Olympics Live Updates: Biles Makes Tokyo Debut

Two words: Simone Biles.

At about 2:10 a.m. Eastern time, the transcendent American star of the Games takes to the mat, the beam, the vault and the floor for the first time at these Olympics. For American television viewers, NBC is showing the competition in its prime-time coverage, beginning at 7:30 p.m. Eastern on Sunday.

Swimming is always an anchor of the first week of the Games, and the first four golds are set to be awarded starting at 9:30 p.m. Saturday Eastern time, perfect for live prime-time viewing. On tap are the grueling 400-meter individual medleys. That’s a chance for two international stars to shine: Daiya Seto of Japan and Katinka Hosszu of Hungary. The men’s 400 meter freestyle and the women’s 4×100 free round out the lineup.

Naomi Osaka will always be remembered for these Games after lighting the cauldron at the opening ceremony. She will also want to be remembered for winning the tennis gold medal; she opens against Zheng Saisai of China.

April Ross and Alix Klineman are the new American stars in women’s beach volleyball and will try to follow in the footsteps of the legendary team of Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings.

After some stutters in exhibition games, the American men’s basketball team plays for real for the first time, and its opponent is a good one: France, which features five N.B.A. players, including Rudy Gobert.

Here are some highlights of U.S. broadcast coverage for Saturday evening, including the first appearance of skateboarding in the Olympics and the next game for the seemingly unstoppable U.S. softball team. All times are Eastern.

• Skateboarding: Men’s street skateboarding makes its Olympic debut, with live coverage of the preliminary runs starting at 7:30 on USA. Coverage of the finals starts at 11, also on USA; NBC picks it up at midnight.

• Beach volleyball: Preliminary matches will be included in NBC’s multisport coverage starting at 8. At 9, NBCSN will rebroadcast an earlier match between Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena of the United States and Alexander Brouwer and Robert Meeuwsen of the Netherlands. NBC plans additional coverage during its overnight broadcast, starting at 2 a.m.

• Rowing: At 8, CNBC has repechages in men’s and women’s single sculls and pairs. At 11, CNBC has replays of heats in the men’s and women’s eights.

• Swimming: NBC will include the finals of the men’s and women’s 400-meter individual medleys in its multisport coverage starting at 8, with additional coverage during its overnight broadcast starting at 2 a.m.

• Three-on-three basketball: Look for live coverage of a preliminary game during NBC’s multisport coverage starting at 8. Additional coverage starts at 8 on CNBC and at 10:40 on USA.

• Softball: The U.S. women are on a roll, and they face Australia at 9 on CNBC, with a replay at midnight on NBCSN.

• Tennis: First-round singles and doubles matches continue, with coverage starting at 10 on the Olympic Channel.

• Volleyball: NBCSN has a replay of the men’s match between the United States and France at 10. The U.S. women take on Argentina in a Group B match at midnight on NBC.

• Archery: USA has elimination-round coverage at 10:40, and CNBC will carry the final of the women’s team event at 3 a.m.

• Cycling: Coverage of the women’s road race starts at midnight on USA.

• Table tennis: The mixed-doubles quarterfinals start at 12:20 a.m. on CNBC.

• Water polo: CNBC has the men’s Group A match between the United States and Japan at 1 a.m.

• Gymnastics: The men’s team competition is in the mix during NBC’s overnight coverage, starting at 2 a.m.

• Diving: The women’s synchronized springboard competition starts at 2:10 a.m. on CNBC.

• Fencing: Coverage of women’s individual foil starts at 3 a.m. on CNBC.

For the first time in 13 years, baseball and softball will be contested at the Olympics.

Thanks to Japan’s ardent love of both sports, baseball and softball are back in the Games after being voted out in 2005 as permanent Olympic offerings. The criticisms then were that the sports weren’t global enough and, in baseball’s case, the best players in the world didn’t participate. Baseball, played by men in the Olympics, had officially joined the Games in 1992 and softball, played by women, in 1996.

This summer is a long time coming for several athletes. Some softball players had retired and then came out of retirement when their sport was brought back for the Tokyo Games. Others stuck it out for years hoping for this moment.

The return of softball and baseball will be brief, however, since neither is a permanent Olympic sport. They weren’t included by the organizing committee of the 2024 Summer Games in Paris. But there is hope: Baseball and softball are widely expected to return in 2028, when Los Angeles is the host.

Which countries are playing?

In previous Olympics, eight teams competed in each sport’s tournament. This year, there will be only six.

In baseball, the teams are Japan (which has appeared in every Olympics for baseball and is ranked No. 1 in the world), the United States (which won gold in 2000 and is ranked No. 4) and South Korea (which won gold in 2008 and is ranked No. 3). Making their first appearances in the Olympics for baseball are Mexico, which is No. 5 in the world, and Israel, the Cinderella of the tournament and ranked No. 24. The Dominican Republic, the last team to qualify and No. 7 in the world, rounds out the field.

(The country with the most gold medals in baseball — Cuba, with three — didn’t qualify.)

In softball, the teams are headlined by the United States (which won gold in 1996, 2000 and 2004, and is the top-ranked team in the world) and Japan (which won gold in 2008 and is ranked No. 2). No. 3 Canada and No. 8 Australia will be making their fifth Olympic appearances in softball. Making its first is Mexico, ranked No. 5 in the world. No. 9 Italy is back for the first time since 2004.

How do the tournaments work?

