Simone Biles was recently in an uncharacteristic place at a gymnastics event: the spectator seats.
At a July tune-up meet, Biles watched the gymnasts who this week will compete for the title she won a record nine times: U.S. all-around champion.
We don’t know yet whether any of Biles and two-time Olympians Suni Lee, Jade Carey and Jordan Chiles will return to elite competition in the run-up to Los Angeles 2028.
The headliners at this week’s Xfinity U.S. Championships include a mix: veterans like two-time Olympic alternate Leanne Wong, first-year seniors like 16-year-old Claire Pease (who won that July event in front of Biles) and those somewhere in between, like Hezly Rivera, a 17-year-old who was on the 2024 Olympic champion team.
After nationals and an early fall selection camp, four women will be named to compete at October’s World Championships, where there are only individual events.
It is guaranteed that a new all-around champion will be crowned after two days of competition Friday and Sunday in New Orleans.
Not only is Biles absent, but so is the only other woman to claim the title in the last six editions (Konnor McClain, 2022).
Others are now stepping into the spotlight.
Joscelyn Roberson, a 2024 Olympic alternate who trained with Biles in Texas leading up to Paris, said she received such adulation from young fans at a recent meet that, “I feel like they’re acting like I’m Simone.”
It’s a new feeling.
“If I ever got super, super nervous (in the past), I could be like, ‘Oh, no one’s watching me. They’re watching Simone. They’re watching Jordan. They’re watching Suni and Jade. They’re not watching me,’” Roberson, a rising University of Arkansas sophomore, said in a press conference Wednesday. “But now it’s kind of hard because you are older, and you’re one of the oldest, even though we are still so young. It’s like, OK, maybe they are kind of watching me. It adds a different level of nerves, but I love it. I love a big crowd.”
Wong, who graduated magna cum laude from the University of Florida with a degree in health education and behavior, is the veteran of the group at 21.
She decided to continue in elite gymnastics after finishing her NCAA career in the spring.
“I just took the summer to do some other life things,” she said, including a mission trip to Costa Rica, moving into a new house and having her wisdom teeth removed. “It was like, all right, let’s just go back to gymnastics because I’m not ready to put it away yet.”
Pease can become the first woman to win U.S. junior and senior all-around titles in back-to-back years since Shawn Johnson in 2006 and 2007.
Pease was inspired last year by watching Rivera, one of her training partners outside Dallas, make it all the way to Paris.
Rivera, the youngest 2024 U.S. Olympian across all sports, has gazed at her gold medal about once a month over the last year to wow herself all over again. She also put Olympic rings above her bed.
“My mindset is kind of like, I achieved my dreams, I achieved my goals, but I still have more (goals), so I kind of like to put that (the Olympics) in the back of my head for now,” Rivera said last month. “Every time in the gym, I don’t think that I went to the Olympics. I’m just kind of training like I’ve almost never been, in a way.”
Training partners Jayla Hang, who has the highest all-around score of any American in 2025, and Simone Rose, who was second to Pease at a July tune-up meet, are motivated by 2024.
For Hang, it’s from not making the Olympic Trials after placing 16th at last year’s U.S. Championships.
For Rose, it’s from making it to the Olympic Trials, where she placed 10th in the all-around as the second-youngest gymnast in the field.
“It really helped me see I truly belong here,” she said.
The last three Olympic teams included returning gymnasts from the previous Games, including a record-tying four in 2024. But before that, the teams in 2004, 2008 and 2012 included zero returning Olympians.
Skye Blakely, the 2024 U.S. Championships runner-up to Biles, is among those pushing for 2028.
She made it to each of the last two Olympic Trials, but didn’t compete either time due to injuries sustained preparing for the meet, including an Achilles tear last year.
Blakely plans to perform on two events this week — uneven bars and balance beam — in her first elite meet in 14 months.
“Knowing that trials didn’t go the way I thought it was going to at all, and having this big injury, I was truly blessed at one moment to know that I still had on my heart the goal to want to go to the Olympics,” she said.
