The party is over at the Bercy Pyramid. The hall is cheering: Re-be-ca! Re-be-ca! Re-be-ca! And, from the podium, on the bronze step, Jordan Chiles directs and encourages the choir, and asks for an impossible crescendo, and on the silver step Simone Biles accompanies the shouts with her hands, happy as a child celebrating her queen, Rebeca Andrade, the Brazilian from the favelas, who ascends to the first step, the gold one, and in agreement with a gesture, Chiles and Biles, on either side, bow and bow to her as their courtesans do to Sisi the empress in Vienna. And there is no one who is not moved or does not understand perfectly the meaning of what happened on the last day of gymnastics, a Monday at lunchtime, next to the Seine in Paris.
Simone Biles, who was making it to the finals of the last two apparatus, balance beam and floor, with three gold medals hanging around her neck and a favorite to win at least one more gold, fell off the balance beam, and in her fourth performance in eight days of her liberating dance on the mat with the four diagonals — triple double somersault, full front to double double, double with half twist and double — she performed with such energy and speed that the 12×12, 144-square-meter ring with the diagonal being just under 17 meters was too small for her and she stepped out on two.
“…Ready for it?” (Ready?) asks Taylor Swift in the song that sets the pace for Biles, and the singer herself, in X, confesses that she has seen the performance many times and is still not ready, but Biles, yes, she is ready, for sure. She is so ready to fill the stage with her necklace and sparkly leotards and with her 10,000 Swarovski crystals and without her shame already on her shoulders that she can grab a microphone and, after winning the team competition, proclaim that the name that the group she leads should be given is FAAFO, an acronym for Fuck around and find outa rough and aggressive version of someone who plays with fire and ends up getting burned. Attack us and you’ll see what happens to you. When they suggest that this is slang The neighborhood, exaggerated for the gymnastics public, so many families with children and grandmothers, takes a step back and conciliatory accepts the proposal of her coach, the French Cécile Landi. “We are already so old (it is the third games of Biles, 27 years old, and her teammates are in their second) that we are the GG, the Golden Girls“, he says, referring to the television series The Golden Girls.
Biles’ adrenaline and desire, so ready If she goes over, she is penalized with 0.6 points (0.3 for every two feet in the margin) and gives the victory by 33 thousandths, a third of a point, to Andrade, second in the all-around competition, second in the vault, third with her Brazil in the team competition, and already gold in Tokyo in the vault. The second Olympic gold allows the Brazilian, 25 years old, and in her third Games, to enter the club of the Golden Girls, which Biles does not limit to those born in the empire.
The paradise of the floor and the festival, which only left the Romanian Ana Barbosu on ice, who thought she was third and bronze before a claim from the United States managed to increase the score of Chiles, a very expressive gymnast and dancer, by one tenth, enough to be third, was reached, following the route of Dante passing through hell.
Silence in the men’s gymnastics hall of the Bercy pyramid. A sobriety that impresses and inhibits the festive, musical gymnasts. It’s the corridor of hell, as described by the popularizer Cristina Martínez, and it is confirmed by the pale faces of the gymnasts who see the competitors tremble, fall over and over again, and get up again and again, forced to spend 80 seconds doing the gamba, somersaults, back flips, Cossack turns dancing the sober casatchoc, somersaults without hands… on a 10-centimeter-wide board more than a meter high above the platform and on which walking without falling is already complicated for humans.
It is the corridor of no return for Simone Biles, one of the four who lose their balance and fall to the ground. The hero’s stumble, the foolish mistake, usually triggers the beginning of the disastrous events of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Not with Biles. Biles has already left the tragedy behind. Her resurrection after Tokyo, emancipation and vindication are part of her epic. And the epic is always more exciting, more heartfelt, when it is starred by a person capable of reaching beyond herself in the face of the greatest difficulties but who also trips on the curb of a sidewalk like anyone who is not a plastic film superhero with special effects and mistakes without consequences.
Biles’ fall, which resulted in her finishing fifth, and three more, unexpectedly crowned Italy with two medals. Gold for the solid Alice d’Amato, a 21-year-old Genoese with experience in Tokyo, and bronze for the Roman Manila Esposito, an Olympic debutant at 18 and European champion who competes in the Iberdrola League with the Xelska club in Palma de Mallorca. Both train in Brescia, at the CAR where Italy’s team silver medal also came from, under the orders of Enrico Caselli. The silver went to the Chinese Yaqin Zhou, the first to jump onto the burning corridor, and she walks around it, barefoot, without pinkies like others, on tiptoe, delicate and strong, graceful, like a swan on the water, as if that were her only habitat. A false impression of delicacy that is only broken when an imbalance forces her to put a hand on the bar to avoid falling, and it was a pity. She had too much poetry, or feeling, but she lacked the practical sense of the Italians, who combined the useful with the beautiful, those who best understood the sense of balance between risk and benefit in a final in which just by not falling the medal was sure to fall. Or almost sure. Rebeca Andrade, the last to perform (she did so after Biles) had seen so many tragedies in the previous seven that she failed her connections and did not fall, but she was fourth. She perhaps did not know, but she suspected, that only an hour later, she would rise to the top, revered by Simone Biles, the greatest, and even greater after the falls.
You can follow EL PAÍS Sports on Facebook and Xor sign up here to receive the Daily newsletter of the Paris Olympic Games.
