TRAVEL

By Tess DeMeyer / The Athletic NYT News Service/Syndicate Stories

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Time zones do not affect Jordan Chiles.

She declared this while sitting in a hotel conference room near the University of Maryland, far from her Los Angeles town house. It was 10 p.m. on a Friday in January, the night before a competition. She had split her week between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, where she flew for a Time magazine Women of the Year photo shoot, and she and her teammates had just spent their day touring Washington, making stops at the Washington Monument and the World War II Memorial.

The schedule sounds exhausting. But Chiles has been traveling to international gymnastics competitions since she was 12. She knows the routine. The next day, Chiles scored a perfect 10.0 — the second of the NCAA season — on uneven bars in front of a record crowd for a Maryland gymnastics meet. The 7,287 fans who packed Xfinity Center erupted in celebration over her routine, even though she was competing against the hometown Terrapins.

About 12 hours later, she was flying back to California with her UCLA teammates after securing the first Big Ten Conference win in program history. The cross-country trip epitomized Chiles’ life since returning home from the 2024 Olympics: a whirlwind of flights, appearances, sponsorship obligations, college classes and still, somehow, room for gymnastics.

But for Chiles, 23, that is the easy part. Behind the scenes, she spent the second half of 2024 wrestling with the emotional fallout from the Paris Olympics, which, for her, ended in controversy and continues in the courts. “Since I was going, going, going, I didn’t have to think about anything. I didn’t have to process anything,” Chiles said. “But at the same time, since I wasn’t processing it, it was just in my head. Building up.”

The bronze medal Chiles initially won Aug. 5 in the Olympic floor exercise final is tied up in an appeals process that has reached the highest level of Switzerland’s court system. It stems from a score change that lifted Chiles from fifth to third on the day of competition. The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled the inquiry filed by Chiles’ coach to change her score arrived four seconds too late. Six days after Chiles stood on the podium next to Simone Biles of the United States and Rebeca Andrade of Brazil, the International Olympic Committee reallocated the medal to Ana Barbosu of Romania.

Chiles’ legal team appealed the sports court’s ruling to the Swiss Federal Tribunal — Switzerland’s Supreme Court — in September, arguing there is video evidence proving Chiles’ coach, Cécile Canqueteau-Landi, submitted the inquiry in time. But a ruling could still take months, and the best-case scenario for Chiles is that the tribunal refers the case back to the sports court for a second look. Seven months after a torrent of emotions and decisions that Chiles said took away “the recognition of who I was,” she, Barbosu and the gymnastics world await a decision.

In Paris, the score 13.666 appeared on a large screen at Bercy Arena shortly after Chiles finished her final routine of the Games. Barbosu, who sat in third place, had earned a 13.700, and it seemed Chiles had missed the podium by less than a tenth of a point. But a few moments later, a new score appeared: 13.766. Chiles jumped into Canqueteau-Landi’s arms, then burst into tears and took off running, overcome with emotion about winning her first individual Olympic medal. When the coach caught up, she lifted Chiles in a hug and spun her in a circle as Biles bounced around the pair.

A few feet away, Barbosu, 18, had been waving a Romanian flag while celebrating what looked like a third-place finish. After seeing her position change to fourth, she dropped the flag and clasped her hands over her stomach in shock. She left the competition floor in tears, covering her face with the collar of her warm-up suit jacket. Chiles went on to the medal ceremony, where she and Biles bowed to Andrade, who took the gold, in what became an iconic image from the Paris Games. The women were the first three Black gymnasts to share an Olympic podium.

Then the ruling by the sports court. The Olympic committee decision. Barbosu received her own bronze medal 11 days later at a ceremony in Bucharest, Romania. By that point, Chiles was on the move. She went from Paris to New York to appear on “Today” and announce her return to UCLA. She went home to Texas; vacationed in Mexico; returned to New York for appearances at Fashion Week, a New York Mets game and the U.S. Open tennis tournament; and presented at the MTV Video Music Awards, where rapper Flava Flav bestowed her with a bedazzled bronze clock necklace.

