narrower than a standard American curb. The thrill of watching high-level gymnasts comes in part from the threat of disaster underlying the beauty of their routines--a strain that is often evident in the gymnasts' faces. Biles, however, projects a sense of assured inevitability. "It's like there's no effort," Steve Penny, the head of USA Gymnastics, said, seated next to me in the front row.
Gymnastics is one of the most popular televised events of the Olympics--some fans tune in for the acrobatics, and others for the tears--but its punishing physicality is better understood in person. When Biles executed a flawless back handspring, followed by a pair of backflips, it...