Anticipation had built to learn the follow-up to the popular Fierce Five moniker of 2012.
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Her explosive and high-flying tumbling passes – which included her trademark soaring double layout with half twist at the end – had the Brazilian crowd roaring their approval and when she completed her final landing, it was not a case of if the US were champions, but by how much.
When the athletes received their winning score at the end of the team final, they leapt up onto the floor podium and huddled up.
“Back-to-back #GOLD for the first time EVER”, NBC tweeted as the “Final Five” claimed victory. That allowed Chad le Clos of South Africa to stunningly win gold in an event that Phelps had dominated for the better part of a decade.
The win, anchored by 19-year-old living legend Simone Biles, comes with a historic margin of a record 8.209 points.
“We always want to do our best and deliver the best routines we can and have fun and enjoy these moments because they are so special, it’s just incredible to compete for the USA”. And 28 times they hit.
Not that they would have. She was disappointed to not be needed in Rio when the lineup became official for Sunday’s preliminaries, but she also realized she had done everything she could to make the 2016 Olympics, including waiting a year to enroll at Utah. “We’re consistent because of the hard work”.
But a new generation of USA athletes is ready to take up the banner of Olympic standard-bearer from Phelps, a grizzled veteran at 31. Russian Federation needed a 15.100 average on vault to leapfrog the Chinese.
The team then moved to bars, where Douglas scored a 15.766.
And Laurie Hernandez, the youngster of the group, looked like a steely veteran. She clutched the white railing in front of her during Biles’ floor routine, nodding with approval with each gravity-escaping tumbling pass. During the team final, the USA only counted two scores out of 12 that were under the 15.000 mark.
By the beginning of the final rotation, when the USA competed on floor, their victory was all but assured, given the difficulty scores ― numerical head starts ― awarded to Raisman’s, Biles’s and Hernandez’s routines.
But not until their final three routines, with the Star Spangled Banner already cued up for the medals ceremony, did the Americans let loose.
Afterwards, Kocian and Douglas do something that didn’t happen after the vaults: they stand and laugh and talk for minutes. Kocian was even better, scoring a 15.933 in her top event. It included a tremendous performance on the balance beam, her final event of the competition. “U-S-A!” rang out. “She just wants the best for us”.
“There was definitely something different about Aly, she was always determined”, Flemming said. The U.S. hasn’t lost a major global competition since 2010 and there appears to be no end in sight to their run even though Karolyi and her husband Bela are selling the training facility on their Texas ranch to USA Gymnastics later this month.
Many assumed that the name was a reference to the change in gymnastics team size that will take place at the Tokyo Olympics. There are individual event finals also for several days this week.
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“Fantastic closing”, Karolyi said when asked what her husband, Bela, had said to her after the meet.
