Biles wins 5th world all-around title
As she eyes Tokyo Games in ’20, Spring gymnast dominates field, shows that she still has no equal
At the conclusion of her floor-exercise routine Thursday at the world gymnastics championships, Simone Biles bounced off the mat and pantomimed a microphone drop.
Having dropped the mic, Biles proceeded to grab yet another gold medal — her fifth all-around world championship and her 22nd world medal, at age 22, in a career that has no peer in the sport that she continues to dominate as she works her way toward the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
The four-time Olympic gold medalist from Spring lapped the field at the International Gymnastics Federation event in Stuttgart, Germany, with a fourevent score of 58.999 points. That was more than a point better than her winning score a year ago and 2.1 points — the largest margin of victory under gymnastics’ current scoring system — clear of silver medalist Tang Xijing of China.
Angelina Melnikova of Russia was third at 56.399. Sunisa Lee of St. Paul, Minn., the second U.S. gymnast in the field, was eighth.
Biles will compete again this weekend in all four event finals, meaning that she could leave Stuttgart with as many as 26 medals.
Her 22 total medals and 16 gold medals already are standard for the women’s field, as is her five allaround titles. Only Vitaly Scherbo of the Soviet Union and Belarus with 23 medals exceeds her on the men’s side, and she almost certainly will reach and surpass that total this weekend.
“I definitely feel relieved that it’s over,” Biles said.
“I woke up feeling that today would go well and it did, so I feel successful. I put out good performances. I didn’t do anything crazy, so I’m pleased with that.”
Biles led from the start and, appropriately, was the final competitor to take the podium on floor exercise as the all-around competition wound down.
The concluding mic drop was a previously unveiled theatrical flourish of Biles’ floor routine, which begins with the six-note fanfare from the Broadway hit “Hey Big Spender” and launches into a percussive musical mélange featuring even more percussive aerial moves.
Biles’ first floor pass included a triple-twisting double-tuck somersault, the first performed in competition by a female gymnast and only twice by a male competitor, that will be one of four elements named in her honor in the gymnastics code of points scoring manual.
Unlike the previous two opening passes that she attempted in the team competition, this one had too much power, resulting in both feet landing out of bounds and perilously close to the edge of the mat,
Biles landed with her toes on the out of bounds line on her second pass and launched herself out of bounds on her final pass as well. Even with the deductions, her event score of 14.4 points was the best of the day on floor, an event in which she will seek another individual medal this weekend.
She began on vault with the blind landing vault named for Chinese gymnast Cheng Fei, scoring 15.233 points for the day’s best score on that apparatus.
From there, Biles moved to uneven bars, the only event in which she did not medal at the 2016 Olympics and a stumbling block Thursday for Lee, who had a fall on a transition from the high bar to the low bar that knocked her out of medal contention.
She sailed through her routine, which concludes with a double-twisting double somersault dismount, and scored 14.733, thirdbest on the afternoon behind 2016 gold medalist Nina Derwael of Belgium at 15.2 and Elisabeth Seitz of Germany at 14.866.
Balance beam, where Biles reworked her routine prior to arriving in Germany, went well, with only two minor balance checks.
She did not perform the double-double dismount that the FIG had undervalued, citing safety concerns, but said she would do so during the event final this weekend.
That score of 14.633 points was, again, the best by any competitor, Tang, who was a late entry into the all-around final, was second-best on beam at 14.6.
As usual, Biles’ superior event difficulty effectively settled the event before it began. All four of her events had start values in excess of six points, topped off by her floor value of 6.6.
Only Tang among the other competitors had even two events with start values of 6.0 or higher, so Biles had a 2.4-point edge over the Chinese gymnast in terms of routine difficulty. That was more than enough to secure her record-breaking margin.