By Will Graves | The Associated Press
ANAHEIM, California—Simone Biles is back in the gym. That’s it. That’s all.
The Olympic gymnastics champion is in no hurry to declare whether this is the start of a comeback, following a year off after her historic performance at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro. And she’d be just fine if everyone else took the same approach.
Asked last Saturday why she started doing semiformal workouts earlier this month, Biles shrugged her shoulders.
“I don’t know yet, that’s the thing,” Biles said. “What’s the hardest point of all is everyone has already set expectations for me, for my comeback, before I’ve come out and said it.”
Which, Biles stressed, she hasn’t. The last 12 months have been a welcome break during her run atop the sport, a stretch that included three straight world all-around championships and five medals (four gold) in Rio.
The 20-year-old joked the only exercise she’s done since she got back from Brazil is walking her dog, though that’s not exactly true. She participated in a post-Olympic tour and competed on Dancing With The Stars, some of the perks of her newfound celebrity.
Life is starting to calm down a little. Her family is working on turning one of the rooms in the massive gym and lifestyles center they opened in 2015 into Biles’s personal office. That kind of sounds like a job, which Biles insists it’s not.
“[Mom] better not tie me not too much to the gym,” Biles said. “I’m not trying got be there all the time unless I’m training.”
Which she’s currently doing, just not nearly at her pre-Olympic level. There is no formal plan either. Part of the problem is Biles doesn’t currently have a coach. Longtime mentor Aimee Boorman left Texas for a job in Florida last fall and there’s no plan for a reunion. For now Biles is just kind of feeling her way and having one of the current coaches at the World Champions Centre check in occasionally to see how she’s doing.
“Aimee went to Florida so it’s hard for even the coaches to look at me and gauge what’s happening because they weren’t there before,” Biles said. “That’s difficult. We’re taking it day by day.”
For now it’s just basic skills like back handsprings and leaps. Maybe a couple of layouts. No tumbling. No vaulting. A bit of beam. A lot of questions.
Biles sat in the stands at the US championships last Friday night and watched as her sport went on without her. It was more than a little weird. She misses competing. All the work in the gym is another matter. She’s well aware it will take countless hours to get anywhere close to the form that helped her make history. She also won’t have to look far for advice.
Fellow “Final Five” teammate Aly Raisman won three medals in 2012, took a two-year sabbatical and was back on the world championship team by 2015. Raisman called Biles’s uncertainty a natural response to the daunting work that could lay ahead.
“I think a lot of people sometimes think you take a year off and you can just go back and do a floor routine just like that,” Raisman said. “I think it took me at least two full years to do a full floor routine since I stepped in the gym. I spent like six months just conditioning.”
Biles would prefer not to wait that long to figure out whether she’s serious. For now she’ll just wake up each morning, figure out how she feels, go to the gym and kind of make it up as she goes.
“I’m still getting my body right and see how I feel,” she said. “Yeah, testing the waters basically.”
Smith, Locklear lead wave of new faces at US championships.
Ragan Smith, meanwhile, never technically stepped foot on the floor as a competitor at the 2016 Summer Olympics as the star-studded US Olympic women’s gymnastics team beat a steady and relentless path to the podium on its way to medal after medal after medal.
Not that it mattered to Smith. Technically the 17-year-old was a “replacement athlete”, a fancy description for “alternate”. Funny, she didn’t feel like one as she trained up to and through the games just in case.
“If you ask her, she says she’s an Olympian,” Coach Kim Zmeskal Burdette said.
And now she’s the center of attention.
As the “Final Five” take a break and weigh their future—Biles, Gabby Douglas, Aly Raisman, Laurie Hernandez and Madison Kocian are being inducted into the USA Gymnastics Hall of Fame last Saturday—the 17-year-old Smith finds herself as the face of the program as the 2017 championships begin on Friday night.
This weekend marks the first time since 1985 that no one on the previous Olympic team returned to compete the following year, leaving the stage to Smith and the next wave in a program that plans to keep on rolling with Valeri Liukin taking over for retired national coordinator Martha Karolyi.
“The expectations are the same,” said Rhonda Faehn, senior vice president of the women’s program.
No big deal or anything. All Smith and company have to do is follow in the footsteps of the most decorated team of all time. That’s fine with Smith and her coach, who won an Olympic bronze as a teenager in 1992.
“People ask about pressure and adding pressure and it’s doesn’t if that’s what you were striving for in the first place,” Zmeskal Burdette said. “If you want to be the one people are talking to, it gives you more confidence.”
Something Smith is not lacking. She made a splash in 2016 in her first year as a senior, her tiny size and infectious floor exercise—set to theme from “The Addams Family”—making her instantly recognizable. She’s ditched it for something a little more grown up this year, by design.
“It’s sassy instead of very cute,” Zmeskal Burdette said. “That’s the character she feels very good with. She is sassy. So be it.”
And a pretty good gymnast in her own right. While she’s talked openly about trying to extend her elite career through the 2020 Olympics, Smith is trying to focus on the now.
“I don’t think, ‘Oh the 2020 Olympics,’ I don’t think about that ever really,” she said. “I just have it in the back of my mind as a goal.”
One that remains far off. Biles did the near impossible when she won three consecutive world championship all-around titles before winning a record-tying five medals in Rio. At this point, Smith would settle for a solid weekend at the Honda Center and a spot on the 2017 world championship team when it heads to Montreal in October.
So far, so good. Smith won the American Cup in March and seems at ease with being one of the favorites, though not the only one. Ashton Locklear served as an Olympic alternate along with Smith and is eager to prove she’s more than just a wonder on uneven bars. Riley McCusker shook off a shaky performance at the American Cup—including a frightening dismount on balance beam—to bounce back and win the all-around and the beam at an international meet in Italy a few weeks later.
“That’s the gymnast she is,” coach Maggie Haney.
One who is hardly afraid of the standards set by those who came before.
“It’s definitely cool being the next generation,” McCusker said. “I think we can prove ourselves and be the same or even better than the last generation.”