Gymnastics Highlights: Simone Biles Nails Final Routine to Win Second All-Around Gold

Biles, returning to the sport’s top stage after withdrawing from the team event in 2021, beat out stiff competition from Rebeca Andrade of Brazil. Sunisa Lee of the United States claimed the bronze.

Three years after withdrawing from the team final of the Tokyo Olympics because of a mental block, a move that prompted critics to call her a loser, a quitter and un-American, Simone Biles on Thursday proved to the world — and to herself — that she was unstoppable.

Wearing a leotard reminiscent of Wonder Woman’s suit, Biles, 27, won the all-around title at the Paris Games, becoming the oldest all-around champion since 1952 and only the third woman — and the first since 1968 — to win two Olympic all-around titles.

The gold was Biles’s ninth Olympic medal, pushing her record total of Olympic and world championship medals to 39 and reaffirming her standing as one of the best athletes of all time.

After Biles learned that she had won, she waved to a crowd that chanted “U-S-A! U-S-A!” and then walked off the raised platform, rested her elbows nearby and exhaled.

“All in all, I’m super proud of my performance tonight and the fight that I had for the last three years, mentally and physically, just to get back competing on a world stage, Olympic Games,” said Biles, who also won the gold in the all-around at the 2016 Rio Games.

Except for an uncharacteristic mistake on the uneven bars, Biles nailed her routines and did so under extraordinary pressure, as Rebeca Andrade of Brazil was having a fantastic night. Andrade, the silver medalist in the all-around in Tokyo, had led the competition after the second of four events.

With Andrade battling her for the lead until the end, Biles said she had never been so stressed during a gymnastics meet.

“I don’t want to compete with Rebeca no more. I’m tired,” she said, as a joke. “She was way too close. I’ve never had an athlete that close, so it definitely put me on my toes and brought out the best athlete in myself.”

Andrade won the silver medal, finishing 1.199 points behind Biles’s total. Biles’s teammate Sunisa Lee, the all-around champion in Tokyo, won the bronze — a remarkable accomplishment, considering what she has endured. After being diagnosed less than two years ago with two kidney diseases that limited her training, Lee thought that she might never compete in gymnastics again. Her coach Jess Graba said that after she won the bronze, he told her, “I will always put my money on you because you always fight.”

Lee, 21, credited Biles with helping her get through the night because “we were both freaking out.”

She and Biles giggled as Lee described their discussion of the scores as the competition unfolded. Both were trying to figure out where they would place.

“We were literally, like, calculating,” Lee said. “I was like, ‘I don’t even know how to do math in my head and she was like, ‘Me, either!’”

After Tokyo, Biles took time off, just as Lee did — but for different reasons. Biles began seeing a therapist every Thursday to help reset her body and her mind. With no expectations of winning medals, she returned to her sport so her story would have a different, and better, ending.

Biles went into the all-around with confidence. Winning a gold medal earlier in the week — in the team event — helped. With fans waving huge photos of her head and banners that said “Simone for President!” on them, she performed with both joy and genius as the Americans reclaimed the Olympic title. The American team won silver in Tokyo.

But on Thursday, the all-around was not so simple for Biles, who had become accustomed to winning by comfortable, if not cavernous, margins. Andrade, who finished second to Biles at last year’s world championships, put pressure on Biles with brilliant performances on each apparatus.

Biles started the competition on vault, which bedeviled her in Tokyo when she became disoriented in the air. Just as she did earlier in the week, Biles aced her dangerous vault, the Yurchenko double pike, which allows almost no margin of error: She could easily land on her head or break her neck.

On this night, there were no flashbacks. No anxiety. Just Biles, at 4-foot-8, flying like a radiant red, white and blue ball of fireworks, as the crowd hushed. When she landed on her feet, the spectators roared, applauding an effort that would earn her 15.766 points — an excellent score.

Next up were the uneven bars. An uncharacteristic break in her routine gave Biles a lower than usual score, allowing Andrade and Kaylia Nemour of Algeria to move ahead of her in the standings.

But Biles kept her composure, performing a solid routine on the balance beam, scoring 14.566 points to move into the lead, but only by 0.166 points. Andrade’s score on the beam moved her into second place.

“Knowing that I gave Simone a bit of work is cool, right?” Andrade said in Portuguese, with a laugh. “She’s the best in the world. Simone is a phenomenon.”

