SKINNER GETS A SECOND CHANCE
Biles’ withdrawal creates an opening for veteran gymnast
TOKYO — MyKayla Skinner presumed her Olympic Games were over when, as the individual athlete from the United States participating in the gymnastics qualifying round, she was unable to make the all-around final last week.
Skinner, however, has another chance to suit up Sunday as the United States’ replacement athlete for Simone Biles during the first of three nights of individual event finals.
Skinner, who ranked seventh in vault with a score of 14.933 but did not advance to the vault final because she ranked behind Biles (14.966) and Jade Carey (15.166), was moved into the final with Biles’ decision Saturday to withdraw from vault and uneven bars finals as she continues to battle air space orientation issues.
“Looks like I get to put a competition (leotard) on just one more time,” Skinner wrote on Twitter. “Can’t wait to compete on vault finals. Doing this for us, @Simone_Biles. It’s go time, baby.”
Skinner, 24, a former University of Utah gymnast from Arizona, and Biles are the oldest members of the six-member USA Gymnastics contingent in Tokyo. She was named to the team as an individual athlete while Carey qualified as an individual athlete through the International Gymnastics Federation’s World Cup circuit.
Sunday also will bring Sunisa Lee’s first competition since winning the all-around individual gold medal in Biles’ absence on Thursday. She qualified second on uneven bars at 15.2 behind Nina Derwael of Belgium at 15.366.
Biles elected to drop both of the first nights of individual events for which she qualified as she continues to train and undergo medical evaluation. She also has qualified for floor exercise and balance beam finals later in the week but has not said if she will compete.
Lee, meanwhile, said in a Zoom call on Friday that she hopes to do a bars routine that begins with a start value of 6.8 and includes more intricate elements that were left out of the routines she performed in team qualifications and finals and the all-around final.
“I get bored really easily, so me and my coach would think of a lot of different combinations for me to do and stuff like that,” she said. “This was the hardest one but the most exciting one, and I thought it would be the coolest.
“My bar routine is so unique. You don’t really see a lot of connections back-to-back like that.”
Lee, however, now is facing the high expectations that have followed Biles for years.
“I feel like people are putting a lot of pressure on me to win bars or top two,” she said. “People are trying to make a competition out me and Nina, and I’m just competing for myself and just seeing where I get, because I want to know like how good I am and like where I stand.”
On the men’s side, former Oklahoma gymnast Yul Moldauer will compete on floor after qualifying sixth of eight with a score of 14.866, and former Ohio State gymnast Alec Yoder, who made the team as n event specialist, will compete on pommel horse. Yoder ranked fourth of eight at 15.2.
Top qualifiers on each men’s event were Chih Kai Lee of South Korea on pommel horse (15.266) and Artem Dolgopyat of Israel on floor exercise (15.2).