The Olympic Games of Paris start now, and if they won’t bring the world together over the next two-and-half weeks — not this world — they might at least help us think about all the trouble in it a little less. Once again, this time from Paris, we will watch athletes like Simone Biles, who might end up the headliner of them all, do something great in sports. And that is always worth watching, every single time.
Of course Biles is not the only American story. There are so many other athletes and stories, just from our country, about which to care, far too many to list here. We will watch Sha’Carri Richardson try to run faster in the 100 meters than any woman in the world, outrun once and for all the ridiculous ban because of marijuana that kept her from competing against the world in Tokyo. We have always been so much a country of runners and jumpers. Three years later, but not too late, we will finally get the chance, on a stage like this, to see Richardson of Dallas chase gold.
We will watch the great Katie Ledecky try to dominate the rest of the world in women’s swimming, perhaps win an almost ridiculous fourth straight gold medal in the 800-meter freestyle. All she has done so far in her career is win seven gold medals and three silver, to go with 26 world championship medals. When she jumps in the water again in Paris, swimming will feel like the same kind of main event it once did when Michael Phelps was back in the water at the Olympics.
So it is Sha’Carri and Katie. It is finally getting the chance to see LeBron James and Steph Curry on the same court, trying to win a championship, this time of the whole world, together after all the winning they have done in the NBA.
But with all that, Simone Biles will be the one from the United States to watch in Paris, looking to go all the way back to the top of her sport, literally reaching for the sky, three years after she was so afraid of crashing to the earth in Tokyo. That was where, as we all learned, this young woman’s mid-career crisis really was occurring in mid-air.
In the run-up to those Games in Tokyo, you felt as if there was Biles on the U.S. team and everybody else; as if all of the coverage on all of NBC’s platforms would be built around the most gifted gymnast our country had ever produced and the world had ever seen. But then, and even though she would come away with medals in the team competition and on the balance beam, what we didn’t know, but would sure find out, was that once she was in the air, doing things that really only she had ever done, how afraid she was.
It was because of something known to gymnasts as the “twisties.” She would be doing a vault and spin through the air and not have any idea if she was going to be able to land safely. The twisties had afflicted her in the past. Now they were back, and about to steal one more Olympic moment from her, what could have been her last, at least at the time. Then her bravest moment became admitting her fears to us all. In so many ways, it really was as brave as flying through the air.
Here is something she told Alex Cooper in an April podcast about how the twisties can literally knock you out of the air when you are once again doing things in the air that no one has ever been able to do:
“I have no idea where I am.”
But now she is back, at 27, and knows exactly where she is, in the middle of the spotlight once again. An Olympian as small as anyone in Paris has a chance to become the biggest story of them all if she comes all the way back to win gold again. She has been winning gold and everything else since winning her first national title as a teenager 11 years ago. In all, she has won a ridiculous 37 medals between the Olympics and world championships. And might be better, right now, with these Games about to begin, than she has ever been. In addition to everything else she has done as the GOAT, now she is trying to write a comeback story like this.
Simone Biles: Not the only story. Just the best one going at the Summer Games of Paris for the American athletes we’re talking about today. If you love basketball, come on, you know you’re going to love seeing LeBron and Steph together at last. You know you will be watching greatness again when Ledecky is again trying to touch the wall first, and watching American women try to win another gold medal in basketball, even though it would have been a lot more fun watching them try to do that if Caitlin Clark, the biggest women’s basketball star on the planet, had been added to the team as she should have been.
And guess what? It will even be big fun watching a talented 35-year-old gunner named Jimmer Fredette trying to win a basketball gold medal of his own in the 3-on-3 competition.
Again: This is just the short list of American athletes, some of whom will get this kind of stage for the only time in their lives. That is always the most enduring beauty of any Olympic games if you’re not Biles, or Ledecky, or LeBron.
The Olympics aren’t what they were, or were intended to be. You know how political they can be, especially in places like Russia and China. But in the end, they ARE still about athletes trying to do something great, against the world and in front of the world. You still come to them for that. And, maybe for the last time at the Olympics, you get to watch Simone Biles fly.