The next morning, she flew to Oceanside, California, where she had 72 hours to learn the choreography for the Gold Over America Tour, the post-Olympics exhibition led by Biles. The rest of the cast had been rehearsing for two weeks. On Sept. 16, a little over a month after the International Olympic Committee stripped Chiles of her medal, the tour kicked off in Oceanside. It made 30 stops over seven weeks. In each new city, the audience roared when Chiles ran onto the floor.

For 90 minutes, she danced, tumbled, waved, smiled and cheered for fellow elite gymnasts with the energy and confidence of a pop star performing to a capacity crowd. But back on the bus or in her hotel room, she struggled with what had happened in Paris. “Those days were the hardest of my life,” she said. “I didn’t want to be seen.” She felt she could not pull herself out of bed on the tour bus. She cried herself to sleep, and when she woke up, she cycled through the same questions: What now? What am I going to do? “I didn’t want to do anything,” she said. “I just wanted to be alone and have nobody around me. Just hide myself.”

The young woman who lived by a motto, “I’m that girl,” that reminded herself that she had nothing to prove in her quest for a second Olympics, lost her spark. “I’d always tell myself, ‘Do I even know who the real Jordan Chiles is? Do I know who she is?’” she said. “It really would take a toll on me to try to figure out who she is. Who is the Jordan Chiles that people talk about and they’re always so happy to see? It was hard to get out of that mindset and push myself to feel comfortable in my own skin.”

Over time, little things helped stop her introspective spiral. She sought comfort in Disney movies from her childhood, watching “The Cheetah Girls,” “Let It Shine” and “Camp Rock” in hopes of rediscovering a youthful joy. She drew on her iPad, stayed up late cracking jokes on the bus with her castmates and went shopping with Biles, one of her close friends.

She also began to think about the Jordan Chiles of the future.

“She can leave the old one that’s trying to be depressed behind her,” she said. “She has other things to do. She doesn’t have to be stuck.” The appeal may put the bronze medal controversy back into the headlines, but Chiles said it is not on her mind. She lets her legal team handle the process. Her team submitted an additional brief to the court in January. Her lawyer, Maurice Suh, declined to comment while the appeal is pending.

The Swiss Supreme Court typically takes four to six months to issue a decision, said Marc-Anthony de Boccard, a Swiss-qualified lawyer and sports law specialist. They are ruling, essentially, on due process, he said: whether the court complied with the right to be heard. Which is why a second sports court review would follow if Chiles wins this round.

Chiles’ focus has instead been on her college season, where she is trying to help UCLA to its first national championship since 2018. Her roommate Margzetta Frazier, a former elite gymnast and UCLA standout from 2019 to 2024, said Chiles was able to compete at such a high standard because of all that she has been through. “She’s used all of her experiences throughout her career to get that mental edge that she developed to where her gymnastics is very intentional, down to the way she puts her fingers,” she said.

Since her first 10.0 of 2025 in Maryland on Jan. 18, Chiles added another perfect score on floor exercise to clinch a victory over Michigan State by one-tenth of a point. Her Prince-inspired routine opens with a huge double back layout and features expressive choreography packed with personality, including a brief air guitar solo. UCLA coach Janelle McDonald said it “exudes joy” — the joy that eluded Chiles in the aftermath of Paris.

“It’s hard to watch her without a smile on your face because you see the joy. You see the effort,” McDonald said. “You see the determination that she’s put into her sport and her craft for all of these years.” In 2025, Chiles has released a leotard collection, appeared in Nike’s first Super Bowl ad in 27 years, caught a pass from Michael Vick at the NFL Pro Bowl and published a memoir. She attends two in-person classes, and on weekends, she wowed crowds at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion. She and the Bruins will compete this weekend at the Big Ten championships.

“On days where I’m tired and I feel like I can’t keep going, I’m like, ‘OK, if Jordan can go to five states in two days, then I can get up for work today,’” Frazier said.

Chiles is not certain what the next 10 or even two years will look like. She is aiming for the individual national titles she has not yet won to complete a career sweep after placing first on bars and floor at the 2023 NCAA championships. She still has one more year of NCAA eligibility, should she choose to use it. She is not firm on a decision about the 2028 Olympics, but she is sure of where she stands after her Paris experience. “I am still that girl and will forever be that girl,” she said. “Period.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Copyright 2025

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