It still happens to Simone Biles. Even now, after two Olympics, six world championships and greater than a decade within the highlight.

The most decorated gymnast of all time and the face of the American Olympic movement will likely be talking to someone when she reaches her age.

“They’re like, ‘Oh my God, you’re so cute, you’re a baby,’” Biles told The Associated Press with a rather exasperated laugh. “I want to be like, ‘I’m an adult. I’m an adult now. I’m 27.’”

Still, Biles remains to be seen as a ponytailed prodigy, whilst the demographic profiles of her top competitors change.

Perhaps that’s because all but one among the last 13 Olympic champions have been teenagers – including Biles, who triumphed in Rio de Janeiro eight years ago, and her teammate and good friend Sunisa Lee, who was 18 when she beat Brazilian star Rebecca Andrade in a nail-biting final in Tokyo in 2021.

Both are returning to what they’ve called their “redemption tour.” When Biles and Lee take to the court at Bercy Arena on Sunday for Olympic qualifying, they will likely be joined by 2020 Olympic freestyle champion Jade Carey (24) and 2020 Olympic silver medalist Jordan Chiles (23), together with newcomer Hezly Rivera, who, at 16, is by far the youngest member of the oldest team the U.S. has ever sent to the Games.

Gone are the times when six-time Olympic medalist Aly Raisman was named team grandma in 2016 at age 22. Biles jokingly admitted she now has to apologize for using that nickname.

“Like I was old now,” Biles said. “Forget about Grandma, that’s behind us.”

Rapid evolution

Better training, loosening of name, image and likeness rights regulations for school athletes and the ability of social media are allowing America’s best athletes to increase their careers.

Carey, Lee and Chiles have spent significant time for the reason that Tokyo Games competing within the NCAA tournament, which was once seen as a way for former Olympians to grace their retirement.

Not a lot. Relaxed NIL rules meant Chiles, Lee and Carey could construct on their success in Tokyo without sacrificing their college eligibility. The frequency of NCAA meets and the emphasis on execution over difficulty allowed Chiles to hone more fundamental skills and gain invaluable competition experience without burning out.

“Now you can go to college and go back to the elite and go back and forth,” she said. “I think that’s something cool, and it’s all because you can kind of rest your body.”

New paradigm

Perhaps crucial reason is more fundamental, more influential, and more enduring.

The climate and culture around elite gymnastics are evolving. As are the ability dynamics, as the game becomes more athlete-centric, moving away from the paradigm of the authoritarian coach and the talented but obligatory wunderkind that for thus long defined success at the best level.

“People have stopped telling them they can’t do it,” said Aimee Boorman, who trained Biles earlier in her profession and is a co-founder of GIGA, knowledgeable gymnastics league for girls that may launch in 2025. “They’ve stopped telling them they’re done at 17 or 18. … The stigma of ‘little girls in pretty boxes’ is no longer a fact of life.”

Since Biles returned to the game last summer, she has been asked over and over why she is doing so a lot closer to her thirtieth birthday than her twentieth. Her answer has all the time been the identical: “Because I can.”

“Nobody is forcing me to do this,” Biles said after the U.S. Olympic qualifiers. “I wake up every day and decide to grind in the gym and then go out here and perform for myself.”

What has modified is the best way she toils. She uses her time within the gym more efficiently, partly by selection to assist a body that has trained for 20 years, and partly because her busy schedule requires it.

Global trend

The truth is, what Biles and company are doing within the U.S. is becoming increasingly common all over the world.

While Oksana Chusovitina stays an exception — the 49-year-old Uzbek will miss her first Olympics since 1988 but remains to be eyeing the 2028 Los Angeles Games — there are many women of their 20s and 30s who will try to affix the Americans within the medal race.

Andrade, 25, is Biles’ biggest threat for the all-around title. Sanne Wevers of the Netherlands turns 33 in September but remains to be one among the world’s best balance beam skaters. Ellie Black of Canada turns 29 in September. Paris is her fourth Olympics, but in some ways she is pretty much as good as ever.

Perhaps happier than ever before, which is a large a part of the equation.

Black spends less time working on specific equipment and more time on “strength training,” something she wouldn’t mind seeing younger athletes do.

“I think it’s just finding the balance, making sure we’re strong,” Black said. “We’re not overtraining. We’re not doing crazy reps. We’re not spending our whole lives in the gym.”

Second page

Laurent Landi, who, along along with his wife Cecile, has been training Biles since late 2017, believes there’s one other factor at play within the gymnasts’ arguments over how best to arrange for competition.

In the US, following the Larry Nassar sexual harassment scandal, there was a sense that the training pendulum had swung from too strict to too loose. Biles told the AP in 2021 I felt like I “took the horse out of the stable and couldn’t get it back in.”

While Biles’ stance has softened recently, describing it more as a generational difference and the incontrovertible fact that there’s nobody right path to success, Landi believes that a part of the explanation Team USA is so heavily weighted toward veterans is that the subsequent wave isn’t ready or willing to push themselves to the highest, though he admits that concern mostly centers around Americans.

“That’s why you see the older generation holding on,” he said. “They realize, ‘Oh yeah, if you want to (stand out), you should be doing this, this, this.’”

“Is it going to be hard? Yes. Is it going to be hell? Yes,” he continued. “But you have to stick with it to (get) to the point where, ‘OK, I can do this.’ And these kids don’t even know how to really push themselves to that limit anymore.”

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Landi stressed that no athlete desires to get to the purpose where they should try really hard simply to make it easier later, but he believes that “that’s part of sport and part of life.”

How long can they go on like this?

The end will come soon enough for Biles and everybody else. She’s not saying yet whether Paris will likely be her final opponent. While the will to completely immerse herself in the subsequent chapter along with her husband, Chicago Bears safety Jonathan Owens, is real, she also knows that when the ride is over, there’s no going back.

It may very well be a tricky road, muses Elisabeth Seitz, who’s making her fourth Olympic appearance as a TV commentator. She narrowly missed out on making the five-woman German team.

Like Biles, Seitz faces questions at home that go something like, “You’re still a gymnast, get a real job.”

The thing is, Seitz, 30, believes she is in the most effective shape of her life after recovering from a torn Achilles tendon last fall. Her experience helped her recuperate from the injury in eight months. She knows what she will and may’t do.

Why would she wish to walk away from something that also has a robust hold over her before she desires to? Before she has to?

In this fashion, she appears like Biles and her peers, who’re helping to redefine who can — and who can’t — do it professionally.

“I just love gymnastics,” she said. “I just love the sport. That’s why I keep doing it.”