Opinion | Simone Biles Has Already Won

All the signs suggest Simone Biles is ready for it: to return to the Olympic stage and crush her new floor-routine mix that starts with a Taylor Swift song. She almost certainly won’t be satisfied if she doesn’t add to her Olympic team and individual medal count — currently at seven — but regardless of what she accomplishes in Paris, it’s important to acknowledge that by returning at all, the 27-year-old gymnast has already won.

Ms. Biles stepped aside from several events at the Tokyo Games in 2021 after experiencing anxiety and the “twisties,” a gymnastics term for disorientation while performing midair tumbles. “I have to focus on my mental health,” she told reporters. “It just sucks when you’re fighting with your own head.” It was a simple statement, yet a powerful one, and a surprising admission of vulnerability by an athlete indisputably at the top of her game.

By punching her ticket to her third Summer Games three years later, she’s not only completed her comeback in every way that counts but also achieved what may be her most lasting accomplishment: changing the way elite athletes talk about sports and psychology and the way we, the spectators, think about athletes and mental health.

It’s the rare athlete who can find the courage to speak openly about mental health. The former W.N.B.A. star Chamique Holdsclaw has discussed how she resisted revealing her own experience with depression in 2004 because as an athlete, “you’re supposed to be strong, fierce, tough. I didn’t want to be considered weak.” In 2018, DeMar DeRozan, then a player with the N.B.A.’s Toronto Raptors, posted on social media about depression, which he later described as “opening up that Pandora’s box,” while urging, “let’s make this thing a normal conversation that’s had.”

Ms. Biles surely would have preferred not to be in the position of elevating the conversation around elite athletes and mental health. But even before Tokyo she’d sounded an alarm when she told Sports Illustrated that people “don’t get that we have anxiety, that we break down.” Other notable figures had begun to speak out, including the retired swimmer Michael Phelps, the N.B.A. star Kevin Love and Naomi Osaka, a Grand Slam tennis champion who withdrew from the French Open in 2021, citing her mental health.

Ms. Biles inarguably amplified the conversation, speaking as an athlete at the pinnacle of her field during the top competition on a global stage. She shattered the persistent myth that silence and suffering are necessary burdens if one wants to succeed at the highest levels. And she confirmed a truth that psychology studies have long revealed: Elite athletes face many of the same mental-health challenges as the rest of society — they just play out on a grander, more public stage.