Biles claims record fifth world success
Penalties fail to prevent biggest victory margin American gives herself a seven for all-around win
Simone Biles rated her own performance as a seven out of 10 after crushing the rest of the all-around field at Stuttgart’s World Championships. Her margin of victory over China’s silver medallist Tang Xijing was 2.1 marks, the biggest she has recorded in any of her record-breaking five all-around world titles.
Biles’s modest self-analysis might have been prompted by the 0.5 penalty marks she collected. When she performed her much talkedabout “triple double” on the floor, she landed with such force that she bounced a step backwards and out of bounds with both feet. That was 0.3 gone, and there were two further minor slips that cost her 0.1 each.
But the great thing about being Simone Biles is that she does not need to be error- free. She is performing moves at a different level from all her competitors – and pulling them off with a lack of visible effort that reduces spectators to openmouthed astonishment, or often stunned laughter. When you add up the difficulty scores for Biles’s routines on the four pieces of apparatus, they come to exactly 25 marks. Xijing, who is highly ambitious by any other standard, comes in at 22.600. She would have needed Biles to fall off at least two pieces to have a chance. In fact, this did happen last year, but Biles still came in almost 1.700 marks ahead of the field to become the first four-time world all-around champion.
The only gymnast to threaten Biles’s all-around dominance in recent events is a fellow American, 16-year-old Sunisa Lee, who finished a mere 0.350 behind her in the US trials. But Lee’s challenge effectively ended when she came off the uneven bars, early in the second rotation. Only note-perfect delivery on each apparatus would have kept her in the contest. “I would probably rate it as a seven,” Biles told the BBC last night. “I think the team finals and qualifications went a little bit better here and there. But I am really pleased with my performance. I can’t complain.” Asked if she would return to try for a sixth world title in 2021 (Olympic years have no world championships), Biles said: “Let’s focus on the now.” Great Britain had one gymnast in yesterday’s field – 18-year-old Alice Kinsella – who finished a creditable 12th. James Hall and Joe Fraser compete in the men’s all-around today.