There is a version of Simone Biles that the world has memorised. The number of Olympic medals. The skills named after her — moves so dangerous that other gymnasts won’t attempt them, named after her because she was the first to survive them in competition. The GOAT. The greatest of all time. The acronym printed on leotards, on magazine covers, on the kind of headlines that turn a human being into a monument.

But monuments don’t have bad days. They don’t have twisties. They don’t sit in a hallway in Tokyo and decide that their mind and body have reached a threshold that no medal is worth crossing.

Simone Biles did.

And in doing so, she became something more interesting than the greatest gymnast alive. She became a woman choosing herself in front of the entire world, with everything on the line, in the moment everyone had been waiting for.

What strikes me about Simone now — in 2026, a year after Paris.

In the quiet that has followed the gold, she seems unhurried about the question of what comes next. She told CNN recently that the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics is “50/50.” That her mental health will be one of the deciding factors. Not her body, which remains extraordinary. Not her scores, which remain untouchable. Her mind. Her inner life. The part of her that no one can see from the stands.

There is something quietly radical in that.

We live in a culture that celebrates women who push through. Who show up anyway. Who compartmentalise and perform and deliver, regardless of what is happening beneath the surface. We have built entire industries on teaching women how to do this better, faster, with a smile. We call it resilience. We call it strength.

I think about what it costs to be known as the best at something from childhood.

To have your identity folded into a skill before you’ve had the chance to discover who you are outside of it. To spend your formative years in the service of a body, a score, a standard that the world set — and then asked you to keep raising.

And then to be twenty-four years old in Tokyo, standing in a hallway, and to say: not today.

That moment was not a failure. It was, perhaps, the first fully autonomous decision of her athletic life. Her body was telling the truth. Her mind was finally being listened to.

“We can’t do it alone. If God gave us all the tools, we’d all be amazing.”

There is a faith in that — not the performative kind, but the quiet kind. The kind that shows up in the moments when you have to trust something larger than your own preparation, your own discipline, your own relentless, impossible excellence.

The documentary called Simone Biles Rising on Netflix.

It chronicles the inner journey from Tokyo to Paris. Not the highlights. The in-between. The therapy sessions. The slow rebuilding of trust in her own instincts. The work of learning, again, to believe what her body is telling her.

She came back to Paris, and she was extraordinary. Of course she was.

But what moved me was not the gold. It was the interview after, where she spoke not about the performance but about the process. About what it took to stand in that arena again, having chosen once to walk away. Having lived with that choice. Having not regretted it.

That is the story. Not the medals. The woman who had to learn to trust herself more than she trusted the expectations of everyone watching.

I think about all the women I know who are very good at something.

Those who have built identities around their competence, their consistency, their willingness to deliver. And I think about the question Simone is sitting with — this unhurried, unashamed 50/50 — and I wonder what it would feel like to give ourselves the same permission.

Not to retire. Not to give up.

Just to say: I don’t know yet. My inner life will decide. And that is enough of a reason.

Simone Biles is the greatest gymnast alive. She is also a woman learning, slowly and out loud, that she gets to be more than what she can do. That the part of her no one can see from the stands is worth protecting, too.

That is the story worth telling.