The United States women’s gymnastics team put a hefty beat down on the rest of the world, flipping and twisting and turning their way to history with a dominant gold medal in the team event on Tuesday night.
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The sole agenda item: Come up with a nickname – something that would define them forever – if their dream came true in Rio and they won team gold to take their place alongside the Magnificent Seven of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and the Fierce Five of the 2012 London Games.
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) Just call them the Final Five.
“I personally don’t think I felt any pressure or expectations because I had this wonderful team behind me”, said Biles afterwards.
The girls chose to call themselves the Final Five, as Martha Karolyi, the coach and the national team coordinator for USA Gymnastics, is retiring this year and this is her final team.
And at the Rio Olympic Arena, Biles showed why she is held in such high esteem by producing the day’s best vault, beam and floor routines, the latter of which brought the curtain down on a majestic individual performance.
The United States finished with a score of 184.897, more than eight points clear of second place Russian Federation.
From there, they moved to the uneven bars-a weakness, to the extent the USA has a weakness.
Because this is the last Olympics that Martha Karolyi will be with the team.
Maybe that’s because for Hernandez, Biles, Gabby Douglas, Madison Kocian and Aly Raisman, the meets are the fun part of their jobs.
Douglas and Raisman were part of the group that won in London four years ago and become the first gymnasts since Svetlana Boginskaya in 1988 and 1992 to win back-to-back golds in the event.
At 4 feet 8, Biles isn’t ideally suited to the uneven bars, but she was solid.
Her family were in the crowd to witness her first Olympic gold.
A fall from Elissa Downie on the beam proved costly for Britain, though, as they dropped back to fifth at the halfway point. Douglas turned in a strong 15.766 before Kocian topped that with a 15.933 of her own.
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The U.S. went through 28 rotations over two days, just like the other seven teams that made the team final.
