Simone Biles’ mental health is peaking before Paris.

At May’s Core Hydration Classic—considered the opening meet of the 2024 Olympic gymnastics selection season, which ends later this month at the Olympic trials—Simone Biles stepped onto the floor exercise mat in an enchanting Barbie-pink leotard. But before she had even completed her signature opening tumbling pass—the Biles II, a triple-twisting double back tuck—the crowd at Hartford’s XL Center went abjectly feral. This was in response to the opening strains of the gymnastics GOAT’s brand-new floor music: Taylor Swift’s “… Ready for It?”

The Reputation opener brought the gymnastics/Swiftie fandom the crossover nobody knew they needed: The song is Swift’s underrated salvo to her high-profile haters, and this meet continued Biles’ resplendent comeback after being called a “quitter” by a bunch of the smallest men who ever lived. (Both Swift and Biles also currently enjoy prominent relationships with professional football players. Does this mean they’re best friends?)

But the assertive, defiant song also served as an apt backdrop for Biles’ 2024 performances thus far. These showings have been confident as hell, most recently Biles’ whopping margin of victory at the two-day U.S. Championships that concluded on June 2: 6 points, in a sport usually decided by tenths.

This means that Biles—who fell once, on vault, during Night 2—could have counted six more falls and still won her astounding ninth national title. The margin signaled the return of the GOAT’s stratospheric 2021-level difficulty: She performed the aforementioned triple-double on floor, the Yurchenko double pike (aka the Biles II) on vault, and the double-double dismount off bars, among other astounding skills. But there’s something else different about her. Her vibe is, high-key, on. Biles looks mentally and emotionally solid in a way she didn’t three years ago, and yet her famously tiny-but-mighty self also looks, somehow, lighter. She no longer seems to be carrying the world on her shoulders.

The wild ride that was covering the Tokyo Games taught me never to make a single solitary prediction about the Olympic medal podium again, but there’s one thing I will scream, for whatever it’s worth: Just in time for an Olympics in her coaches’ homeland, the Simone Biles unbothered era is here.

Biles’ gymnastics in 2021 was in some ways the best it had ever been. Following the 2016 Rio Olympics, she took a well-earned hiatus. Since her return to the gym in 2018—a year in which she won the World Championships by more than a point despite multiple falls and a literal kidney stone—she had mastered numerous upgrades (aka even harder skills), seemingly for the hell of it. Her Rio routines already had a stupefying amount of difficulty, and some of her upgraded skills were even purposefully undervalued by gymnastics’ powers that be. She headed for Tokyo as the unquestioned best in the world.

And yet, amid a pandemic and major domestic unrest, it was obvious that Biles was not OK. In fact, she was but one element of a USA Gymnastics program in deep, chaotic disarray. The Olympics’ one-year postponement threw off everyone’s schedule. (The amount of meticulously planned, grueling training necessary to “peak” at an Olympics is beyond most mortal abilities to conceive.) And the U.S. women’s program was still very much reeling from the gut-wrenching scandals that had come to light after Rio, which thrust numerous Olympic gymnasts, including Biles, into the spotlight anew, not for their gymnastic achievements but for an amount of public bravery they never should have had to display (but which nevertheless put a monstrous predator behind bars). The financially bereft USA Gymnastics went through a hasty restructuring, resulting in an Olympic squad that—despite an incredibly deep field—was somehow composed as if it were entirely reliant on Biles’ assumed dominance.

All that weight was visible on her face back then. It was also evident in her gymnastics, which was majestic as always but displayed a jangle-nerved, uncontrolled edge that peeked out during the trials process, then came to a head in Tokyo even before the nightmarish “twisties” episode that happened literally midair on live international television. This is not mere hindsight; I would pinpoint the moment I knew that something was very off with Biles to her performance on floor in the Games’ qualifying round, where on her tumbling she bounced not merely out of bounds (as her power often causes her to do) but all the way off the apparatus and halfway into the stands. Prior out-of-bounds tumbles aside, she had shown immense command over her prodigious skills for years; otherwise, she wouldn’t be the greatest to ever do it. This was not normal.

In the Olympics, after the twisties incident on vault confirmed to the rest of the world what many of us already suspected, Biles was wise to withdraw from all subsequent events save one, for her own safety (and to ensure that the U.S. finished on the medal stand, which it could not have with multiple falls). And in the beam final she competed in twist-free, she brought home the medal she says she’s now most proud of: a bronze. Then, when Biles took another hiatus that many of us believed might be permanent, to focus on her health and her family, it was a relief for those of us who don’t like watching people break their necks on live TV. It was also a nonnegotiable for someone who just looked straight-up miserable to be doing the sport she dominated.

Her misery did not seem like the common exhaustion with fame and its trappings—the type that, say, Nikola Jokic has expressed. In the year leading up to the Tokyo Games, Biles did not seem to even mention gymnastics on her social media accounts unless she had to for financial reasons. (Nearly all of her gymnastics-related posts on main were #ads.) This was a young woman who later said she felt crushed by the weight of not just her own drive for excellence but the expectations of the entire world. When she went into (proverbial) exile after the Olympics, she deserved to let go of her white-knuckle dying grip on gymnastics.

But somehow, even though we, the world, do not deserve another Simone Biles era, she is back and appears more than refreshed. This cycle, she seems at once driven toward the highest heights of greatness she still can reach and at peace with that pursuit for its own sake. Three-hundred training sessions later, the immense amount of work Biles has put into her mental health positively shines from her. Biles circa 2024—at the once-unthinkable gymnast age of 27—is at her absolute peak in the mental game.

It’s important for the public to remember that even if we don’t talk shit about Simone Biles, she owes us nothing. She already lived through her nightmares three years ago, and it’s abundantly clear that no matter what happens in these Games, she is, indeed, ready for it.

Sure, the odds point to a U.S. team victory and a Biles gold in the all-around and at least two events. As long as she keeps throwing the double pike, she will likely win an Olympic vault gold even if she falls. The Olympics are always unpredictable; something—or many things—may well take us by surprise. But you can see in her face that she has already won the biggest of her victories. No matter what happens in Paris, Simone Biles is still bejeweled.