Simon Biles will switch to competition in August

Simone Biles is back.

The gymnastics superstar plans to return to competition in early August at the US Classic outside Chicago, her first event since the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

USA Gymnastics announced Wednesday that Biles, a seven-time Olympic medalist and 2016 Olympic champion, will be part of the women’s field for the one-day event taking place Aug. 5 at the NOW Arena in Hoffman Estates.

Biles has taken most of the past two years off following her eventful stint in Japan, where her decision to withdraw from multiple events to focus on her mental health shifted the focus from the competitions themselves to overall well-being of the athletes.

She served as a cheerleader as her U.S. teammates won the team silver and then sat out the all-around, vault, and floor exercise finals she qualified for while facing what is known as “the twisties”—a gymnastics term for when an athlete loses their spatial awareness of the sky.

Biles returned for the balance beam final, where she won a bronze medal that tied Shannon Miller’s record for most Olympic medals by an American gymnast. She alluded to the Paris Olympics in 2024, but only after a long hiatus.

The past two years have been something of a whirlwind. She headlined her post-Olympic tour in the fall of 2021 and this spring married NFL player Jonathan Owens — now a defensive back for the Green Bay Packers.

Biles, 26, has also become one of the most vocal advocates for athletes finding space to protect their mental health after her stance in Japan brought the issue to the forefront. As the conversation around the topic continues to evolve, Biles’ return to the sport she dominated for nearly a decade suggests an athlete who wants to go out on her own terms.

The US Classic is one of the big events on USA Gymnastics’ annual calendar and typically serves as a sort of warm-up for the National Championships, which take place in San Jose at the end of August this year.

Biles used the Classic as her comeback competition in 2018 after a two-year hiatus following her record medals in Rio de Janeiro. It took her a whopping two hours to prove she remained the gold standard in her sport, paving the way for another spectacular run that included two more world all-around championships in 2018 and 2019 and three more national titles.

Things could be different this time, in more ways than one.

Biles was in the spotlight during her run-up to Tokyo and in many ways became the face of the American Olympic movement. She seems to be taking a more subdued approach with the Paris Games a year from now. She’s kept her various social media channels almost completely gym-free, instead using them to highlight snippets from her personal life.

And for the first time since he rose to fame as a teen in 2013, Biles doesn’t have to carry the burden of being the standard-bearer of the American program.

Sunisa Lee, who won gold in the all-around final in Tokyo, will also be attending the US Classic after competing for two years at Auburn, where she helped spark a huge upsurge in interest in collegiate gymnastics.

Lee missed the second half of her sophomore year with the Tigers as she struggled with health issues, but looks forward to a return to the Olympics, not to defend her all-around title, but to take another shot at gold on uneven bars, her signature event. She placed third on bars in Tokyo, in no small part because of the attention she received after becoming the fifth American woman in a row to win the Olympic title.