NPR is in Paris for the 2024 Summer Olympics. For more of our coverage from the Games, head to our latest updates.
PARIS — For the second time in her remarkable career, the peerless gymnast Simone Biles won the Olympic individual all-around final title, only two days after leading the U.S. women's team back to the gold medal in the team event.
Unlike many of her other medals over the years, this one did not come easily. Her gold required overcoming an unusually poor performance on the uneven bars that briefly put her into third place behind two strong competitors, including Brazil's Rebeca Andrade, the gymnast widely considered to be the world's second best.
But the setback was not enough to prevent her from winning her sixth Olympic gold and her ninth Olympic medal overall, more than any other U.S. gymnast ever.
"I've never had an athlete that close, so it definitely put me on my toes. And it brought out the best athlete in myself," Biles said of Andrade afterward. "But I knew if I did my work, it would all be fine."
Biles became just the third woman in the history of the Olympics to twice win the individual all-around gold medal, and the first since the 1960s. (The first two-time winner was Larisa Latynina of the Soviet Union, whose nine Olympic golds remain the most ever earned by a gymnast.)
But Biles, 27, is the first to win her second eight, rather than four, years after her first. At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Biles withdrew from the individual all-around after struggling with the "twisties" and losing the ability to control her body in mid-air. The intense pressure had affected her mental health, Biles said then, and she ultimately took a two-year hiatus from the sport altogether.
"Leading up to Tokyo, I was so nervous about getting injured physically that I neglected my mental health," Biles said Thursday. "Then I was injured, except it was a mental injury." At the time, she thought she might never be able to compete in gymnastics again.
But in her return to the sport, she has been dominant, including in this legacy-cementing performance here in Paris.
Andrade ended the night with silver, to raucous applause from a large Brazilian contingent of fans. The bronze medal was awarded to the U.S. gymnast Suni Lee, who had won the gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 after Biles' withdrawal.
On Thursday, Biles opened the competition in the lead after starting on vault, her best apparatus. Biles performed her signature Yurchenko double pike and scored a 15.766, jumping out by two-thirds of a point over Andrade.
But her lead disappeared on the very next rotation. On the uneven bars, Biles turned in an unusually poor performance in which her momentum slowed during a swing from high bar to low bar, causing her knees to almost brush the floor. Her routine earned just a 13.733, over a half-point lower than her two previous scores on the uneven bars in Paris. That moved her into third place, behind both Andrade and Algeria's Kaylia Nemour.
"I was a little bit disappointed in my performance on bars. That's not usually how I swing," she said. "I was probably praying to every single god out there, trying to refocus and re-center myself, because that's not the bars I've been training."
A strong performance on the balance beam put Biles back into first place by a slim margin of just 0.166 points over Andrade.
Then came the last rotation of the night: the floor exercise, in which Biles had outscored Andrade two other times in competition so far. As every spectator in the 10,100 seats of Bercy Arena watched, Biles dazzled, smiling as she neared the end of her routine as it became clear she had done enough to win gold. Biles walked off the mat holding her two pointer fingers in the air — #1. Ultimately, she won by 1.199 points.
"Simone is the best," said Andrade, herself the greatest gymnast in the history of her own country, Brazil. She called it a "source of pride" to compete alongside Biles. "She extracts the best out of me. I hope I do the same out of her," she said.
Biles is set to compete in three more events at these Olympics, the individual event finals for vault, balance beam and floor exercise.
Copyright 2024 NPR
Loading...
