Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade wants her friend Simone Biles’ gymnastics crown

No one doubts that Biles, 27, is still the superior athlete. Not even Andrade’s own team contests it.

But now, as they prepare for an anticipated showdown at the Paris Games, Biles has a real challenger for the first time in years. The room for error has shrunk. If a mistake mars Biles’s brilliance, it could be Andrade who ascends the podium’s final step.

Despite the narrowing gap in their abilities, the relationship between the pair, who are of similar ages and backgrounds, bears little of the animus that often characterizes rivalries among elite performers. At competitions, they cheer each other on. And at crucial junctures in Andrade’s career, moments when she questioned whether she’d ever realize her potential, Biles has gone further, encouraging the athlete fated to be her top competitor.

In 2018, Andrade was struggling to regain her form following a significant knee injury, the second of three. Biles took the younger athlete aside and told her she was too talented to give up. When Andrade managed to best Biles on vault at last year’s world championships, the American mimed lifting an imaginary crown off her head and placing it atop the Brazilian’s. That evening, Biles approached Andrade again at a party, and the world’s greatest gymnasts danced together.

“I’ve grown such affection for her,” Andrade told The Washington Post.

“I actually love competing with Rebeca,” Biles has said of Andrade. “She does push me.”

Andrade is now ready to do more than push Biles. She wants to win. And there are some who think she has a chance.

“We’re going to see a grand duel happen in Paris,” said Daiane dos Santos, the first Brazilian gymnast to win gold at the world championships. “They’re going to come in full force, with the same objective, to show who in fact is the best: Who will win?”

Their showdown is, in many ways, a triumph of the improbable.

If Andrade’s aunt had not worked as a cook at a São Paulo gym that housed a program to combat poverty through gymnastics, she never would have recommended the 5-year-old. If Andrade’s older brother had not been so devoted to her success — he often biked her to practice — Andrade would have dropped out. And if that brother, Emerson Andrade, had not convinced a man to sell him an old bike for $3, rather than $4, they’d have had little way of getting there.

But perhaps the most unlikely twist came in 2015, when it was clear Andrade was Brazil’s next great gymnastics talent. That was when Andrade, then 16, tore her right ACL. In a sport where agility is everything and the slightest corporal alteration can differentiate victory from defeat, an ACL injury can wreck a career.

“She was telling me, ‘My knee isn’t the same, it doesn’t bend right,’” Emerson Andrade said. “My mother couldn’t even watch, staying in the kitchen, because Rebeca was crying in pain.”

But Andrade made it back. Only to tear the same ligament again in 2017.

It was over, Andrade told her coach. She’d never be the same. “She said, ‘Xico, I don’t want it anymore,’” her coach Xico Porath recalled.

Again, she underwent surgery, and again, she started preparing for a comeback. Her performance when she reached the 2018 world championships in Qatar was underwhelming. She didn’t medal in a single event. Doubts — potentially fatal to the individual athlete — began to invade her thoughts.

When the meet was over, Andrade sat by herself, outside the hotel lobby on a bench. That was when she saw Biles. The American, already a superstar, had medaled in every event, the first woman to do so in decades. Andrade watched as Biles glided past.

Then the American turned. She sat down next to Andrade.

“It was such a kind moment, so affectionate, because there was no one else around,” Andrade said. “She told me, ‘Don’t give up. You’re talented. And you’re going to get past this.’”

Gymnastics rewards risk and daring. Even when an athlete fails to execute a difficult element, the fact that she attempted it factors into her final score.

This is where Biles is without rival. Her kineticism enables skills no other female gymnast can match. Even when she doesn’t land them, the sheer difficulty of her routine puts her on the podium. One of her signature elements is a triple-twisting double tuck — also known as the Biles II. It’s a single leap from the floor in which, once in the air, she rotates her body around two axes simultaneously, flipping head over heels twice and twisting sideways three times. Once, she stayed afloat for nearly 1.2 seconds.

Biles’s representatives did not respond to a request for an interview.

To attempt such acrobatics requires the type of grit that Andrade has long found inspiring. “It can’t be easy,” she said.

Andrade thought of Biles’s mental toughness in 2019, when her right ACL snapped a third time. Not even her coach expected her to attempt a third comeback. But she surprised him.

“‘I’ve thought it over, and I’m not going to give up,’” she told Porath, according to the coach. “‘I’m going to try again.’”

At the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021, she earned gold on vault and silver in the all-around competition, making her one of Brazil’s top sports stars. She looked for Biles. The American had bowed out of the Games after suffering the “twisties,” a mental disconnect between mind and body. But even in that moment, Andrade could see Biles cheering her on.

Andrade returned the affection, lauding Biles’s return to competition last year.

“The best in the world was able to show us that things can happen, and you can get past it, and return,” Andrade said.

Then: last year’s world championships. For the first time, Andrade and Biles competed when both were healthy and in their prime. Biles won the all-around gold. Andrade earned silver.

During the vault final, Biles fell on her Yurchenko double pike. Andrade landed her vault and snared the gold medal — and Biles’s imaginary crown.

“Simone’s gesture showed that all of my work, all my effort, and everyone’s support, it was worth it,” she said. “I didn’t give up.”

At an Olympic gymnastics facility in Rio de Janeiro this month, Andrade began training early — first floor, then bars, then beam. She was ready, she said.

If both athletes perform at the peak of their abilities in Paris, Andrade’s team had concluded, Biles will win.

“A Simone that sticks her landing is the champion,” Porath said.

But if Biles stumbles, he continued, they’re prepared to capitalize. Andrade has been practicing new skills. The Brazilian Olympic Committee this month posted a video of the gymnast practicing a triple-twisting Yurchenko, an elaborate and dangerous twirl that has never been executed successfully in women’s competition.

“We always train new things,” Andrade told The Post. “If we’re feeling good in the competition, we might do it.”

Andrade wants to win. But mostly, she said, she wants to keep competing against Biles. Biles has not said publicly whether she will retire after this year’s Games. But in a private conversation, Andrade said, Biles confided that Paris would be her final competition.

“I said, ‘No, girl, don’t do this,’” Andrade said.

When Andrade was at her lowest, Biles encouraged her to persevere. Now she wants to do the same for Biles.

“I know that she wants to win, but she will continue rooting for me,” she said. “And she knows that I want to win, but I’ll keep rooting for her.”

Emily Giambalvo contributed to this report.