Greatest gymnast proves she’s human
American Biles stumbles but wins fourth title, Canadian Black 12th
DOHA, QATAR— Simone Biles attempted to smile, but her eyes betrayed her. She was angry, paying little attention to the gold medal around her neck, the one that made history.
Yes, winning never gets old. It’s just not why she does this.
The challenge whenever the greatest gymnast of her and any other generation steps onto the floor isn’t to impress the judges, so much as to meet her own impossibly high standards. The one that keeps nudging the 21year-old to propel herself and her sport forward.
And for two hours Thursday, for the first time in a long time, the momentum slowed. At least in the eyes of Biles, who didn’t exactly sound like someone who had just become the first woman to win four world allaround championships, a feat she pulled off despite a handful of uncharacteristic errors to beat Japan’s Mai Murakami and American teammate Morgan Hurd by more than 1.6 points.
Canada’s Ellie Black finished 12th with an all-around score of 54.133. The 23-year-old from Halifax won individual allaround silver at last year’s worlds in Montreal. Canadian teammate Brooklyn Moors placed 24th.
Black will compete in the vault event on Friday and in the beam competition Saturday.
Biles’ margin of victory was sizable for nearly everyone else, but not for her. Battling a kidney stone that she insists is manageable, she sat down her vault in the first rotation, came off the beam on her third and stepped out of bounds on floor exercise.
“It’s not the gymnast that I am, to go out there and kind of bomb a meet like this,” said Biles, after posting an allaround score of 57.491. “Even though I won, I wish it were a little bit different.”
Only it wasn’t, a testament to the massive difficulty Biles packs into each event. What she’s doing on floor exercise is as hard as anything the men can come up with. The vault — the one that will carry her name when code of points is updated — is so tough no other woman even attempts it in competition.
Doing anything else would be “boring” as her coach Laurent Landi put it. Yet Biles doesn’t use the remarkably high start values of her routines as an excuse when she doesn’t hit them. There is no grading on a curve, at least not in her head.
Biles jokingly asked Landi if she needed an 18 — a score not currently possible in gymnastics — heading into her floor exercise to catch Murakami. The deficit was actually 13.308 points, totally doable. Biles briefly thought about toning down her boundary-pushing set for something a bit easier just to make sure she won. The internal wavering was fleeting. “I would never,” Biles said. Playing it safe simply isn’t her style. While her right foot did slip into the red out of bounds during her first tumbling pass, it hardly mattered. Her score of 15.000 was more than enough to rocket past Murakami and Hurd, the 2017 worlds.
“It’s absolutely insane that she fell twice and won,” Hurd said. “I have no words.”
Neither did Biles, at least not any positive ones.
Most meets with Biles typically start the same. She drills the vault — where she is the reigning Olympic champion — and then spends the next three rotations simply padding her lead to margins that look like typos.
Not this time. Attempting “the Biles” — a round-off, half-twist onto the table, front double full off typically done by men — her left arm barely touched the table, causing her to under-rotate. She landed and promptly sat down, her score of 14.533 placing her in third.
Known for getting angry with herself after mistakes, she responded with her significantly improved uneven bars set and executed her double-twisting double-somersault dismount to move slightly in front of Hurd halfway through.
Then things got weird. Biles came off the beam early, hopped back up then grabbed the four-inch piece of wood moments later when she had trouble landing a front flip, a sequence she struggled with during qualifying. It was a stunning sequence, not just to Biles, but to the group that’s been chasing her for a decade.
Given what looked like an opening, Murakami — the first Japanese woman to win a world all-around medal in nine years — kept it real.
“Instead of expecting I can win, I felt like, ‘Oh, Biles can fall,’ ” Murakami said.
“It just sucks that I did so bad and I still won,” said Biles, who plans to compete in all four event finals. “I wish it could not happen. You have to earn it, and I’m not sure I earned it tonight.”