PARIS — She and Suni Lee are dancing with the American flag. Hezly Rivera and Jade Carey flank them on either side, smiling broadly and Jordan Chiles holds her fist in the air. At first glance, it’s just another celebratory post on Simone Biles’ Instagram, part of a post-Olympic gold medal-winning reel showing her with her teammates and her husband.

Except underneath the picture, Biles added a caption: “lack of talent, lazy, olympic champions.”

Somewhere in Paris, Biles dropped the mic directly on MyKayla Skinner’s head.

Though Biles didn’t reference Skinner, it would seem like the most decorated American gymnast of all time had her former teammate on her mind. After the Olympic Trials, Skinner posted a now-deleted YouTube video, saying in part that “besides Simone, I feel like the talent and depth isn’t what it used to be,” adding that “a lot of girls don’t work as hard, and don’t have the work ethic.” Skinner, who won silver in 2020 with Biles, went on to say that she thought SafeSport, designed to identify abusive coaches, prevented coaches from pushing gymnasts as hard as necessary, and questioned the strength of the competition at the trials, wondering how someone who “fell twice” could finish second.

Unlike so many athletes, who like to pretend they don’t read what’s written about them, Biles knows what’s being said about her. She’s keeping the receipts.

Since her comeback post-Tokyo, Biles has spoken openly about the trolls who call her a quitter. She responded immediately to Skinner’s comments, posting on social media that “not everyone needs a mic and a platform.” Skinner later posted the obligatory apology, saying that the abuse she says she endured at the hands of Márta Károlyi may have led to her “hurtful comments.”

Seems fair to surmise that Biles has not entirely accepted the apology.

Required reading

(Photo of Simone Biles: Ulrik Pedersen / DeFodi Images via Getty Images)

The United States women’s basketball team beat Japan handily on Monday, 102-76, to open their Olympic pool play strong. But former college basketball coach Seth Greenberg, a self-proclaimed basketball junkie, didn’t watch.

“I haven’t watched one second of the women’s [basketball team], and I probably would have watched if [Caitlin Clark] was playing.” Greenberg said during an appearance on OutKick’s “Don’t @ Me with Dan Dakich” on Wednesday.

“During watching some other Olympic activity this week, they clipped [to] the game against Japan, and some 5-foot-2 player was guarding someone who was a good player. It was uninteresting, to be honest with you. No disrespect, it just wasn’t interesting. It didn’t grab me. Watching women’s gymnastics grabs you. Watching beach volleyball grabs you.”

“And if [Clark] played, I probably would have watched just to see what kind of pass she would throw or shoot a logo three.”

The 22-year-old WNBA rookie phenom was not chosen to be on the roster, but Dawn Staley, South Carolina women’s basketball head coach and member of Team USA Women’s National Team Committee, suggested during an interview with NBC’s Mike Tirico on Sunday that maybe Clark’s play warranted her selection.

CAITLIN CLARK SIGN CATCHES ATTENTION OF US WOMEN’S BASKETBALL STARS BEFORE JAPAN BEATDOWN

Caitlin Clark is shown before the WNBA All-Star Game on July 20, 2024, in Phoenix. (Alex Slitz/Getty Images)

“As a committee member, you’re charged with putting together the best team of players, the best talent,” Staley said. “Caitlin is just a rookie in the WNBA, wasn’t playing bad but wasn’t playing like she’s playing now. If we had to do it all over again, the way that she’s playing, she would be in really high consideration of making the team because she is playing head and shoulders above a lot of people.”

With or without Clark, the U.S. women’s team are the heavy favorites to win gold again.

The team might be the best current dynasty in sports as it seeks its eighth consecutive gold medal this year at the Paris Olympic Games.

Caitlin Clark of Team WNBA handles the ball against the USA Basketball Women’s National Team during the WNBA All-Star Game on July 20, 2024, in Phoenix. (Juan Ocampo/NBAE via Getty Images)

However, there is no doubt that Clark attracts eyeballs to the sport. The WNBA has seen both attendance and ratings soar in Clark’s rookie season.

Team USA has two more games in pool play:

• Aug. 1, Belgium vs. USA (3 p.m. ET)
• Aug. 4, Germany vs. USA (11:15 a.m. ET)

Fox News’ Ryan Gaydos contributed to this report.

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PARIS – The dawn rain slowed to a drizzle just before 8 a.m. Wednesday in Paris, just as 46 of the fittest women in the world trotted onto the Pont Alexandre III, descended a flight of stairs onto a floating dock and dove into the Seine, bacteria be damned.

After years of planning, construction of a $1.5 billion sewage retention tank system, months of jitters, and a final 24-hour delay as mother nature cleaned up the latest sewage overflow as best it could, this elite collection of Olympic distance triathletes did the thing that has grossed out pretty much everyone for 100 years.

Was the river clean? Let’s say clean enough, and leave it at that.

At 3:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Olympic organizers and representatives of a regional environmental agency, the City of Paris and the prefecture of the Ile-de-France region performed the test that the Seine has been failing since the weekend downpour that soaked the opening ceremony and sent untold gallons of fresh sewage into the urban waterway.

Unlike the previous three days, when organizers canceled two training swims and postponed the men’s race for 27 hours, this time the river passed the test. But, officials determined, with levels of E.Coli and enterococci under the threshold risk for bacteria, viruses and other diseases that health experts and the world governing bodies for triathlon and swimming have set for open-water competition.