In softball, the tournament is straightforward: Each team will play each other once, so five games per squad. Then the top two teams after the round-robin stage will play for the gold medal, while the next two best teams compete for a bronze medal.

In baseball, it’s more complicated. The six teams are divided into two groups of three — Japan, Mexico and the Dominican Republic in Group A, and South Korea, the United States and Israel in Group B. Each team will play the other two teams within their group during the round-robin stage.

In the knockout round, the two group winners advance straight to a second knockout round. But the two second-place teams and the two third-place teams face each other. The loser of the latter game is eliminated.

From then on, the games are played in a double-elimination format. The winners from each side of the bracket — the winners’ side and the losers’ side — play each other for the gold medal. Got all that? (For an easier-to-digest flow chart, see here.)

When and where are the games?

The games will be played mostly at Yokohama Baseball Stadium, about 40 minutes south of downtown Tokyo. A few games, including the opening games of each tournament, will be at Fukushima Azuma Baseball Stadium, about three and a half hours north of Tokyo.

The softball tournament has already begun, even before the opening ceremony, and runs through July 27. (The United States won its first two games.) The baseball competition goes from July 28 to Aug. 7.

Who are the teams and the players to watch?

In baseball, the betting favorite is Japan, followed by the United States and South Korea. The top professional league in the world, Major League Baseball in the United States, doesn’t pause its season for the Olympics, nor are its players allowed to play in the Games. But Nippon Professional Baseball in Japan and the Korea Baseball Organization in South Korea do take a break to allow their players to participate.

As a result, the Japanese roster is filled with talent. It has many veteran stars who are former Japanese league M.V.P.s., including pitcher Masahiro Tanaka, the former Yankees All-Star who returned to the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles of the Nippon league this season; pitcher Tomoyuki Sugano; and infielders Hayato Sakamoto and Tetsuto Yamada. There are also younger standouts like Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a hard-throwing pitcher, and Seiya Suzuki, a power-hitting outfielder.

In softball, many signs point to another showdown between the United States and Japan for the gold medal. The Americans have claimed the top prize in three of the four previous Olympics. The only time they didn’t was in 2008, when Japan handed the United States its only loss that tournament behind the powerful arm of Yukiko Ueno. She tossed 413 pitches in three games over the final two days, including outdueling the American star pitchers Cat Osterman and Monica Abbott in a 3-1 win for the gold medal.

All three of those pitchers are back, and the U.S. roster has added young talent that wasn’t around back then, including Haylie McCleney, a slugging outfielder, and infielder Ali Aguilar.

This is the debut of skateboarding at the Olympics, but it will look a lot like other major skate contests, such as the Dew Tour or Street League Skateboarding.

There are two distinct disciplines: street and park, both of them judged by a panel, each with their own qualified athletes. If you watch snowboarding at the Winter Olympics, think of them a little like slopestyle and halfpipe — variations in the setting that feature slightly different types of acrobatics.

Men’s street skateboarding will be held on Sunday, July 25. Women’s street will be held the next day, on Monday, July 26.

Both street competitions are top-heavy with favorites. For the men, Nyjah Huston of the United States is considered the best street skater in the world. His biggest rival is Japan’s Yuto Horigome, who beat Huston at June’s world championships and might emerge as one of his country’s big Olympic stars.

The women’s street contest could see a Brazilian sweep. Impeding that possibility might be skaters from Japan and the United States, like Mariah Duran or Alana Smith. But Brazil has three of the world’s best: the five-time X Games gold medalist Leticia Bufoni, Pamela Rosa and Rayssa Leal, who is just 13.

Women’s park will be held near the end of the Olympics, on Wednesday, Aug. 4. Men’s park will follow the next day, on Thursday, Aug. 5.

Because of the time zone difference, these competitions will begin the previous evening on the East Coast and end after midnight. They will be shown on NBC, CNBC or the USA Network.

In a telephone interview about a week before leaving for the Tokyo Games, Simone Biles was asked to name the happiest moment of her career.

“Honestly, probably my time off,” she said.

Coming from the most decorated gymnast in history, a woman who revolutionized the sport, it was a striking comment.

Five years ago, Biles did everything her sport and her country asked her to. Sporting a red, white and blue bow in her hair, she helped the United States women’s gymnastics team secure its third consecutive team Olympic gold medal and then won three individual gold medals, in the all-around, the vault and the floor exercise. She emerged from those Games as America’s sweetheart, the itchy sash placed on every great American female gymnast.

Then, only weeks after she returned from Rio, came the revelation that the people responsible for protecting gymnasts and safeguarding the integrity of the sport had failed catastrophically to do either, revealing an entrenched culture of physical and emotional abuse.

U.S.A. Gymnastics had looked the other way as Lawrence G. Nassar, a longtime national team doctor, molested hundreds of female athletes, including many of Biles’s teammates — and, though it took time for her to realize it, Biles herself.

She has said she feels betrayed, and that makes the initial trauma even worse. Yet she has managed to set aside those feelings and harness the newfound power of an independent Black woman who knows her worth and answers to no one. No longer just a sweetheart, she has joined top Black female athletes like Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams in flexing her influence in sports and society.

In a show of defiance and resilience in a sport that has long demanded obedience from its young athletes, Biles is the only Nassar survivor, at least the only one who has come forward publicly, who will compete in Tokyo.

“I’m going to go out there and represent the U.S.A., represent World Champions Centre, and represent Black and brown girls over the world,” she said in the telephone interview. “At the end of the day, I’m not representing U.S.A. Gymnastics.”