Editor's note: Follow the latest U.S. Olympic Gymnastics selections.
MINNEAPOLIS — Call it carnage, mayhem or just plain bad luck, the four women accompanying Simone Biles to the Paris Olympics may be the ones who were healthy enough to make the trip.
In the space of 30 minutes on Friday night, Serie Jones was ruled out of one event with a knee injury and Kayla DiCello was ruled out with an Achilles injury, while Skye Blakely, a member of the U.S. team that has won gold medals at the past two world championships, was hobbling across the floor on crutches after rupturing her Achilles during training two days earlier.
Biles and the others may do superhuman things, but they have feelings, and they couldn't help but be affected by the evil curses that floated like mist across the floor. Biles spat the F-word after a failed balance beam routine. Suni Lee was a wonder she could stay on the beam after landing off-balance during her aerial routine.
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And so it went on and on.
“It's always tough to see a teammate get injured, but this is the second this week,” said Laurent Lundy, coach of Biles and Jordan Childs.
Three, actually. But you get the point.
Injuries happen in every sport and are unpredictable, but when they occur at the end of four years that have tested an athlete both physically and mentally, it seems particularly cruel.
The last Olympics were postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and when they finally took place, it was tough, with no spectators and no family or friends allowed to attend. And for this Olympics, there was a shortened preparation period of three years instead of the usual four. Players who could have been transferred stayed, and the competition for what is always the toughest team to form became even more intense.
Add to that the usual anxiety that comes with the Olympic Trials, a goal he's come close to reaching throughout his career.
“This is the most stressful game of my career so far because this is a make or break game,” Chiles said.
But if you get through that, your reward won't be a regular Olympics, but an Olympics in Paris, one of the most spectacular cities in the world.
Then injuries threw everything into disarray.
“I don't want that to happen,” Chiles said. “Obviously, in my mind, it was there, but I didn't want to think about it, so I tried to push it to the back of my mind. We can only control what we can control, and at the end of the day, what happens, happens.”
What makes this so striking, more than anything, is that the U.S. women's team looked like it was on its way to being in pretty solid, if not set, shape after the U.S. Championships four weeks ago, and of course, Biles, 27, is in the best shape she's ever been in — even better than she was in 2016, when she won four Olympic gold medals.
Then there's Jones, the two-time world all-around medalist who used personal tragedy as fuel for her Olympic success; Blakely; Lee, the Tokyo all-around medalist who made an incredible comeback from two bouts of kidney failure that had her struggling to get out of bed six months ago; and Chiles, whose recovery is so rapid that her progress is almost visible in real time.
It could be DiCello, the Pan American Games all-around champion and Tokyo reserve, or Jade Carey, the Tokyo Games floor exercise gold medalist.
And now it all went haywire.
Blakely's Olympic appearance was over, as was DiCello's, and Jones only had to qualify for the trials to make the team, and her performance on the uneven bars, her speciality, was superb: without increasing the difficulty she earned 14.675 points, the third-highest score of the entire tournament, behind only Biles' 15.975 for her Yurchenko double pike and her 14.85 for her spectacular floor routine.
But will Jones be able to push herself harder on Sunday, the second day of competition? Neither Jones nor her coach were seen after the competition, so the nature of her injury and, more importantly, her prognosis are unclear. Is her injury serious enough to keep her out of Paris? Will she still have to get back in shape by the time the practices drag on and passions flare? And it's not just her knee injury. What about the shoulder injury that kept Jones out of nationals?
These aren't just theoretical questions, as Olympic qualifying is just a month away, on July 28th.
“It has to be right now, right? Because anything could happen three days from now, two weeks from now,” Alicia Sacramone Quinn, high-performance strategy leader for the U.S. women's program and a member of the selection committee, said earlier this week.
“We always have to look at what's in front of us right now because that's what we can really rely on,” Sacramone Quinn said. “We look at what they've done and most recently what they've done in these two tournaments.”
Athletes sometimes drag themselves down through chaos: they have a bad day, run out of gas, miscalculate, or sometimes just lose. All of this hurts.
But not so much that they wouldn't even have a chance to try, which is why it was so heartbreaking to watch on Friday night: the Olympic Trials.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.
