Thanks to the global pandemic, the greatest gymnast in history were forced to spend part of the last year trying to find a balance in life previously associated with work.
“I’ve lived, I’ve traveled, I’ve done things I couldn’t do because of gymnastics,” she said. Now, while preparing for the 2021 Olympics – perhaps the last (!!!) – the 24-year-old is approaching his sport with renewed excitement. Twenty-five World Cup medals, four unprecedented moves named after him, and a level of performance so daring that the bar has been raised for the entire sport.
And he’s still at the height of his game, which makes him one of the best all-rounders of our time, a racer whose name will forever share the same passion as Serena Williams and Michael Jordan and Michael Phelps.
But with all the talk about gold and GOATs, it’s easy to forget that this is a woman who is redefining the limits of the human body while bearing the mental burden of competing for an organization that has failed to protect their athletes – and them – from a documented culture of abuse. And that is before the pressures of the 2020 coup and the fate of the Tokyo Olympics, which will be Biles’ last, became uncertain.
But more on that later. Right now, like the rest of us, Simone Biles is signing Zoom from home, waiting for him to return. For the past year, Biles has used his unexpected visits to buy his own home in Texas, a room he designed for himself and his two French women, Lilo and Rambo. When we met, he was sitting here, comfortable in the sun-filled room, a vast gray sweater slung over his shoulders, as calm as we were just in our room.
Beals spent most of the quarantine here in the troubled early days of the pandemic, but while we were baking banana bread and dyeing T-shirts, he struggled with the fact that his chance to end the career he had sacrificed his entire life could become a reality. He was stolen from the pandemic.
Dealing with procrastination means pushing your body to the limit for another year, and Beals’ job relies on his body, a finely calibrated machine backed by thousands of hours of training to get his hands on the right time every four years to climax.