Two days after Team US won their third straight Women’s Team gold medal at the World Gymnastics Championship, Simone Biles won the All-Around competition for her third straight World Championship.
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When Biles, the adrenalin clearly coursing through her veins, took a giant step out of bounds on one of her tumbling passes there was much frantic grappling with mental arithmetic among the assembled masses.
Douglas, meanwhile, became the first reigning Olympic all-around champion to win a medal in the world championships since the Soviet Union’s Elena Davydova in 1981. She even stepped out on floor.
“I just keep blowing my own mind because, yes, there are goals that I have and then I dream of it and then I make it a reality”, Biles said.
Biles amassed 60.399 points, with All-Around Olympic gold medalist Douglas 1.083 points adrift of her 18-year-old compatriot and Romania’s Larisa Iordache having to settle for bronze with a tally of 59.107.
“Now I am OK but not so much better because my team is (not in the) top”, she said. “And when I landed on red, I was like, ‘oh my gosh, I’m not supposed to be on this”, said Biles, who began her final routine knowing that she needed to eclipse 14.183 points to beat Douglas.
Nor have we seen the last of Biles at these World Championships. She had a smooth turn on the uneven bars, but it was the only event on which she wasn’t the world’s leader heading into Thursday’s competition, and under ordinary circumstances, it would have provided her with her lowest score. She scored 15.066, enough to move her up into the fourth place and within reach of Chinese gymnast Shang Chunsong.
The competition continues on Friday with Olympic champion Kohei Uchimura bidding for a sixth consecutive men’s all-around title after helping Japan win their first team title since 1978 on Wednesday.
There’s still plenty of time for Douglas and the rest of the field to put in the upgrades necessary to get close to Biles.
“Everyone wanted the three-peat”, she said. Even if she hadn’t, she would have been hard pressed not to notice that event organizers were flashing Biles’s “TARGET SCORE” to clinch gold on a screen in numerals at least twice her height on an arena-wide screen. “And I mean, yes, I wanted it and if it didn’t happen, I’d still be proud of myself, but it was just like I had to look to make sure”.
Iordache overcame the disappointment of Romania’s stunning 12th-place finish in team qualifying to add a bronze to go with the silver she won past year. She was the first to compete on the beam and opted for a highly hard routine.
It never changed. Not after her soaring opening vault. She hugged her coaches at the end of her routine, relieved after restoring a few sort of order to the gymnastics world.
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“She stood out from the beginning”. Her personal coach Aimee Boorman said later she’d told her athlete that she’d had “the save of the century”.
