Biles clinches 7th all-around crown
When Simone Biles is at her best, she tops 60 points on gymnastics’ open-ended scoring system for the four events that she performs better than any female athlete who has drawn breath.
Friday night at the USA Gymnastics championships in Fort Worth, Biles came within an eyelash of 60 points even without doing her latest high-flying vault and with a couple of bobbles — but no falls — on balance beam and uneven bars and a little too much uncontrolled flight time on floor exercise.
By the time the threetime Olympic gold medalist from Spring wrapped up the night as the final performer on floor exercise at Dickies Arena, she
was halfway home to her seventh national allaround championship without the need to do many of the harder skills that she will perform at the Olympic Trials later this month and, in July, at the Tokyo Olympics.
Biles’ 59.55-point score led 2019 world championship team member Sunisa Lee of Minnesota by 2.2 points. Lee, in turn, led Jordan Chiles, Biles’ training partner at World Champions Centre in south Montgomery County, by .45 points.
Jade Carey, the floor and vault specialist who has clinched a spot for the Tokyo Games by her performance at World Cup events, was fourth.
USA Gymnastics did not make Biles available for a Zoom conference interview after the meet, but she told NBC Sports that she was pleased with her performance.
“It was really good. It was definitely better than Classics,” Biles said. “I’m excited. Floor could have been a little bit better. I need to control my adrenaline going into passes, but I’m not mad at today’s meet at all.”
Biles’ superior difficulty gives her an almost insurmountable lead from the jump, and she moved even further out of range of the mortals in her wake with two 9.8 performance scores on vault.
She scored 15.8 for a blind landing vault named for Chinese gymnast Cheng Fei and 15.55 for a 2½-twist vault named for the Romanian gymnast Simone Amanar.
Biles stuck the landing on the Cheng vault and elected not to do the unprecedented double-revolution pike position vault that she premiered at the U.S. Classic event in Indianapolis last month.
She made it through her weakest event, uneven bars, without repeating the fall that occurred at the Classic event while switching hand positions on the high bar. Her execution score was 8.55, but her total score of 14.75 was second-best among all athletes to Lee’s 15.3.
Since the 2016 Olympic Trials, Biles has suffered occasional misfires on balance beam, including a near-fall at the Olympics, and she had a brief moment of peril Friday night while performing a forward leap while executing a half-turn on the fourinch-wide beam.
She landed with her right foot on the beam and swung her left leg outward to regain her balance, then had a balance check on a back somersault. Still, her 14.35 score was the best for any gymnast.
Biles closed the night, as usual, on floor exercise. She stuck the landing onto a mat for her first tumbling pass, which ends with a triple-twisting double somersault, but had a wee bit too much energy the rest of the way, launching herself out of bounds for the remaining three tumbling passes to finish with 14.65 and leave her just short of the 60-point threshold.
Chiles, who won the USA Gymnastics Winter Cup meet at which Biles did not compete and was second at the U.S. Classic, was solid for most of the night save a balance check and a short dismount on balance beam.
She said her 2019 move from Washington state to the Biles gym has helped solidify her performances.
“I wanted to show that I can stay consistent throughout the whole time,” Chiles said. “Definitely years ago I probably would have been wobbling here and there for the rest of the (balance beam) routine, but my confidence in my gymnastics is a lot better.”
While Biles held center stage, the crowd gave a warm welcome back to 2008 Olympic team silver medalist Chellsie Memmel, competing at age 32 for the first time since 2012.
Memmel dropped off the high bar during uneven bars and did not compete on floor exercise but clenched her fists with glee after vault and even after her brief bobble on bars.
“The crowd was phenomenal,” she said. “The energy that they help bring you and the extra adrenaline is huge.”
The third Olympian on the floor Friday night, 2016 team gold medalist Laurie Hernandez, suffered a knee injury during warmups on balance beam and competed only on that event before scratching on the other two.
“(I) was doing a dismount during meet warmups and hyperextended my knee,” Hernandez said on Twitter. “Unfortunately we had to pull out of day 1, but we’re still keeping an open mind about day 2 (on Sunday) and playing it by ear.
“Not the way I thought this would go, but thank you for all the love and support,” she added.