BREAKING OUT IN BOSTON
New skills highlight Biles’ return to top of the heap
BOSTON — With 11 all-around and event national titles, Simone Biles is still a halfdozen shy of the Boston Celtics, whose array of NBA championship banners loomed above as she took the floor Friday night at TD Garden for her first USA Gymnastics nationals since 2016. By Sunday night, however, Biles, 21, of Spring almost certainly will add another four titles to that total, and there’s a chance she could make a clean sweep of all five women’s all-around and event titles up for grabs.
Displaying the characteristic power and focus that carried her through the last Olympic cycle as the sport’s dominant performer, Biles added some new skills to the world’s largest repertoire of leaps and twists to take the lead in the two-night women’s all-around championship.
She will return Sunday for, barring the unexpected, another command performance that will produce a fifth career allaround title and maybe four event championships, taking her one step closer to another world championship and, she hopes, to the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
Biles’ four-event score of 60.1 points was 3.1 points clear of 2017 world champion Morgan Hurd, who along with Riley McCusker of Brielle, N.Y., was the only gymnast within four points of Biles.
It’s the highest score for any women’s gymnast in the world during the Olympic cycle that began in 2017, and it matches the goal of 60 points that her coach, Laurent Landi, wrote on a card that he placed in her locker earlier this year.
As for Biles’ assessment of her night: “Pretty clean and decent.”
Decent, in this case, is better than she was two years ago at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, where she won four gold medals
and a bronze. She was the top scorer on all four events, including uneven bars, her longtime Kryptonite, and her main focus for improvement in the time she has been training with Landi and his wife, Cecile Canqueteau-Landi.
“That was good enough for me today,” Landi said of Biles’ bars performance. “Frankly, if she does this for the next two years, I’ll take it.”
While her bars routine has been upgraded, Biles is doing harder skills on every event save vault, where her repertoire already was the hardest in the world. She added a new, harder first pass on floor exercise and now begins her balance beam routine by pivoting three full revolutions above the beam, crouched on her right foot with her left leg outstretched.
She had a brief bobble on that turn, and she wasn’t pleased with a handstand on bars and the two times she bounced out of bounds, a six-tenths deduction that, if she avoids it Sunday, could put 61 points into play for her final score.
“I think so, if today happens again but I don’t go out of bounds,” she said. “I think that is achievable. Floor was my lowest score (Friday night), which is kind of crazy.”
As was the case with her return to competition last month at the U.S. Classic, Biles came out with a bounce — too much bounce, in fact — on floor, going out of bounds on her final two tumbling passes. The deductions dropped her score to 14.45, and she was in third after the opening rotation.
Biles more than made up for the landing errors on vault, with only minor forward landing hops on the Cheng, named for Chinese champion Cheng Fei, which includes a 540-degree rotation, and the Amanar,
named for Romanian gymnast Simona Amanar, which features 2½ twists and a blind landing.
Her score of 15.6 on her first vault provided a lead that she never relinquished and steadily built in the final two events. She completed the skill on bars on which she fell at a meet last month, and her score of 14.85 was the highest of the night. She closed with a 15.2 score on balance beam, and as she took another step toward the seemingly impossible dream of dominating two consecutive Olympic cycles, she enjoyed herself.
“At (her comeback meet in Columbus), I was still easing back into everything and feeling the surroundings and getting used to competing again,” she said. “Tonight, I really embraced it.”
In the non-Biles division of Friday’s competition, Hurd was the only other gymnast to rank in the top four on every event save one; two vaults are required to qualify for a vault championship,
and Biles was the only gymnast to complete two vaults. Grace McCallum of Isanti, Minn., and Trinity Thomas of York, Pa., rounded out the all-around top five to put their names in contention for the world championships team that will compete later this year in Doha, Qatar.
Ragan Smith of Dallas, who won last year’s national title, continues to struggle with an injured ankle and was tied for ninth.