At the midpoint between the 2024 and 2028 Games, three of the five women’s gymnasts from the Paris Olympic champion team are committed to bidding for LA 2028.
The other two, Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles, have not announced whether they plan to return to competition. Time is ticking.
Let’s start with those competing at the Xfinity U.S. Championships on Friday and Sunday (live on NBC Sports and Peacock).
Hezly Rivera, the youngest U.S. Olympian across all sports in Paris at age 16, is the only member of the team who did not take a season off after the Games.
Rivera won the 2025 U.S. all-around title — the youngest woman to do so since Ragan Smith in 2017 — but missed out on the 2025 World Championships due to a left ankle sprain.
Rivera drew an LA28 logo and put it on her Texas bedroom wall. It serves as a daily reminder, not that she’s making a big deal of it.
“It’s always in the back of my mind, but I’m not really thinking about (2028) yet,” she said, “because I think it’s important to take everything one step at a time and take things piece by piece. I have little goals for myself in between.”
Hezly Rivera bids to become the second woman to repeat as U.S. all-around champion in the last 13 years after Simone Biles.
Jade Carey comes next, having returned to elite competition this season for the first time since winning her second gold medal in Paris.
When Carey finished her second Olympics in 2024, she felt fulfilled and figured her elite career was over. Then she had second thoughts that many other Olympians can attest to across sports.
“I would regret later on not trying again when I knew that I still had some more in me,” she said.
So she’s back at nationals this week in her hometown of Phoenix, still ramping up her difficulty as she plays the long game looking to 2028.
Jade Carey hopes to compete at a third — and final — Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028.
Suni Lee comeback likely to start in 2027
Suni Lee announced on July 14 that she will come back for a 2028 Olympic bid, having taken two years off after Paris.
Lee, the Tokyo Olympic all-around gold medalist, moved back to her native Minnesota from New York City, reuniting with longtime coach Jess Graba.
When Lee fell off the balance beam in her last routine of an otherwise successful Paris Olympics, the first thing she told Graba was that she needed to come back for a 2028 Olympic bid to rectify it.
Now she’s making good on that, citing it as motivation for her return.
Graba guessed that Lee, who came back from two kidney diseases to win three medals in Paris, won’t return to competition until spring 2027.
“I think the goals, for the most part, are she wants to see what she can do when she gets a full amount of prep time (for an Olympic run-up) and as healthy as she can be,” Graba said. “The COVID (pandemic) in Tokyo, and then with the kidney issue going into Paris, I think it just felt like, for her maybe, she had more in the tank she didn’t get to show.”
Suni Lee teased a return to gymnastics training, two years before the LA Olympics.
Simone Biles: ’50-50′ on comeback
In September 2022, Simone Biles returned to intermittent training, her first steps toward a comeback for the 2024 Paris Games.
If Biles wants to replicate that timeline for LA 2028, she must decide soon, something she has stressed in interviews.
Biles was asked in April if she has “any more indication which capacity” she’ll be at the LA Games — spectator or competitor.
“I feel like we’re still at a 50-50,” she told CNN. “We’re still on a time crunch here. Now it’s almost half of 2026, so we’re gonna have to make these decisions pretty quickly.”
Jordan Chiles coy on elite gymnastics comeback
If Jordan Chiles, an Olympian in Tokyo and Paris, has made a decision on LA, she hasn’t shared it widely yet.
“We’ll have to wait and see,” she told TODAY for a July 4 special.
Chiles is more familiar with Los Angeles than any of her Olympic teammates. She just completed her NCAA career for UCLA.
Chiles is also waiting for a Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling on whether she will be reinstated as the 2024 Olympic bronze medalist on floor exercise.
If all five 2024 Olympians come back and make it to LA, it will be historic regardless of the number of medals won in 2028.
The record number of U.S. female gymnasts to carry over from one Olympics to the next is four — Biles, Lee, Carey and Chiles from Tokyo to Paris and four others from 1948 to 1952.
Skye Blakely was a contender to make the 2024 Olympic team before an injury she called heartbreaking.
