The reverential hush of the early moments, when a diminutive figure who has been an emblem of struggle and perseverance in sport, prepared to somersault backwards along a piece of polished wood 10cm wide, seemed to take us to the outer limits of Olympic theater.

Simon Biles, in a leotard of a thousand sequins, arrived to an ovation from an audience which even celebrated her warm-up, yet she was suddenly utterly alone. Paris and the wider world held its breath, waiting to see if she really was going to sign her name across these Olympics in an entirely different way to the one which she symbolized her last. Beginning with a performance on the beam, the apparatus which can shred a gymnast’s the nerves like none other. Every other athlete in the rotation had finished as she sized it up. Every eye was upon her. The audience was wreathed in silence.

She soared into the dismount, with two double twists and two somersaults, and thumped her heart. The drama and distress of her Tokyo Olympics were receding into the distance when we were taken right back to that uncertainty of that place.

Biles was warming up for the floor exercise when she landed awkwardly, straining her left calf which, we now know, had troubled her a few weeks ago. She left the competitors’ area with team doctor Dr. Marcia Faustin, before the US team’s medics hurried to apply tape from the knee to ankle of her left leg.

It was an enormous moment, posing the question of whether Biles, whose withdrawal from the Tokyo Games with a mental block commonly known as ‘the twisties’ shone a light for the welfare of athletes everywhere, would be able to continue. In the stand, US team’s technical director Chellsie Memmel felt ‘crushed.’

Biles smiles after competing on the vault during an artistic gymnastics qualification round

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With Biles’ soaring the U.S. enjoys a commanding lead with 172.296 points

She related later: ‘I can’t even imagine how she was feeling.’

Even as the medics fussed around her, there was more evidence of gymnastics’ brutal uncertainties. Biles’ team Jade Carey’s floor routine was concluding disastrously as she lost her balance on landing and crashed off the performance area.

Biles didn’t blink. The gymnast wearing 319 stepped up to execute a floor routine of the most extraordinary difficulty, which took her up to gravity-defying heights. She took a step off the floor in her first tumbling pass – one of the signature moves with triple-twisting double back tuck, also known as Biles II – and a step forward after her second. But those 90 seconds were a statement of her return to the Olympics, in front of celebrities – the ubiquitous Snoop Dogg, Ariane Grande and Tom Cruise – whose presence revealed how gymnastics is something bigger than sport when she competes.

There was still anxiety. Biles sat on the top step leading down from the floor after her routine, rather than joining her teammates, when her performance was over. She sat flat on the arena floor before attacking the vault, the discipline where her Tokyo Olympics ended.

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If there was a moment to ease off and protect the strapped calf, then this might have been it. But Biles joked with her teammates by crawling back after a warm-up run on all fours and then proceeded to execute her Yurchenko double pike – a vault so difficult that no one else attempts it – cursing herself for taking a step back on landing. The 15.8 score spelt out the accomplishment.

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Biles battled an ankle issue on Sunday, although it didn’t seem to hurt her performance

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Biles is the leader of her qualification group after the first day of competition in Paris

For these Games, she plans to introduce the ‘Weiler-kip – a new feat on the uneven bars, her supposedly weakest apparatus and the only one on which she has not created a maneuver of her own – in order to further raise her starting score. She didn’t attempt it yesterday/on Sunday, though the qualification round would have been the safest place to do so. Perhaps this was a concession to her discomfort. As and when Biles completes the maneuver, it will be the sixth skill named after her.

The Americans were reluctant to discuss her injury in much detail. USA gymnastics coach Cecile Landi revealed that she had felt ‘just a little pain in her calf’ which was a recurrence of the earlier strain. On the TV broadcast, Biles could be heard expressing her frustration.

‘As soon as I took off, I felt it. It’s right there on my calf. Right where I had that f***ing tear.’ To the question of whether it was just a minor injury, Landi replied: ‘I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.’

Biles was walking gingerly as she left the stadium, but the look on her face took us so far from the forlorn, broken-hearted individual who spoke to us in Tokyo, a little more than 1,000 days ago. The demons seem banished and Biles is back operating on a different dimension to anyone. The sense that these Games will carry her imprimatur is irresistible.

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