Ethermac|What's next for Simone Biles? After dominant return, 2024 Paris Olympics beckon

HOFFMAN ESTATES,Ethermac Ill. — Simone Biles had to know the questions were coming.

After her dominant victory Saturday night at the U.S. Classic, and her triumphant, joyful return to competitive gymnastics, everyone was bound to wonder: What's next? Or, perhaps more pointedly: What's Biles' plan for the Paris Olympics next summer?

"Right now, I think I should just embrace what happened today, be happy," Biles said after Saturday's meet, in her first public comments about her comeback.

"It's just like, when you get married, they ask when you're having a baby. When you come to Classic, they're asking you about the Olympics. I think we're just trying to take it one step at a time, and we'll see."

It was a measured response − and one that belies both the ease and determination with which Biles has returned.

Even after a 732-day hiatus, she showed Saturday night that she is still the proverbial gold standard in women's gymnastics, nailing a few of her eponymous skills while putting up an all-around score of 59.100, which would have been good enough to win the most recent world championships by a healthy margin.

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Though Biles said she's trying to be more intentional about living in the present, her likely path forward over the next 12 months is clear. With her performance at the U.S. Classic, Biles qualified easily for the U.S. championships in San Jose, California, which are less than three weeks away. The 2023 world championships in Antwerp, Belgium will follow a month later. And then, barring any surprises, Paris.

Though Biles isn't publicly committing to an Olympic push just yet, she sure hinted at it with some of her comments Saturday, as she compared her last Games to the next.

"I think it'll just be different," she said. "We're still dealing with COVID, but not to the capacity. We're going to get to have our family and our friends go, and we'll get to be in the village. So the experience will be so different that we won't be stuck in our thoughts all day."

It was almost two years ago to the day that mental health issues prompted Biles to withdraw from most of her scheduled events at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. It was the mounting scrutiny, she elaborated Saturday, that ultimately forced her to take a step back − a combination of external criticism on social media, and even nitpicking from within her "inside team."

In the leadup to Tokyo, Biles said she was told she was "our gold medal token," counted on to be the smiling face of Team USA and USA Gymnastics. She was struggling to manage that pressure, and her own internal expectations, while also trying to support her younger teammates, who had never experienced the Olympics before.

"There were a lot of things that, since I had already been to an Olympic Games, they were also expecting out of me, that I kind of couldn't do my own job," Biles said, while declining to identify the person or people behind the "gold medal token" talk.

Ultimately, she won just two of the four or five Olympic medals she had been expected to win in Tokyo, neither of them gold. And yet, Biles said she's "obviously … very happy that happened," because it gave her an opportunity to focus on herself. She started meeting with a therapist once a week, and she married NFL player Jonathan Owens in April. (Biles competed Saturday wearing a silicone wedding band she said she purchased on Amazon for "like $15.")

"Her priorities have shifted and changed," said Alicia Quinn, the women's strategic lead for USA Gymnastics. "When you are doing it for yourself and you realize that it’s for the joy of the sport and not allowing the pressures of something else impact you that way, it can be more fun."

Biles said she returned to the gym in September, started working out twice a day in January and "really buckled down" in May, after the wedding festivities were over. And she soon overcame her bout of "the twisties," which popped up in Tokyo.

"She could do everything that she was doing before (Tokyo)," her coach Cecile Landi said Friday, while adding that they've tried to design routines to "make her as mentally and physically comfortable as she could handle."

Biles, for her part, believes she's already in better shape than she was in 2021.

"I think that goes mentally and physically," she said.

Biles would be 27 years old at the start of the Paris Games, an age by which most Olympic gymnasts have long since retired. She said she feels more mature this time around, more purposeful. "Nobody's forcing me out here," she said. With 19 career world championships, four Olympic gold medals and skills named after her in three different events, she has little to prove to anyone but herself.

"It's just about really taking care of my body right now," Biles said. "So that's what we're doing − and it's working. So we're going to continue to do that."

She grinned.

"But don't ask about 2028," she said.

Contact Tom Schad at [email protected] or on social media @Tom_Schad