Biles still soars despite flaws
Halfway home to sixth national title, Spring star disappointed by mistakes
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Simone Biles closed the opening night of the U.S. gymnastics championships Friday with a history-making dismount, a clenched fist and a smile.
Given that Biles, 22, of Spring began the night with tears in her eyes and a slightly naughty word on her lips, it was a gratifying conclusion to a stressful evening for the four-time Olympic gold medalist.
Even with errors here and there, owing to her superior routine difficulty on a night that prompted both laugther and tears, Biles is halfway home to a sixth allaround championship. She leads Sunisa Lee of St. Paul, Minn., by 1.75 points and Jade Carey of Phoenix by 2.55 points.
Biles entered the event hoping for two landmark moments — a triple-twisting double somersault on floor exercise and a double-twisting double somersault dismount on balance beam.
She landed the second but not the first, and an NBC Sports television microphone captured her reaction.
“I’m OK,” she said. “I’m just (teed) off already.”
“I realized I did a bad routine, so the emotions are real, they’re raw, and I think it’s OK to show that,”
Biles said after the meet. “Should I have cussed? Probably not, but it was real. It was what I felt in that moment.”
The triple-double is so difficult that only two men — Olympic medalists Kenzo Shirai of Japan and Ri Jong-Song of North Korea — have attempted it.
Biles completed the aerial maneuvers on her first tumbling pass but upon landing pitched forward, with both feet off the floor briefly. She steadied herself by putting both hands to the mat with her left leg was flexed behind her, and she completed the routine.
“As soon as I fell on the floor, I was like, ‘OK, that’s it, I’m scratching the meet, I’m walking off the floor,’ ” Biles said. “I got tears in my eyes, and that’s the only time I felt sorry for myself in a real long time.
“But you have to keep the momentum going. Mistakes will happen. It’s the hardest skill probably in the world. It’s just so annoying, because I worked so hard and I’ve never done that in the gym.”
Laurent Landi, her coach, said Biles was out of kilter on the runup to the triple-double attempt
even before the takeoff and landing.
“I saw it on the run,” he said. “It’s the adrenaline that she has. Instead of using it efficiently, she didn’t put the speed at the right time. She went too high and tried to save it in the air, and she was almost there.”
Biles’ floor score of 14.35 was at least a full point lower than it would have been had she completed the skill, but it still was the best score of the night on that event.
On vault, Biles took a hop and a step upon landing her first blindlanding vault and a step forward on her second but still scored 15.3 and 15.4 points, respectively, with 9.3 execution scores. Once again, it was the best score of the night.
She fought through uneven bars, her least favorite event, and scored 14.05 points, which tied for fourth, with a low landing that was far from her best. Once again, microphones caught her expressing her displeasure with her performance.
Balance beam, her final event, was not without flaws, but Biles closed with a bit of history by landing the double-double dismount. Her score of 14.95 points, again, led all her competitors.
“I’m happy with the beam dismount,” she said. “If you had asked me after (the U.S. Classic meet in July) if I would compete it, I would have said no. But in those short few weeks, we did a lot of work.”
Biles was unsure which would
be the dominant emotion of the day as she left the arena. Optimism, though, may be the final outcome.
“Usually day one is the best, and day two you’re tired, but I’m hoping for the opposite,” she said. “I want to do better on day two.”
She was even able to laugh about the day a little bit.
“It’s like you feel the pain, but you don’t want to cry, so you laugh about it,” she said.
Among the other competitors, Lee had the day’s best score on uneven bars at 14.75. Carey, who hopes to compete at the Olympics as an event specialist on floor or vault, had the second best scores on each event behind Biles.
Riley McCusker of Brielle, N.J., last year’s runner-up, was in the running most of the evening for the non-Biles division before falling on uneven bars and dropping to fourth place.
Morgan Hurd, the 2017 world champion, also was in the running entering the final rotation but had two tumbling pass errors on floor and dropped to eighth, one spot behind Jordan Chiles, Biles’ training partner at World Champions Centre in Montgomery County.