Simone Biles Returns to Team Gymnastics Competition, Putting the U.S. Women on Top

ANTWERP, Belgium—Simone Biles faced her biggest test yet in her unprecedented sporting comeback—and, just like old times, ensured another record victory for the U.S. women’s gymnastics team.

Biles returned here to international team competition for the first time since her mid-event withdrawal from the Olympic team final. But as the U.S. women briefly teetered on Wednesday evening in the world gymnastics championships, she held her nerve to anchor a seventh consecutive title for them.

Biles was back on top of the podium, along with Skye Blakely, Shilese Jones, Joscelyn Roberson and Leanne Wong. It was a universe removed from the chaotic hours during the team competition at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics when her career took a dramatic and unexpected turn. That’s when Biles was overtaken by disorientation—amid an extraordinary array of external pressures—and after a terrifying vault said she couldn’t continue to compete safely or well.

This time, Biles was rock solid as her team suffered a series of rattling moments.

Roberson, Biles’s 17-year-old training mate in Texas, injured herself during the warm up of her vault. Landing short and visibly in pain, Roberson was carried onto the sidelines by their shared coach, Laurent Landi, who then rapidly signaled judges to indicate a last-minute substitution of Wong into the U.S. lineup on vault, and later the floor exercise.

The U.S. lost two potentially high difficulty scores for Roberson, who spent the rest of the event bandaged and watching. She said after the competition that she had no immediate prognosis but had felt her ankle pop.

Wong aced her vault, settling some of the tension. But she later fell from the balance beam—and her resulting score of 11.7 looked as if it could wipe out the U.S. lead. Jones then turned in a solid performance on the beam, gymnastics’ most nerve-racking event, but there was a long and anxious wait for her score. Biles’s other coach, Cecile Landi, could see that her gymnast up next was stressed and doubting herself, even through the opening moments of her beam routine.

In the end, it was all shored up by Biles, who closed out the competition in the floor exercise, as an arena announcer egged on the crowd. The gymnast who in years past would often fly out of bounds on the floor went on to complete four tumbling passes with her feet increasingly looking as if they were superglued to the mat on landing. Her routine earned the single highest score of the night.

“We still pulled it out,” said Biles of the win. She added that she is keenly aware of just how many people on social media have a strong opinion on her abilities after what happened at the Tokyo Olympics.

“You should see my Twitter,” she said dryly. “It doesn’t look pretty for me out there…When you’re at the top, everybody wants you to fail and I’m sure after this, the girls will get some of that hate too, and see if we can repeat, and repeat, and repeat. I’m just excited that everybody is so headstrong and keeps pushing forward.”

Biles’s reappearance on the global scene comes weeks after she launched herself in a string of domestic events: a low-key season opening, the U.S. championships, and the world team trials, finishing first in the all-around each time.

Now she’s in the same Belgian arena where, a decade ago, she was first crowned world all-around champion as a 16-year-old in braces.

After the team event, she’s hit the halfway mark in what is shaping up to be a personal gymnastics marathon. Behind her are four routines in the qualification round, and four in the team final. Ahead are four more rotations in the individual all-around final on Friday, and all four individual event finals—for which she has also qualified—on Saturday and Sunday.

The events of Tokyo ended any habit of taking Simone Biles’s dominance for granted. In Antwerp the second time around, though, she made clear that she should never, ever be counted out.

Write to Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com