Simone Biles
On 3 August 2021, at the Ariake Gymnastics Centre in Tokyo, Simone Biles returned to competition for the balance beam final. She had withdrawn from the team final on 25 July and from four subsequent finals after developing the twisties — a genuine loss of air awareness in which a gymnast's automatic sense of body position fails mid-flight, making high-difficulty skills acutely dangerous. "I was trying a 2 1/2," she said of the vault that ended her team final, "and I ended up doing a 1 1/2. Just got a little bit lost in the air." Beam was the apparatus she could perform without twisting, so she stripped the twist from her routine and replaced her usual dismount with a double pike. She scored 14.000 and won bronze; Guan Chenchen of China took gold on 14.633 and Tang Xijing silver on 14.233. It was Biles's seventh Olympic medal. On 15 September 2021 she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the FBI's handling of the case against former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, whose abuse she survived. She returned at Paris 2024 and won three golds and a silver.