Simone Biles Returns to Take Olympic Bronze on Balance Beam

The last of the women’s gymnastics finals, balance beam, was her only remaining chance to create a new set of images from her Olympic Games in Tokyo, both for herself and for her various business enterprises.

She did that—and won a bronze medal in the process.

Biles delivered what was probably the best performance available to her under the circumstances. She executed most of her regular routine, without major or obvious errors. And she made a clean dismount that she had rapidly substituted in recent days as she prepared to face more pressure than at any point in her career.

Even with a lower-rated dismount, she managed to maintain a competitive difficulty score. She was hit harder on execution by the judges picking out flaws that were likely indiscernible to the people who matter most to Biles’s future.  Guan Chenchen of China won gold; Tang Xijing, also of China, silver.  

Her mere presence in this last event final was a stunning twist in a week defined by how the inability to harness her own twists haunted Biles. One day before the beam final, with only this one event remaining, she confirmed she would compete. 

Then two hours before the event, she was out in the arena warming up, looking increasingly confident in a routine with a reworked dismount to sidestep the twisting problem she was having. 

No gymnast is ever guaranteed a gold medal on the notoriously thin, easy to slip from balance beam—let alone a gymnast under the kind of strain that Biles has been. But the apparatus was now her sole chance for an individual medal, and a return to the competition floor, in a leotard, actually doing gymnastics.

As the competition got closer to beginning, Biles sat next to Sunisa Lee, the American heir to her all-around champion throne, next to the floor exercise surface where she had not competed in a final. She watched highlights on the arena’s big screen of the events she had been supposed to win but had instead watched from higher up in the stands. A disorienting week made the normal abnormal. 

Lee of all people knew how hard beam could be for a gymnast. “Beam makes me so nervous,” she said. “It’s just you and the beam… It’s really scary and it’s just super nerve wracking especially because anything can happen.”

“It’s not like a power event. You have to be very mentally strong on beam.”

For all of its challenges, though, there had also been cause for optimism going into this event. The beam demanded less of the twisting that was causing her problems on vault, floor and even the uneven bars. And the schedule gave her one more day to try to convince herself and her coaches that she could perform safely, in a private gym in Tokyo she’d persuaded to open its doors so she could go back to basics to try to work through her sudden-onset lack of air awareness.

But the most important thing about beam might be this: Biles entered the Games as an overwhelming favorite to win multiple events. The balance beam wasn’t one of them. 

Biles had three experiences already of walking away from the beam with a mere bronze from a major international competition: at the 2013 and 2018 world championships, and at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. 

She also went in knowing that at least three gymnasts who had made the final, whom she’d enthusiastically cheered on over the years, were nursing injuries. Half the field of eight, in some way, was really going to be just happy to be there. Biles, who warmed up to a song with a refrain of “there’s no place I’d rather be,” was one of them. 

That all helped. When the U.S. women emerged from the qualification round a surprising and unfamiliar second behind the Russian Olympic Committee gymnasts, it had been yet another layer of pressure in the weight on Biles’s seemingly unbeatable, invincible shoulders. 

Coming into the beam final, it was stunning that she was out there at all, rather than cheering from the sidelines as one by one, all of her 2016 Olympic titles were taken by different gymnasts. It was such an obviously significant moment of these Games that

Thomas Bach,

the president of the International Olympic Committee, arrived in the audience in time to watch alongside the head of the international gymnastics federation and rushed out of the stands to congratulate Biles in person before the medal ceremony.

The result was also hard to believe because over the years Biles has built an insurmountable lead over her competitors precisely by twisting her way to success, rewarded by the scoring system. Her ability to twist and turn at the same time in the air helped her dominate on the floor exercise and vault; she was able to include a double-twisting double somersault dismount to boost her on the uneven bars too and on balance beam, she showed in 2019 that she could even give herself an edge by throwing that skill as a dismount there too. 

Then twisting nearly became her downfall. And so twisting had to be thrown out for Biles to get back on the beam. Instead, she performed the rest of her routine and a modified double pike dismount—difficult, but not as difficult as the full or double-twisting double somersault she had used to power ahead in the past.

Write to Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com and Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com