It wasn’t the 7+ routine she needed to put up to win the team final, but Biles would be able to hit a 13.8 on floor with a fall, maybe two.
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Michael Phelps will be the favorite to add his fourth gold medal in Rio and 22nd overall as he takes to the pool in the 200m individual medley.
There are some athletes which struggle to live up to the hype – but in Rio it was the hype which failed to keep up with Simone Biles. Sure, she and Oleksiak broke the Olympic record, but Manuel is the the first African American woman to win a gold medal in an individual swimming event.
The very next year, she topped the medal podium with gold medals at not only the American Classic, but the Alamo Classic, the Houston National Invitational and the Secret U.S. Classic.
Simone even invented her own move for her floor routines, which is now named after her.
After a smooth start, Raisman finished with an exclamation point on her strongest apparatus, Floor Exercise, where she won the Olympic title four years ago. “And it’s for all the people after me, who believe they can’t do it”. Every time the Olympics come around, we realize gymnastics is an absolutely incredible sport and then promptly forget that revelation until the next Olympics. “I’m more happy for her than I am myself”. Although she briefly fell behind in scoring during the first half of the competition she ultimately won the individual all-around gold medal by more than two points. She’d won the gold! A three-time Olympic medalist in London, Raisman appeared to be on the outside of the picture looking in after a shaky performance at the world championships that left her “devastated”.
The girl adopted along with her younger sister by their grandparents as toddlers and discovered by coach Aimee Boorman’s mother during a field trip to the gym is a wonder, even if it always didn’t seem that way.
“I would say yes”, Martha Karolyi said when asked if Biles was the greatest ever.
On Monday, she is scheduled to compete in the balance beam event and on Tuesday she will compete in the floor exercises. However, there was a tiebreaker rule that did not allow for duplicate medals to be handed out and Raisman lost the tiebreaker to Aliya Mustafina. “So now she’s got an Olympic gold so that’s awesome”.
Brazilian duo Diego Hypolito (15.533) and Arthur Mariano (15.433) won silver and bronze respectively to the delight of the home crowd in the Rio Olympic Arena.
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“I feel really good at 22 and I can’t wait to see what is to come”, Raisman said.
