Watching Simone Biles this weekend will show how women's gymnastics has changed

Superstar gymnast Simone Biles returns to competition at the US Classic this weekend for the first time since an attack of "the twisties" forced her to drop out of several events at the Tokyo Olympics in July 2021.

She kept her plans quiet until a few weeks ago and says she's now able to twist fine. Scores from an untelevised national training camp indicate she could be back to her record-shattering best - able to complete the Yurchenko double-pike vault, which no other woman has ever done.

On top of all that, there's another reason to be excited: Biles's return is one more piece of evidence that gymnastics' old culture - which at times infantilized athletes in cruel and bizarre ways - is possibly dead.

At 26, you might hear commentators call Biles "old" for her sport. It has been widely reported that female gymnasts have traditionally been teenagers with short careers. But you hear less about why.

"To do gymnastics, you have to have good strength-to-weight ratio," said Jessica O'Beirne, host of the long-running GymCastic podcast. "The emphasis now is on strength and power - more specifically power. You can't do the gymnastics required if you don't have power."

In the bad old days, the emphasis was on weight. Coaches pressured athletes to eat less so they weighed less, and thin often meant prepubescent. That a tiny childlike body was the ideal is best documented in the TV commentary of old competitions - clips of the worst examples are now passed around by gymnastics fans with a perverse glee.

"She would prove Bela Karolyi's theory that to wait until after puberty was to waste the best of their years," one sports documentary said of Nadia Comaneci and her coach.