Simone Biles pulled off two great comebacks in the all-around: One to win gold, one to step back from the brink.

PARIS — Inside Bercy Arena, the site of the gymnastics competitions in these Olympics, the media climb corrugated metal staircases to bleachers that quite nearly touch the place’s ceiling. From there, they watch the flips and vaults. From there, even there, it feels like Simone Biles can launch herself high enough and far enough to fist-bump the BBC correspondent in the top row.

For a while Thursday, it seemed Biles might have to do that, might have to fly higher and pull off the kind of breathtaking piece of athletic artistry of which only she is capable, to do what everyone expected her to do: win the gold medal in the women’s all-around competition. For a while, Biles believed she might have to do it, too. She entered the competition understanding that it would take more than a run-of-the-mill performance to beat her primary rival, Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade. It did, and it was only because everyone has gotten accustomed to Biles’ making the impossible look easy that the challenges she overcame Thursday to win her sixth Olympic gold medal might go unappreciated.

There was an external challenge, and there was an internal one. Andrade, the all-around’s silver medalist at the 2020-21 Games in Tokyo, was the former. “I don’t want to compete with Rebeca no more,” Biles said. “I’ve never had an athlete that close. So it definitely put me on my toes. It brought out the best in myself.”

She hadn’t been planning, she said, on using the “Biles II,” her unique, double-pike version of a Yurchenko vault — a round-off back handspring into two backflips, but much more incredible than those few words make it sound. But she went to it right out of the gate, and its unmatched skill difficulty, 6.4, gave her an edge over every other competitor, including Andrade.

“Thank God we did the double pike today,” said Biles, who scored 59.131 points to Andrade’s 57.932, as Suni Lee of the U.S. took the bronze. “I just knew how phenomenal of an athlete she is. ‘OK, maybe I have to bring out the big guns.’”

That extra firepower turned out to be necessary. Biles was in third place at the halfway point of the program after a mistake on the uneven bars — a slow swing that caused her knees to come within millimeters of touching the floor cost her points. Glancing at the scoreboard, seeing herself in third, she paced, her hands on her hips. She bent at the waist, putting her hands on her knees. She appeared impatient. When it came time for the balance beam, Biles was walking so fast that she practically ran up the back of the Paris 2024 staff member who was leading the gymnasts in a single-file line across the arena.

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“I’m not sure what the camera caught,” she said. “I was probably praying to every single God out there, trying to refocus and recenter myself, because that’s not the bars that I’ve been training. Out of the all the events, bars is the one I haven’t messed up on once here or back in Houston. I was a little bit disappointed in myself, because I can suh-wing some bars.”

Here was the moment that she had to overcome in her internal challenge. Biles, of course, had withdrawn from the Tokyo Games after experiencing the “twisties,” a sense of disorientation that gymnasts sometimes experience, a crossing of the wires that connect the body and the mind. Her decision to remove herself from competition sparked a national, even international, discussion of the mental health issues that athletes face, but more pressing and personal for Biles, it put her career in jeopardy.

“Three years ago,” she said, “I never thought I’d step foot on a gymnastics floor again.”

She goes to therapy every Thursday now. She even talked to her therapist, she said, at 7 Thursday morning, Paris time, one of countless head-clearing, mind-focusing sessions that have become common for the woman who might be, pound-for-pound and in the context of her sport, the best athlete on the planet. Yes, Simone Biles completed two comebacks here Thursday night, the biggest of her career and the biggest of her life, and maybe the truest measure of her greatness is that no one was surprised that she did it. No one at all.