... and still champion

 Well, golly gee willikers. Wonder what the Tough Guys are saying now.

Wonder what the macho keyboard surfers, the testosterone warriors, the Joe Swagger-ly Swaggers are going to write/say/do now that Simone Biles is the best gymnast in the world again. Wonder how they explain what she did in Antwerp, Belgium, yesterday, a bit more than two years after she woke up in Tokyo one morning with her confidence missing in a sport that is 99 percent confidence.

That happened at the Olympic Games in 2021, before the team gymnastics competition. Biles woke up with a raging case of what gymnasts call "the twisties", i.e., a sudden inability to orient herself in the air. Whatever it is that made her Simone Biles was inexplicably gone, and so she pulled out of the competition.

And here came the Tough Guys.

One columnist called her a "coward" in print and bragged that only he was brave enough to tell it like it was. Others wrote that she was letting her teammates down, was selfishly quitting because she knew she wasn't going to win this time, was mentally weak, was an all-time choker. 

But you know what?

None of 'em were fit to carry this slip of a woman's sequins.

She was, undisputedly, the greatest women's gymnast in history -- they'd even named individual moves after her -- and she'd been carrying that load since she was 16 years old. Like all elite gymnasts. she'd played hurt, once winning with broken toes. And she'd survived sexual assault by a vile creature named Larry Nassar, an alleged doctor unworthy of the title whom the gymnastics community wholly supported long after it became apparent he was a sicko.

Biles survived, and prevailed, through all of that. And then one morning it all piled up on her, and she knew in a way only she would that she just couldn't go.

And now it's 15 months later, and she stands on the top step of the podium again.

In the place where she first won the world all-around championship at 16, she did it again yesterday at 26. It's been barely a year since she came back to the gym. She's painstakingly rebuilt her shattered confidence and her once-fragile mental state. And she once again stands stop Everest.

A winner, as she's always been. And still champion.