The United States of Simone Biles

Simone Biles had zero to prove here.

Nothing, nada. Not today, tomorrow or before. It didn’t matter what happened three years ago in Tokyo—Biles’s place as a gymnastics legend was long secure. She’d won everything there was to win. She’d captured nearly every medal. She’d redefined her sport many times over.

It sure was nice to see Biles back competing in Paris. But how she performed at these Summer Games didn’t really matter.

Buy that?

Yeah, me neither.

It meant a whole lot. You could tell it from the jump. You could see it from the moment Biles arrived in France, her focus sharp, that old confidence brimming. You could feel it when Biles and Team USA delivered a defiant, united performance in the team competition—a gold medal message to the doubters and second-guessers.

And you could tell it meant something Thursday night at Bercy Arena, when a triumphant Biles revealed a glittering goat pendant around her neck—that’s goat as in Greatest of All Time—after executing a gravity-bending floor routine to claim gold in the individual all-around final.

Ohhhhh, this mattered to Simone Biles.

It mattered a whole lot.

At 27, Biles is the rare athlete bigger than her entire sport, and as her fame has grown, her life has taken on the familiar celebrity contours of ascension and struggle. She is relentlessly followed, obsessed over, picked apart. It’s hard to miss the Biles mania on the Internet and in the flag-waving rafters at Bercy. The fascination extends from the gymnastics cognoscenti to the gymnastics quadrennial. (I’m guilty as charged.) Everybody wants to see Simone Biles, even the shooter extraordinaire Steph Curry, who was marveling floorside Thursday.

But what gets lost sometimes in Biles’s fame is core truth: Biles is an alpha competitor, one who recognized the motivational power of a comeback and what it would mean for her to put a redemptive exclamation atop her career.

Now she’s done it, with gusto—mic dropped.

This latest gold is the sixth Olympic gold medal of Biles’s career (she has nine medals from the Games in total) and it marks the second time Biles has won the women’s Olympic all-around. (She also won it in her debut at Rio 2016.) Since 2013, she has yet to finish anywhere but first in any all-around competition she’s entered.

Think about that. Nothing but first.

Thursday in Paris was further evidence of what we already knew, that when Biles is cooking, the sport of gymnastics exists on two levels: Simone Biles, and everyone else.

Except that’s not the full story, right? This is a saga, as anyone who remembers 2021 knows.

Tokyo. Not long removed from the revelation that she was one of many gymnasts horrifyingly abused by a national team doctor, Biles battled with her mental health at those Games. She became undone by a mind-body disconnect called the “twisties” which shook her confidence during her dangerous, twisting aerials. Undone, she sat out events, including her best, the all-around.

It was a heartbreaking personal drama that consumed those Games and provoked a global discussion about pressure and the toll of extraordinary expectations. On the largest possible stage, we learned Biles was human, after all.

Paris? She didn’t expect Paris. “I never thought I’d set foot on a gymnastics floor again,” she said. After taking time off, she returned, placing new priority on recovery and life balance. As the Journal’s Louise Radnofsky chronicled, an aging Biles needed to build a New Simone, one who would ration her training and not let the sport eat her up. She stayed loyal to talk therapy—“Every Thursday,” she said—and credited it with her newfound confidence. She got married to the NFL player Jonathan Owens. The world got to see another Biles at another sporting event: in a parka in the cold at Lambeau Field.

She won the all-around at worlds in 2023, and she arrived at these Games as Team USA’s marquee headliner. She tweaked a calf which freaked everyone out, and on Thursday she encountered early turbulence with a mistake on the uneven bars. Biles has tough competition here, chiefly Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade and her U.S. teammate, Suni Lee, the gold winner in Tokyo after Biles stood down. (The 21-year-old Lee is on her own remarkable comeback, soaring again after health struggles.)

Biles would need to seal victory on the floor, but that was fine. The floor routine is what underlines Biles’s greatness to the amateur observer—she leaps with such height and abandon you almost can’t believe it. There are floor moves that only she can do, and they are named after her, and she started with one here—to Taylor Swift’s “Ready For It,” a triple-twisting double somersault that looked like a scene from a videogame.

She nailed it. It was like watching a half-court buzzer beater or a walk off tape measure homer at the World Series. There was more routine to come, but first place was pretty much in the bag, and the ecstatic crowd pushed her along. Lee would get bronze, Andrade silver, and Biles was golden. She found what never found in Tokyo. She regained her swagger. She felt the love.

Afterward she was funny and self-deprecating about her performance. She thanked her coaches. She thanked her therapist! She bemoaned her slip-up on the bars—“I can swing some bars!” She raved over the 25-year-old Andrade and said she was eager to let the Brazilian start winning some all-arounds. “I don’t want to compete against Rebeca,” she said. “I’m tired.”

Biles was asked about the necklace, and she admitted the goat was a bit of a provocative goof, that she knew some people would like it and others would hate it. She said she couldn’t believe she was in the all-time conversation at all. “I just still think I’m Simone Biles from Spring, Texas, that loves to flip,” she said. She knows she’s much more than that, of course. Biles is the best that’s ever done it—and now, there’s truly nothing left to prove.

Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com