Simone Biles' Olympic Legacy Is Unmatched After Dominant Showing at 2024 Paris Games

Simone Biles' spectacular 2024 Olympics came to an end Monday, as she won her fourth medal in Paris on the floor exercise. She finished with three golds (team, all-around, vault) and a silver (floor), bringing her total number of Olympic medals to 11: seven gold, two silver and two bronze.

Biles' dominance in modern gymnastics is unmatched. She is now the most decorated American gymnast, male or female, and has the most gold medals of any American gymnast, male or female. Internationally, her Olympic medal count is surpassed only by one woman, Larisa Latynina of the Soviet Union, and is tied with another, Vera Caslavska of Czechoslovakia. But Biles' combined Olympic and world medal count of 41 is the highest of any gymnast ever. Only one other gymnast, Japan's Kohei Uchimura, has won six world all-around titles, as Biles has. Biles has won more American titles—nine—than anyone else.

Latynina has more Olympic medals (18), but she has acknowledged that Biles completes more physically difficult skills that take a greater toll on her mentally than did Latynina's. Biles has completed five unique skills that bear her name in the sport's code of points: two vaults, two elements on floor and a balance beam dismount.

One of those vaults is the vaunted Yurchenko double pike, which Biles completed three times in Paris. It's a skill so difficult and dangerous that 2012 Olympian and vault silver medalist McKayla Maroney was told to stop training it; even in the men's code, it's considered one of the most difficult vaults to perform correctly, largely because a failure to complete the second flip in the air means a gymnast could land on their head.

The FIG, the international gymnastics federation, awarded the Biles II vault a difficulty score of 6.4, eight-tenths of a point higher than one of Biles' other competition vaults here, the Cheng. Biles' eponymous double-twisting double-tuck beam dismount, which she debuted in 2019, was deemed so difficult by the FIG that they undervalued it to prevent other gymnasts from taking a dangerous risk. Biles, indignant, performed it once to have it named after herself and has never repeated it in competition.

While a few recent Olympians have matched or exceeded Biles in event dominance (Katie Ledecky, for example, with four consecutive Olympic gold medals in the 800m freestyle) or in medal count (Michael Phelps, for example, with 28 Olympic medals), what puts her legacy in a class of its own is her ability and willingness to conquer new heights in a sport that has struggled mightily to keep pace with both her athleticism and her activism.

Many Olympians possess extreme amounts of willpower; it's practically required to succeed at the elite level of most sports. And many have used their expanded platforms after they reach the Olympics to promote causes that are close to them. But Biles has become, and remained, an advocate for herself and her fellow gymnasts as an active competitor, and then continued to revolutionize the sport from within.

She has fought to center mental health for athletes in a reconstructed American gymnastics federation in the wake of the Larry Nassar abuse scandal, all while coping with being a survivor herself. Weekly therapy, she has said, has helped her cope while rebuilding as an athlete and working through the twisties. And she has done it all while reaching new heights, literally and figuratively, as an athlete. She could coast on her nearly unbeatable combination of difficulty and clean execution, but she continued well into her 20s to imagine new skills and complete them, entirely for herself.

Paris was, in many ways, a redemption tour for Biles as well as her Tokyo teammates Jade Carey, Jordan Chiles and Suni Lee, who along with Hezly Rivera comprised the team here. When Biles withdrew from the team final in Tokyo, unable to overcome the mental block that caused her to get lost in the air and could have threatened her life if she continued to compete, the reaction was quick and cruel. Biles was called a traitor, un-American, a failure. But instead of retiring, Biles took two years off, starting gymnastics nearly from scratch. She transformed her own skills to work around her mental health struggles and to better accommodate an older body.

Instead of being upset that she did not win a gold medal in the floor exercise Monday, an apparatus that has become a signature for her, Biles was thrilled for Rebeca Andrade of Brazil, who won, even bowing to her on the podium along with Jordan Chiles, who won bronze. It looked like a passing of the torch, and it was another lasting image of her legacy.

Biles has not said publicly if she'll attempt to make the 2028 Olympic team. We may not see her again on the international stage, but the sport will forever bear her impact.