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Five Paris Olympics storylines to know from security to Simone Biles
The Paris Olympics are fast approaching. Here’s what you need to know about the first post-pandemic Games.
MINNEAPOLIS — Call it carnage, chaos or just plain bad damn luck, the four women who join Simone Biles at the Paris Olympics might wind up being whoever’s healthy enough to make the trip.
In a 30-minute span Friday night, Shilese Jones suffered a knee injury that limited her to one event and Kayla DiCello was knocked out with an ankle injury. Meanwhile Skye Blakely, a member of the U.S. teams that won gold at the last two world championships, was hobbling around the floor on crutches because of the ruptured Achilles that occurred during training two days earlier.
Injuries happen in all sports and you cannot predict the timing of when they happen. But these seem particularly cruel, occurring at the end of a four-year stretch that has challenged athletes as much mentally as it has physically.
The last Olympics was postponed and, when they finally did take place, did so without fans and in conditions so restrictive family and friends weren’t even allowed to go. Then came a condensed preparation for these Games, three years instead of the usual four. Athletes who might have moved on stuck around, creating even stiffer competition for a team that’s always among the most difficult to make.
Get through it, however, and the reward was not just a normal Olympics but one in Paris, one of the world’s most spectacular cities.
In some ways, the U.S. women’s team had seemed, if not set, taking very firm shape after the national championships four weeks ago. Biles, of course, who at 27 is better than she’s ever been. Better even than in 2016, when she won four Olympic gold medals.
Then Jones, an all-around medalist at the last two world championships. Blakely. Tokyo all-around gold medalist Suni Lee, who has made a remarkable comeback from two kidney ailments that had her not wanting to get out of bed six months ago. Tokyo Olympian Jordan Chiles, who has been improving so rapidly you can almost see the progress in real time.
Maybe DiCello, the all-around champion at the Pan American Games and a Tokyo alternate. Or Tokyo floor gold medalist Jade Carey.
And now it’s all been thrown out of whack.
Blakely’s Olympic run is done and DiCello’s sure appears to be. Jones just needed to compete at trials to be considered for the team and her routine on uneven bars, her signature event, was spectacular. Even without her full difficulty, she scored a 14.675, certain to be one of the highest scores of the night on any event.
But will she be able to do more Sunday, the second night of competition? Is her injury significant enough to still limit her in Paris? And that’s just her knee. What about the shoulder injury that kept her out of the national championships? Qualifying at the Olympics is exactly a month away, July 28, so these are not theoretical questions.
“It has to be in this moment, right? Because three days from now, two weeks from now, anything can happen,” Alicia Sacramone Quinn, who is the high-performance strategic lead for the U.S. women’s program and a member of the selection committee, said earlier this week.
“We always have to look at what’s being done right now in front of us, because that’s what we can actually bank on,” Sacramone Quinn said. “We look at what they have done and what they did most recently, which is these two competitions.”
Sometimes athletes take themselves out of the mix. They have a bad day. They run out of gas. They simply get beat. That stings, too.
But not as much as not even having the chance to try, which is what makes these Olympic trials so gut-wrenching to watch.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.
