Biles scored a 15.966 in the floor exercise final with a series of hard moves executed to near-perfection, including the signature move named for her.
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By winning her fourth gold in Rio – and fifth medal of the games – Biles became the most decorated gymnast in American history.
DON’T count her out just yet!
Simone Biles capped her remarkable Rio Games with (what else?) one final gold medal in Tuesday’s floor exercise, while teammate Aly Raisman hauled in silver. Raisman won a team gold, all-around silver and floor silver in Rio, while Leyva picked up silvers on the parallel bars and horizontal bar.
Like many journalists, as 2016 drew closer I keyed in on similar storylines I’d read the last three years about Simone Biles: history made, history she could make and how legendary gymnasts described her. Unsurprisingly, almost everything I read after Monday’s beam finals led with her feelings about winning bronze.
Raisman has slipped under the radar having not received the attention of Biles in her first Olympics.
This wasn’t the first time Biles had been flustered by the actor. He spent all week tweeting admiration for the USA gymnastics team and sending along congratulations when Biles and the “Final Five” took home the team gold.
“It’s been a long journey, but I’ve enjoyed every moment”, said the Texan whose early life struggles had not set her out as the future face of women’s gymnastics.
A gold would have seen her join Soviet gymnast Larissa Latynina (1956), Czech Vera Caslavska (1968) and Romanian Ecaterina Szabo (1984) who all won four gold at the same Olympics. Thank you, Biles and Boorman, for providing that perspective.
“Honestly, I haven’t hit that dive all week”, Ipsen said. Four of them gold. I went there without any expectations, so to win two golds was just incredible, and then I thought, ‘How on earth am I going to top that?’ We believed in ourselves, and in our team. She is so incredible, even when she fell off the beam, she won bronze. “She gets so much air”.
It was also the highest score of her four floor performances over the past 10 days. “Because I felt so embarrassed”, he said. “I’m definitely thinking about it”. “I am going to retire, and to finish like that is a dream comes true”.
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“It was a moment that forged a friendship between two athletes who had never previously met, an accident that preceded an extraordinary gesture to warm the hearts of a global audience and spoke to everything that is good and righteous about worldwide sports’ grandest competition”.
