My favorite moment from this year's World Gymnastics Championships was the second after Skye Blakely hit the final pose in her floor routine. For a second, she was all smiles, sass, and confidence, radiating exactly the energy her sport's judges want to see. Then the music ended, Blakely's muscles released, and the 21-year-old from Texas looked like she might cry. The performance was done and Blakely could once again be exactly who she was: a young woman who had just done something very difficult.
That routine capped Blakely's first all-around gold medal, which was one of four medals Blakely brought home this week from the Netherlands—her gold joined a Team USA silver, as well as individual bronzes for herself on uneven bars and vault. A pair of Americans—Claire Pease and Reese Esponda—took individual gold and silver on the floor, respectively, in Rotterdam, while Pease also won silver on vault. On the men's side, Fred Richard won gold on the men's floor, making him the country's first gold medalist on that exercise since Paul Hamm in 2003.
In other words, women's gymnastics, even if Simone Biles doesn't come back for the 2028 Olympic Games, seems to be in good shape. In fact, Blakely's win meant the United States went a whopping one year without being home to the reigning women's all-around champion, as Biles had previously won the title in 2023 (at Worlds) and 2024 (the Paris Olympics). Even that requires an asterisk because, at last year's Worlds, American Leanne Wong took home the all-around silver.
To find an individual all-around podium that did not include at least one U.S. woman requires going all the way back to 2003—and that's because there was no individual all-around medal handed out that year's Worlds at all.
But enough about numbers. We are not here for math, even if, as with every sport, gymnastics does demand we learn some of it. We watch for the performance, the wonder, to gain for a fleeting moment a sense of awe, and to feel so many emotions. Blakely was far from the only person crying after her win.
The gymnast, who also competes collegiately for the University of Florida, had been expected to make the 2024 Paris squad, especially after she finished second to Biles at the U.S. Gymnastics Championships, automatically qualifying her for the Olympic trials. At trials, Blakely hurt her right Achilles tendon during podium training and never competed. It was her second time pulling out of an Olympic trials due to injury; the year of her senior debut, 2021, she injured her arm during vault warmups. All sports gods are cruel, but they can feel the most severe in gymnastics, a sport that necessitates, among other things, flying through the air, tumbling backwards, and running at full speed toward a vault table. There are so many ways to get hurt.
"I think she would want it to be real, but in that moment, it was hard to see that there was a way to even be here," Blakely said afterward, when asked if the 2024 version of herself would believe that all this had really happened. "And just throughout the day, I was telling myself: 'Do it for the girl in 2021, and the girl in 2024 when I couldn't do everything. Just fight for her.' And that's what I kept telling myself, is, 'I am capable. I am ready.' And I I think I made every version of myself extremely proud."
Blakely did not win with her most difficult routines. As Jessica O’Beirne of the podcast GymCastic pointed out in her question to Blakely afterward, the gymnast didn't compete in the all around with her hardest vault, a Cheng. I love the answer Blakely gave. "I think it's important to pace myself," she said, and then talked about taking it slow and learning how to push herself while also giving her body time to heal. It was an answer from an athlete who saw herself with many miles, or in this case, competitions, ahead of her. Blakely even joked about how an all-around gold had definitely not been on her vision board for 2026.
Her vision board for next year was vague, too, but its ambitions were plain to see. She said she plans to just "keep dreaming big."
