This is part of Slate’s 2024 Olympics coverage. Read more here.
For 20 interminable minutes of the women’s gymnastics team final at the Paris Olympics on Tuesday, I wasn’t sure about anything—because Simone Biles hadn’t vaulted yet. It was, after all, on vault in the Tokyo team finals when something made Biles’ brain snap out of sync with her body: the dreaded “twisties,” gymnastics’ version of vertigo. But then, in about four seconds of running, springing, blocking, and glorious, glorious twisting flight, it was all going to be golden in 2024. Biles aced the difficult Cheng, and her face, ebullient upon landing, said it all.
There would be no GOAT emergency, and with the team’s star intact, it was no longer a matter of “if” the U.S. would run away with the gold medal on their “redemption tour.” It was a matter of how many—points, that is, full entire points that the team would win by, in a sport often decided by tenths. Indeed, the meet’s most thrilling contest turned out to be for bronze, which was decided by less than three tenths. That hair-thin difference came between fourth-place finishers Great Britain, and—yes, Olympic team bronze medalists Brazil! Hooray! Brazil’s historic achievement—the first Olympic team medal by a program from South America—was, I grant, largely possible with generous assists from other squads’ falls all over the place. Brazil didn’t have its best meet, but a lot of other teams had even worse meets. (I feel especially sad on behalf of 2008 gold medalists China, who finished sixth.)
When it all shook out, the answer to that margin-of-victory question was more than five full points separating the U.S. from historic silver medalists Italy. (Congratulazioni!) Biles, Jordan Chiles, Jade Carey, and Suni Lee (Hezly Rivera was effectively on reserve after a shaky qualifications) could have absorbed five additional falls between them and still walked out draped in gold. By the time Biles took to the floor exercise to cap the meet, she could have replaced half her routine with the Barbaras Rhabarberbar TikTok dance, and the U.S. still would have won. It was, frankly, a blowout.
So: Does this mean the U.S. is the most unstoppable gymnastics program in the history of humanity?
In a word: nyet. Because as much as I am currently soaring on the wings of a giant imaginary bald eagle over an imaginary NASCAR race between extra-polluting gas cars encrusted in Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, something is nagging at me: Would this be the case if You-Know-Who were in Paris? Would a healthy, happy, mentally stable U.S. 2024 squad, if it were able to go back in time as part of this redemption tour, kick Diet Rite Russia’s asses? I personally think silver was and remains a resplendent color for the 2021 American squad—but it was clear to me that if this year’s Olympic Village had a DeLorean, these women would take a do-over of the Tokyo Games. But how would the do-over go?
I need to know this so badly that I did math.
At the end of team finals in 2021, the “Russian Olympic Committee” bested a mostly Simone-less USA, 169.528 to 166.096. The 2024 American squad ended today, on the other hand, with a badass 171.296, meaning, in simplest terms, yes: Trader Josef’s Private Label Russia, facing off head-to-head back in 2021 with today’s American squad (transported back in time!), would end the meet metaphorically squirming for its life on the floor like Johnny Lawrence in the original Karate Kid. So, this settles it, right?
I wish. As you know from the literal preschool-style colors and shapes the television has to put next to scores to let you know if they’re good, gymnastics scoring is deeply complex. If you get sucked into the vast recesses of the “gymternet,” fans exchanging comparisons of “DV” and “CV” seem to be speaking another language. This is because gymnastics’ fearsome Code of Points not only assigns different “difficulty values” to every skill gymnasts complete, and numbers to every deduction that gymnasts can receive, but the scoring system also has the nerve to be revised every quadrennial. This means that putting today’s American scores directly head-to-head with Green Text Bubble Russia’s three years ago isn’t quite fair.
It also gets complicated when we examine the nature of the Code’s changes since Tokyo, especially on the events of balance beam and floor exercise. Today’s U.S. team, for example, received a handful of tenths bonus for their beam dismounts that they wouldn’t have in 2021. So does this mean in the interest of fairness, I should dock those tenths from my imaginary Hunt for Red October sequel, to put today’s scores more in line with the 2021 Code? Well, not so fast. On both beam and floor, the International Gymnastics Federation (or FIG; it’s fronch!) added a litany of new “artistry” deductions after Tokyo. If there’s one thing the post–Perfect 10 Code does, it takes every single deduction imaginable, so it is safe to assume that every gymnast in Paris’ Bercy Arena probably sustained some sort of artistry penalty that 2021 gymnasts didn’t, which I think would even things out. As a result, I am going to call the imaginary balance beam contest between the 2021 ROC and do-over USA a wash.
