Gracious, petty and brilliant – Biles is arguably bigger than the US Olympic movement

Eight years ago at the Rio Olympics, when Simone Biles made the quantum leap from gymnastics-famous to worldwide household name with her epochal four-golds-in-seven-days masterclass, the most common refrain to describe her greatness was that her routines were so preposterously difficult that she could fall multiple times and still win. For years Biles was so far ahead of everyone else it was almost embarrassing, performing elements and routines so juiced with difficulty an entire generation of successors would struggle to catch up with.

On Monday afternoon, the most dogged of her rivals finally did when Rebeca Andrade of Brazil, who had been closing the gap on the greatest gymnast of all time for years, edged Biles for gold on the floor exercise by less than four hundredths of a point. That Biles failed to medal on the beam, the sport’s most precarious and unpredictable apparatus, was no surprise. But her silver on floor marked the first time she was beaten in her favorite discipline at any meet since Aly Raisman pipped her at the 2015 US national championships. During a week that saw gymnasts from Algeria, Ireland and the Philippines win the first ever Olympic titles for their countries, Andrade’s gold may have been the biggest shock of all.

Related: ‘It was really weird’: Simone Biles says crowd affected routine in Olympic final

The final day of an unforgettable gymnastics program in the 12th arrondissement does nothing to diminish what’s been a spectacular comeback for Biles, who was the oldest American woman to make an Olympic gymnastics team since the 1950s. She’d already won three golds over the past week going into Monday, anchoring the United States to a redemptive triumph in the team event, becoming only the third woman in history to win the Olympic all-around title for a second time and adding a third title in the vault. She departs the French capital having racked up a patently absurd 41 medals between the Olympics and world championships, the most of anyone in history by some distance.

But what came into sharper focus on Monday was Biles’ role as the leader of the sport’s restored dynasty. At a Paris Games which marked the first time where Biles’ leadership was truly the heartbeat of the US women’s gymnastics team, she was never better than in defeat. When she wrapped a tearful Jordan Chiles in a bear hug after the last-gasp inquiry that lifted the 23-year-old from fifth to the bronze, Biles was more elated for her longtime US teammate than she was for herself. Same for when she bowed to Andrade on the podium in one of the enduring images of these Summer Games, showing genuine happiness and respect for the rival who’s been chasing her down for the better part of a decade.

Although she was the star of the Rio Olympic squad that became known as the Final Five, the dressing-room leader of that group was Raisman. And while Biles was certainly expected to lead the US team at the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Games, her priorities correctly shifted to her own wellbeing after her abrupt withdrawal from the team event due to a case of the twisties. But in Paris, there’s been no question who the captain is, and for the most part she’s filled that role admirably. Even on the oldest US women’s gymnastics team since 1952 – the hook behind their Golden Girls nickname – Biles is the den mother of a group that grew up worshipping her and still does. Throughout the week-long competition Biles was front and center offering vocal support and encouragement to teammates and rivals both, embodying the unique camaraderie that sets gymnastics apart from all other sports.

Biles is one of a number of veteran American athletes, among them Ryan Crouser, Lee Kiefer, Katie Ledecky and Nyjah Huston, who have openly weighed extending their careers for the opportunity to compete in a home Olympics four years from now. Having only just become the oldest Olympic all-around winner in 72 years, Biles will be 31 when the Los Angeles Games begin. But due to a constellation of factors – her towering self-belief, her earning potential, her status as the face of the US Olympic movement and the positive overhaul of USA Gymnastics under chief executive Li Li Leung – it’s a good bet that we’ll see her there in some form, perhaps as a specialist, most likely after the same two-year break she took after Rio and Tokyo.

So it will be interesting to see how Biles uses her outsized influence as the team’s undisputed leader moving forward. Curiously enough, for as impeccably as she handled Monday’s surprise setback, it was how she set the tone in victory that raised the only questions. There was her inordinate focus on the “haters” after Tuesday’s team gold and disclosure of their internal Fuck Around and Find Out moniker. Fair enough. There was her dunking on a long-forgotten teammate who had doubted the team during the Olympic run-up in a vlog that scarcely made a ripple beyond the gymternet. Which, fine. But watching the 27-year-old face of the US Olympic team bringing Chiles into the mess is where the whole thing starts to drift into Regina George territory. Are we celebrating a team or building a clique?

Now surely there are times when pettiness is a virtue. Biles’ overlong salute to punctuate Monday’s floor routine, after getting dinged by the judges for failing to do so after her beam dismount, would have made Katniss Everdeen proud. And it’s important to note that all of these tabloid extracurriculars, which have been earned through years of hard work and dedication, have done box-office numbers on social media. Frankly, squabbles like these do more to achieve the IOC’s holy grail of getting younger people engaged with the Olympics than adding breakdancing or 3x3 basketball ever will.

And more than anything it’s crucially important to reemphasize that Biles the gymnast is truly a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, a special artist who makes the unthinkable look elementary and the extraordinary look effortless. We will never see another like her. To behold her spacetime-cheating routines over the past decade has been like watching Vince Carter flouting gravity in the NBA dunk contest or Maradona slaloming through half the England team at Azteca Stadium. Since winning her first national title in 2013, she has won every all-around competition in every meet she has entered, 34 of them in all, establishing one of the most unbreakable records in all of sports. There is a credible argument that she’s been America’s best athlete for more than a decade, full stop.

But the simple act of giving attention to the trolls and critics slip-streaming on her name runs counter to the joy, that bounce, that brio that people want to remember when they recall what they felt when they watched Biles perform. As she moves forward as the undisputed leader of the world-beating US women’s gymnastics squad for as long as she wants the job, Biles’ impact in setting the tone for a program that is the envy of the sport, and for the young gymnasts coming up through it, is bigger than ever before and arguably bigger than the US Olympic movement itself. How she wields it moving forward is worth keeping an eye on.