| This past Friday, the gymnast Simone Biles became the most decorated athlete in the history of her sport, claiming her thirty-fourth medal—gold, of course—at an Olympic or world-championship meet. By the end of the weekend, she had won three more. In 2016, The New Yorker profiled Biles on the eve of her first Olympics. Although she was still a teen-ager, Biles was already a transformative figure: not only the dominant competitor of her era but an athlete radically expanding the possibilities of what gymnastics could be. For decades, gymnasts could score no higher than a perfect ten, a figure that created iconic moments at the Olympics, but which could also lead to questionable outcomes and clever manipulations of the rules. In 2006, the International Federation of Gymnastics implemented a new code of points with no maximum score, a change that initially confused fans and dismayed some of the sport’s legends. A period of uncertainty followed, and then clarity arrived—in the form of a diminutive tumbler from Texas. “It wasn’t until Biles’s emergence,” the writer Reeves Wiedeman observed, “that the code revealed its potential.” | 
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