I just had to trust myself. Mentally it was a lot harder than physically.”

Having found herself, Biles, 27, is determined to lead the most scrutinized Team USA in history back to the top of the sport.

“So if I can do anything to help them right now or in the future, that’s what I’m gonna do,” she said of a team that includes three other members from the 2021 Olympic team. “Just be a guide.”

As always Biles’ gymnastics remains unmatched.

Her first-day 60.450 score at the U.S. Championships was the highest of any gymnast this Olympic cycle. She won the Olympic Trials finishing 5.5 points ahead of Lee despite a rare fall on the balance beam.

“We have to invent a new adjective,” said Chellsie Memmel, the technical lead of USA Gymnastics women’s program.

“I don’t know if there will ever be another gymnast not even close to touching her caliber of achievements, difficulty and just the impact she’s had on our sport,” said Alicia Sacramone Quinn, USA Gymnastics strategic lead.

“An icon? I don’t even know if that’s the right way to say it.”

“I laugh after she does her Yurchenko double,” Memmel said, referring to the most difficult vault in gymnastics in which an athlete flips twice in a pike position. “Like how? What are you thinking before that? Because I can’t comprehend that in my mind.”

And she’s doing the incomprehensible more than a decade after she won the first of her record World all-around titles.

“I’m using the phrase aging like fine wine,” Biles said. “I thought it was moldy a while ago but it’s just getting better and better. We’ll see. Hopefully we’ll get to ride this out for the rest of the year. So I’m pretty excited about that.”

It’s a ride that seemed inconceivable in the wake of the Tokyo Games.

“I never pictured going to another Olympic Games after Tokyo just because of the circumstances,” Biles said. “I never thought I’d go back into the gym again and be twisting, feel free. So I think it’s exciting for all of us,” she continued referring to her team, “for myself, (to think) ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m still doing it. I’m still capable.”

She paused for a moment and laughed.

“If it would have gone my way (in Tokyo),” she said, “I actually think I would have been crazy enough to be sitting right here again.”

Biles returned to the sport last year, winning World Championships gold medals in the team, individual all-around, beam and floor exercise and taking silver on the vault.

Biles and her coaches, the French husband and wife team of Cecile and Laurent Landi, said she goes into the Paris Games better than either the 2016 or 2021 Olympics.

“It’s not even the skills,” Cecile Landi said. “It’s the attitude and her behavior. I really feel like she’s happy to be here. I know she says she’s ready to be done but I think she’s really enjoying it and appreciating every meet she gets to do.

And, adds Landi, “I think she can still improve.”

“I just see her, I don’t know, she’s just happy. She’s happy to be here. I don’t feel the anxiety.”

Biles has worked just as hard on her mental approach.

“Before Tokyo, she never would have thought that would have happened and now she knows,” Laurent Landi said. “That’s why she does therapy every single week. So doing this she trained herself mentally to get more prepared and handle it every time.”

She also has a husband to lean on now. Biles married Chicago Bears defensive back Jonathan Owens on April 22, 2023. Owens will be in Paris.

“The Bears are giving him a couple of days off,” she said.

“Different?” said Jordan Chiles, Biles’ training partner and U.S. teammate. “Personally I don’t think so. She’s not 24, she’s 27 now. And she’s married now so I think maybe she has a different mindset now, for sure, on what life is.

“A three-year gap changes a lot within yourself. Physically, mentally, emotionally.”

Biles first took a break from gymnastics in 2017 after winning gold medals in the team, individual all-round, vault and floor exercise at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

She returned in 2018 to win that same set of gold medals at the World Championships and then add a fifth title, on the balance beam, at the 2019 World Championships in Stuttgart.

She continued to lead the way out of the gym as well. She was a strong and persistent voice in the Black Lives Matter movement. And in January 2018, Biles became the the most well-known and one of the most vocal of the more than 500 survivors who were sexually assaulted under the guise of treatment by former U.S. Olympic and women’s national team physician Larry Nassar, casting herself as a survivor on her own terms, refusing, she said, to “be labeled by Larry Nassar’s abuse.”

Much of Nassar’s abuse took place during Olympic and national team training camps at the Karolyi Ranch, operated by longtime U.S. national team director Martha Karolyi, located at the dead end of a red clay road in a remote central Texas forest. Biles alluded to the ranch when she stepped forward.

“It breaks my heart even more to think that as I work towards my dream of competing in Tokyo 2020, I will have continually return to the same training facility where I was abused,” she wrote on Twitter.

USA Gymnastics closed the facility and cut ties with the Karolyis three days later.

“If she hadn’t opened her mouth and spoke out, gymnasts would still be going there for national team camps with Martha walking around the perimeter,” said John Manly, an Orange County attorney who represents Biles and more than 100 other survivors of sexual abuse by Nassar and former Olympic coaches

She continued to push USA Gymnastics to take responsibility for Nassar and create a culture that prioritized athlete safety over branding and corporate sponsorships

“It’s hard coming here for an organization, having had them fail us so many times,” Biles said at the 2019 U.S. Championships in Kansas City. “We had one goal. We have done everything that they asked us for, even when we didn’t want to, and they couldn’t do one damn job. You literally had one job and you couldn’t protect us.

“But then at the end of the day, we still need to know and have an independent investigation. So, for some of us survivors, it is disheartening to know that that hasn’t happened. And some of the survivors are still out there competing, and I feel like they (USA Gymnastics) just want to sweep it under the rug. But that’s not how to go about it. I feel like in gymnastics, you get deductions for stepping out of the line and all this stuff and they just get slaps on the wrist and keep going. It’s like it just doesn’t disappear. After I step out in three nights in a row, they’re like, ah, she’s going to step out. We’re not going to deduct for it anymore. So, I just feel like there needs to be consequences for their actions. But I’m sure it’s coming.”

Despite the distraction, Biles seemed invincible going into Tokyo, favored to win four of the six available gold medals.

And then she took off down the vault runway in the team final.

“I do a lot of therapy,” Biles said, “so every time I’m in therapy if I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna die.’ She’s like don’t say that. That’s not good to rehearse that. It’s not good to say that or whatever negative thoughts I have. She says, ‘This is therapy, it’s an open space, but please don’t say that.’ You can’t remind yourself of that.”

Biles withdrew from the remainder of a team competition in which the U.S. finished second to Russia as well as the individual all-around, vault, uneven bars and floor exercise finals.

She eventually returned to claim a bronze medal on the balance beam.

Biles used the platform of her Olympic disappointment in Tokyo to become a leading voice in speaking up on mental health issues.

“I think it’s nice that Tokyo gave us that opportunity, you know to open up that stage for that talk,” she said. “And now I think athletes are a little more in tune. We trust what our gut is saying and they take mental health a little more serious.”