The same goes for floor, which now offers gymnasts a “dismount bonus” but also offers judges the option of taking up to 2 entire points off for artistry—in the attempt to even the playing field between gymnasts who excel at dance and those who are better at tumbling. (From what I can see in these Games, however, in practice it has mostly meant it’s damn hard for anyone to crack 14 on floor.)
Where the score comparisons between the two Olympic gold medal teams are far more cut-and-dry, however, are on uneven bars and vault.
Both Chiles and Lee compete skills on bars that have lost some value in 2024, but Chiles, Lee and Biles have gained the “dismount bonus” that more than cancels the loss out. To spare you the math I spent more time doing than I will ever admit, I’ll just say that with everything factored in, going back in time with today’s exact routines would convert today’s U.S. score to 170.896 at this point, i.e. still enough to beat the 2021 ROC. These colors don’t run! (Please don’t email me to say that they are, technically, the same colors as Russia’s.)
Now all that’s left is vault. In an effort to create parity between vault-heavy teams (that’s USA) and bars/beam-heavy ones (like China), the FIG slashed start-value scores for all the big-gun vaults a gymnast can do by 0.4 points. In 2021, everyone’s favorite villain MyKayla Skinner competed a Cheng vault that was start-valued at a 6.0, but on Tuesday, it was vaulted incredibly by Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade with a start value of just 5.6. So the final thing we need to do when going back in time for a magical mano a mano, would be to credit the 2024 U.S. team with 1.2 more points, which means that they would absolutely obliterate Aldi Russia by more than 2 points! This is the most patriotic I have ever been! (I should also take this moment to mention that I have nothing, personally, against any of the young women on the 2021 team from You-Know-Where. They were incredible in Tokyo, and absolutely earned their gold.)
There are so many more permutations that I could, technically, run (maybe, even, I did run them, and decided they were too picayune for Slate Magazine!). Is it fair to count great vaulter Jade Carey from today, for example, when she went to Tokyo as an individual specialist and wasn’t able to compete in team finals at all back then? (Because if we’re talking do-overs, it’s possible that might have shaken out differently, too.) Also, the ROC actually had a bad meet (for them!) in team finals, and the U.S. still had a worse one! How would Russia’s best possible day match up against—No. Listen, time travel is fake, and we have to stop somewhere. I cannot not think about this matchup, but somewhere, the counterfactual imagination needs to turn off and I need to touch grass.
In the end, in most feasible scenarios, the answer is, however, clear: Today’s American team on this exact day would have beaten Tokyo’s “unaffiliated team full of Russians” on that exact day. That’s enough for me, but it does bring up one final sticking point. The biggest difference between today and Tokyo’s team finals is glaringly obvious. It’s 4-foot-8 and has five eponymous skills, and is named Simone.
Biles is great enough that she does offer Team USA a large amount of that 5-point cushion without any form of Russia, and a 1 to 2–point cushion with them. She was in 2021, and would be now, a large portion of the U.S. margin of error. Our program is good. It’s great! But if Biles retires after Paris, barring true freak occurrences, you will not be seeing a 5-point margin of victory anytime in the conceivable future.
Now, I would never go so far as to say, “The U.S. team is only great because Biles is on it,” because first of all, do you hear what that sounds like? The’96 Bulls were only good because of Jordan. Yes, greatests of all time tend to do that for a team. That’s how sports work! But just as Scottie Pippen was no slouch, the rest of Team USA had a great meet, and Lee and Chiles are currently the third- and fourth-best all-around gymnasts in the entire world. We’re good! We’re No. 1! We did it! We are “redeemed” (though I, personally, did not need to see a gold medal for this to happen). But how good the American program remains in a post-Biles era? Especially if, Bog forbid, Russia is allowed to do sports again! Not even my genius mathematical brain can manage to compute this feat. We are going to need an actual time machine for that.
