All Hail the Beam Queen

Simone Biles had braces but no driver’s license and “Harlem Shake” topped the Billboard Hot 100 the last time she was beaten in all-around competition, seven years ago this week.

Biles, then having just turned 16, took second to 2012 Olympian Kyla Ross at a tri-meet among the U.S., Germany and Romania in Chemnitz, Germany, on March 30, 2013.

It was just the third senior meet of Biles’ career in her first year as a senior gymnast. Since that runner-up, Biles has won 21 straight all-arounds through the October 2019 World Championships, rarely even challenged (though she has been defeated in unofficial national team camp competition).

Chemnitz marked one of the least consequential meets of Biles’ sterling career. She devoted one sentence to it in her autobiography, “Courage to Soar,” and noted she was distracted from the stress of competition on the overseas trip by daydreaming about a birthday present.

“Secretly, I hoped that when I got back home, a shiny new turquoise-blue Ford Focus would be waiting for me in our driveway,” she wrote.

Ross, speaking by phone last week, faintly recalled when asked the last time Biles was defeated.

“I think it was … were we in Germany?” she said. “Oh gosh, I don’t even know if I can remember it that well.”

After the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, many of the gymnasts likely to make up the gold-medal-favorite U.S. women’s squad quickly signaled they planned to press ahead. The superstar of the team, Simone Biles, stayed quiet.

The 23-year-old Biles wrestled for nine days with what to say about the impact of a year-long delay on her plans to defend her Olympic crowns. Now, she almost has an answer.

“We’re just kind of playing it by ear,” she said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. “I haven’t decided not to do it, but I haven’t really decided to do it.”

Biles said she can’t fully figure out her next move until she’s able to get back in the gym—she is currently sheltering in place at home—and see what it’s like then.

“I really have to listen to my body and my mind,” she said. She added that it would take a lot to be able to push on for longer, given everything she’d already put in, but that she was also reluctant to throw her work away.

Biles has been carrying an extraordinary load for years—often overlooked because of the apparent ease with which she’s defied the boundaries of her sport to come back and then take back-to-back world all-around titles again in 2018 and 2019.

And she had long made it clear to anyone who asked that she was absolutely ready to retire by August 2020. “It’s really in my mind, if I can keep going mentally, because I was already starting to check out,” she said Wednesday.

“Russia’s Olympic squad will be prevented from participating fully in the Games in Tokyo,” said Rusada director Yuri Ganus.

“I think that this will also happen at the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in China.”

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He added that only certain Russian athletes may be allowed to compete “by invitation” at the 2020 Olympics, as with the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea where 169 Russia athletes who could prove they were clean were allowed to compete under a neutral flag.