And so, with the sound of a high-pitched bleep, they set off, thrashing through the murky gray-brown waters on a day when the more immediate hazards turned out to be the slick pavement that caused a series of spills as cyclists tried to avoid one another and navigate the tight turns of perhaps the most picturesque of urban courses.

The Eiffel Tower and the Grand Palais loomed above the 1,500-meter swim. The triathletes cycled past the Musee D’Orsay and the Assemblee National. The Arc de Triomphe flashed within sight as they zipped onto the Champs-Elysées during the seven loops that comprised the 25-mile ride. And they hit many of the hot spots once more during the 6.2 mile run.

This was one of those moments organizers had dreamed of when they first designed the plan for these Games a decade ago – competition through the heart of Paris, a video postcard from one of the world’s most breathtaking cities.

And hopefully no one gets sickened from ingesting or dousing in that river water.

Taylor Knibb of the United States said she crashed in training over the weekend and had the cuts and scabs all over lower left leg to show for it. She debated for days whether to take antibiotics before going into the water. She opted not to.

She said she simply decided to not think about the pollution and just focus on the race. Struggling to swim upstream, she thought: “I just want to be done with this.”

Her teammate, Taylor Spivey said a real issue Tuesday was the current and swimming back upstream in the second part of the first leg. It was as strong a current as she has ever competed in, she said, since triathlons generally don’t take place in rivers.

“I felt like I was on a treadmill,” she said.

None of this came as a surprise to anyone who had anything to do with locating the race in the Seine. Olympic organizers, Paris officials, the leaders of World Triathlon, all of them wanted their competition at the center of the city and the Games themselves. The alternative likely would have been a lake far outside of town. No one fancied that.

Also, the Olympics often serve as a way to unleash spending on dream projects that might never get done ordinarily. Officials have been talking about making the Seine swimmable for more than 30 years. The sewage retention project became one of the legacies of the Games, something organizers could point to when asked whether going through all this trouble to host was worthwhile.

Next summer, three swimming areas in the Seine will open to the public. That is the plan anyway, along with three more races in the river before these Games finish.

To the racing: Flora Duffy of Bermuda, the defending Olympic champion, led a tight lead pack by a hair after the swim, the segment that is more about survival and trying to put some hurt on competitors than establishing a lead. The cycling leg brought some thinning, with Duffy sharing the work at the front with Maya Kingma of the Netherlands, Georgia Taylor-Brown of Britain and the hometown favorite, Cassandre Beaugrand of France.

Still the way triathlon has evolved, with more and more standout runners migrating to the sport and learning to swim and cycle adequately enough to get to the final leg, this race was always going to come down to the run. After 82 minutes, Julie Derron of Switzerland slipped on her running shoes and led the race into its final segment.

Beaugrand runs to victory at Pont Alexandre III. (Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

Spivey, of the United States, was the first of the contenders to slip off the back of the pack. Duffy, who needed to push the pack harder on the bike but wasn’t able to, and Taylor-Brown fell off by the end of the first loop, as a lead group of four separated from everyone else.

As it so often does, that made for some cruel Olympic math. Four contenders, three medals, with two Frenchwomen, Beaugrand and Emma Lombardi, hanging with Derron and Beth Potter of Britain, as legs all over the course began to turn to goo.

Derron ran without fear, sticking to the front on a still, thick morning with no headwind to worry about, her stride smooth, her shoulders steady. Beaugrand edged onto her shoulder with two miles left, with Potter and Lombardi trailing stubbornly behind as the bell sounded, signifying the final loop.

Then Beaugrand made her move. Coming in, one of the big questions other than the health of the river was whether the racing in front her home fans would inspire Beaugrand or whether the pressure would prove too heavy a burden.

In the final mile, with thousands of flags waving and the noise building in the heart of the city, Beaugrand left no doubt, surging, three then seven then 10 and 20 meters ahead and grabbing the tape at the finish and pulling it to her face before collapsing onto the carpet. Derron took the silver. Potter nabbed the bronze.

Alex Yee, right, runs out of the Seine toward the next leg of the race during his gold medal run. (Marijan Murat/picture alliance via Getty Images)

In the men’s race, Alex Yee of Britain won a brilliant and dramatic gold medal. The 26-year-old upgraded the silver he won in Tokyo three years ago to gold after surging clear of New Zealand’s Hayden Wilde, coming back during the run (of course).

He becomes only the second British man to bring home individual triathlon gold after Alistair Brownlee did so in back-to-back Games in London and Rio de Janeiro. France’s Leo Bergere made it a multi-event medal double for the hosts.

Italy’s Alessio Crociani was first out after navigating the energy-sapping 1.5km section the best of the field before embarking on the six-lap, 40km bike, which was tight throughout. Wilde surged on the second lap of the 10km run, putting him in strong position for gold.

But in one of the most dramatic finishes of these Games so far, Yee roared back, passing Wilde on the entry to the Pont Alexandre III with only meters remaining before slowing to an almost walk to take the tape and Olympic glory.

“I have so much respect for Hayden and how much he made me dig there,” Yee said. “He was an amazing athlete and for me, almost two laps in I thought that silver was on the cards but I owed it to myself to give myself one last chance.”

While Tuesday was a triumph for organizers, the Seine has a long way to go.

Three more Olympic races are supposed to take place in the river – the mixed triathlon relay, and two long distance swimming races.

That is the stated program, at least. Another downpour could turn the triathlon into a duathlon and send the swim races out to the flat water canoe venue east of the city.

Less glamorous, perhaps. But less contaminated, too.

Ben Burrows contributed reporting.

(Top photo: Michael Steele/Getty Images)