Biles on top of world again
Gymnast wins 4th all-around title despite kidney stone, two spills
Even after experiencing what was her most challenging performance in five years as the world’s greatest gymnast, Simone Biles remains the best there is — still a record-breaker, still a champion, still determined to meet and exceed her own lofty standards.
Biles, 21, the four-time Olympic gold medalist from Spring, fell on two of four events Thursday at the world gymnastics championships in Doha, Qatar, and still won her fourth allaround title, the first woman to accomplish that feat, with room to spare.
It was good enough for gold, but not good enough for Biles.
“You have to earn it,” she said. “And I’m not so sure that I earned it tonight. It was so bad.”
Biles’ four-event score of 57.491 points was well clear of runner-up Mai Murakami of Japan at 55.798 and defending champion Morgan Hurd of Middletown, Del.,
at 55.732. But it was almost 3.5 points less than her opening-night performance in Doha last weekend and arguably her worst allaround in her five-year run as the standard-bearer for her sport.
She had a built-in excuse — literally. Biles continues to compete against the world’s best while coping with a kidney stone that refuses to pass. She spent several hours in an emergency room last Friday, and she has acknowledged that the pain, although bearable, hasn’t gone away.
Biles, however, isn’t big on excuses.
“If it were a challenge for me, I wouldn’t have competed at all,” she said in a post-event interview provided by USA Gymnastics. “Some people might blame it (on the kidney stone), but I think it was just a matter of concentration.
“I’m definitely more upset with myself than happy,” she added. “It’s not the gymnast that I am to go out there and kind of bomb in a meet like this. I won, but I wish it were a little bit different.”
The difficult nature of Biles’ win Thursday was in keeping with what has been a challenging year for the sport and its greatest champion.
USA Gymnastics continues to be roiled by controversy and turmoil in the wake of the sexual abuse scandal centered on disgraced sports doctor Larry Nassar, who abused hundreds of gymnasts, including Biles herself, under the guise of medical care.
The federation faces civil suits from coast to coast and has been unable to replace sponsors that fled in the wake of the Nassar case. It is in search of its fourth CEO in the last year, and some of its most prominent athletes — including Biles herself — continue to cope with the aftermath of the Nassar case as competitors or as survivors.
Biles, in fact, has been one of the few bright points of 2018 for USA Gymnastics. Less than a year into her return to training following a yearlong layoff following the 2016 Olympics, she continues to challenge herself and advance the art of the sport as she works her way toward a second Olympics in Tokyo in 2020.
Thursday in Doha, however, Biles was off her game. She began with vault, where last week she debuted a combination that bears her name as the first woman to successfully perform it in international competition.
The “Biles” vault is a roundoff — similar to a cartwheel — approach to the vaulting table, followed by a half-turn and, after hitting the table with her hands, two full twists in the air before a blind landing facing away from the table.
This time, Biles said her hands slipped as she slapped them onto the table, depriving her of some of the power needed to launch herself into two aerial twists. She landed with knees bent, mere inches from landing seat first, and toppled backward into the mat.
She followed up with a solid performance on uneven bars — second-best among the 24 competitors on what has always been her weakest event — before coming a cropper again on balance beam, the fourinch-wide bane of every gymnast’s existence.
After sailing through a Wolf turn — three 360-degree pirouettes on her right foot with her left leg outstretched — Biles came off the beam after failing to land properly on a front flip with a half-turn. Later on, she had to fight to save the landing on a front pike somersault that also caused her problems during the team competition on Tuesday.
The key to Biles’ success, though, is the unmatched difficulty of the skills she combines into routines of unparalleled complexity. To that, she adds an element of determination that makes her unwilling, even on an off day, to compromise her standards by settling for easier skills.
“Even on a bad day, I don’t want to water it down just because I had some of those falls,” she said. “I would still rather go out there and show who I am as a competitor.
“But it was a thought. I was sitting on the side and it was, like. ‘Maybe let’s water this down,’ but I didn’t. I wouldn’t do that.”
Closing on floor exercise, she bounded out of bounds on her first tumbling pass but stayed on her feet (and in the air) throughout. Her performance score on the event was the best in the field and, coupled a onepoint edge in difficulty score, made her the clear winner.
In fact, Biles’ margin of victory was the largest of her four world championships. Thursday’s win enabled her to break a tie with Russian champion Svletlana Khorkina, the only other woman to win three world all-around titles.
Biles now has 16 world championship medals, including 12 gold medals, and has a chance at four more event gold medals as competition in Doha continues into the weekend. She is among the eight finalists in all four events, the first time she has qualified for each event final.
Event finals, she said, “will definitely cheer me up a little bit more. I kind of get to redeem myself, and I’m excited about that part, to show them who I really am. … For finals, hopefully, this Simone goes away.”
While Biles is her own harshest critic, she also has a sense of humor about the difficulty of her routines. She admitted being too cautious on the newly named Biles vault that left her flat on the mat Thursday, and she promises to throw caution to the wind in the vault final.
“I was holding back because I didn’t want to overpower it,” she said. “Now, if I run off the podium, who cares? I’m going to overpower that thing. I’m going to try. Better over than under.”
Biles will compete Friday on vault and uneven bars and Saturday on balance beam and floor exercise. In a message to her Twitter followers after competing Thursday, she said she would attempt to spare them additional drama during her final events.
“Didn’t mean to give everyone a heart attack,” she wrote. “I apologize. I won’t do that again.”