Opinion | Three big ways Simone Biles changed America

I’m rooting for Biles to win it all not just because she’s the best, but also because she has changed the sport of gymnastics — and her country.

Who can forget what happened at the last Olympics in Tokyo. Biles stunned the world by dropping out of the team competition after a fluke vault. She wasn’t visibly injured. There was no limping or screaming. But she was hurting mentally. Had she kept going, she might have died. Her brain was telling her body to fly and twist, but her body wasn’t complying.

When she tried to explain this, the internet labeled her a disgrace, a traitor, a quitter. She went from “GOAT” to scapegoat for an angry world still largely locked down. Her career seemed over. Yet here she is — back and better than ever with a new tattoo on her collarbone: Maya Angelou’s “And Still I Rise.”

Her actions in Tokyo spurred a shift that affected the world well beyond sports. Suddenly, it was okay to talk about and prioritize mental health. Biles says she wouldn’t have returned to the Olympics without her family — and her therapist. She is transformed. She’s smiling more. And she’s leading her sport. Her parents opened a gym in Houston that has become a haven for Biles and many other elite gymnasts including France’s Melanie De Jesus Dos Santos and Team USA’s Jordan Chiles and alternate Joscelyn Roberson. When Olympian Suni Lee was struggling at the U.S. national championships competition this year, it was Biles, rather than Lee’s coach, who gave Lee the pep talk that made the difference.

Biles has transformed gymnastics from a girls’ to a women’s sport. In the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s, female gymnastics champions were extraordinarily young and thin. Their coaches yelled at them so much, it amounted to borderline child abuse. It took the story of widespread sexual abuse of gymnasts by team physician Larry Nassar to bring the situation into the open. But the brutality wasn’t limited to sexual abuse, especially not in the era when head coaches Bela and Marta Karolyi constantly criticized the girls’ weight and appearance, and urged them to compete while injured. Kerri Strug’s infamous vault on a broken ankle at the 1996 Atlanta Games, as Bela Karolyi yelled “You can do it!” from the sidelines looks alarming to the world today.

“You literally had one job and you couldn’t protect us,” Biles said of USA Gymnastics in 2019. She refused to continue with Karolyi-style training camps. She testified before Congress about the trauma she suffered.

In her new Netflix documentary, she says she still struggles with flashbacks when she arrives at big competitions. But she has found her voice and pushed for change in her sport. Her new coaches put mental fitness first. Her gym has pioneered new training methods. Biles even helped change Team USA leotards — from girly pink to patriotic colors with higher necks and a more elegant, mature style.

She’s also helped diversify the sport, inspiring young gymnasts of all backgrounds to compete. Biles’s personal story is powerful: She lived in foster care until her grandparents adopted her. She had overcome a great deal well before social media trolls criticized her hair, her clothes, her dance moves and even her husband. Today, there is a calm about her. She lets her flips and turns, scores and medals do the talking. China has boasted that the men’s team it is sending to Paris is the most decorated, with 37 Olympic and World Championship medals among its five stars. Biles has won 37 medals all on her own.

America loves a good comeback story, and they don’t come much better than Biles’s. I’m rooting for her to win — for herself, for America and, most of all, to remind the world what a strong woman can do.