While Biles’s attitude at the Olympics had been super upbeat going into the all-around, smiling between events and joking with her teammates during the team final, it seemed to change as Thursday’s event unfolded. She was proud of herself for rediscovering her love for the sport and for returning to the Olympics, but she was also an intense competitor who wanted to win. Her smile disappeared, replaced by a fierce look of concentration.

Only the floor exercise was left. Biles had qualified first in the event, with Andrade in second. Biles went in with an edge: Her floor routine is the hardest in the world, with the highest degree of difficulty and the best chance for an enormous score.

Performing her routine to screams from the crowd and, initially, to the deep, loud beats of the song “…Ready for It?” by Taylor Swift, Biles hit complicated tumbling pass after complicated tumbling pass to score 15.066 points — and won.

After her score was posted, she put on a sparkly necklace in the shape of a goat, alluding to the acronym GOAT, for Greatest of All Time. But she is not done yet: She has three more chances for medals at the Paris Games and will compete in the finals of the vault, balance beam and floor exercise.

“I know people will go crazy over it,” she said of the necklace. “But at the end of the day, it is crazy that I am in the conversation of greatest of all athletes because I just still think I’m Simone Biles from Spring, Texas, that loves to flip.”

Her face looked as if it had been inflated with an air pump. Her leg joints were so swollen that she could hardly bend her knees or ankles. A scale revealed she had gained more than 10 pounds.

Her mind raced: Had she been eating too much? Was it the pollen in the air? Maybe she was allergic to her roommate’s new dog?

“I was like, who is this person looking back at me?” Lee, who helped the United States win a team gold medal in Paris, said in an interview. “It was so scary. I didn’t know it then, but the old Suni was gone. And she would never be back.”

Lee had been a surprise winner in Tokyo: Simone Biles — the overwhelming favorite for that gold medal — had withdrawn from the Games with a mental block that made her feel unsafe performing her flips and twists in the air.

The title of gold medalist came with a level of celebrity that Lee, who was a quiet 18-year-old from a conservative Hmong community in Minnesota, was not prepared for — and didn’t want.

She has had stalkers, including one her coaches say tried to track her down in at least three states. At Auburn University, where she was on the gymnastics team for two years, the attention she received was so smothering that she resorted to taking online classes from her bedroom so she could avoid the campus.

Instead of reveling in her celebrity, Lee, now 21, said she was depressed and lonely, and often cried herself to sleep. She said she missed her old, normal life and felt that she hadn’t deserved to win the Olympic gold medal, as online critics constantly told her.

But the reason her body was swollen that morning last year was the most frightening turn of all. Doctors initially told her that she’d never do gymnastics again.

“For so many different reasons since Tokyo, I had to really grow up, and fast,” she said.

Simone Biles is the best gymnast in history, by natural talent and also medal count.Credit…Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

At 27, Simone Biles is the best gymnast in history, by natural talent and also medal count, having transformed the sport with dangerously difficult routines that remain unmatched.

For years, she sacrificed both mind and body for gymnastics, competing under psychological torment as a sexual assault survivor and with physical pain that made her feel as if she would need a wheelchair by the time she turned 30.

But Biles, the 2016 Olympic champion with a record 39 Olympic and world medals, is still picked apart, not only by the judges but by people on the internet who spew opinions on how she can be a better athlete and human.

More than ever, those critics took to their keyboards after Biles withdrew from most of her events at the Tokyo Games in 2021 because a mental block left her disoriented in the air. When she pulled out of the team final for fear of seriously hurting herself, she received heartening messages of support, but she was also called a quitter, a loser and un-American.

The criticism felt terribly unfair, Biles said. After all, she had made a lifetime of sacrifices for her sport. The public also knew that she was one of the hundreds of women sexually assaulted by Lawrence G. Nassar, the former national team doctor. Where was the empathy? Instead of dealing with a psychological problem that was invisible to others, she wished that she had broken her leg.

As she headed into her third Olympics, Biles said she was expecting those critics to say, “Oh my gosh, are you going to quit again?”

To that, she shrugged.

“If I did, what are you going to do about it, tweet me some more?” she said in June after dominating at the Olympic trials. “Like, I’ve already dealt with it for three years. But yeah, they want to see us fail.”

Since Tokyo, Biles said, she has regained control of her gymnastics and her self-confidence, having secured armor around herself, plate by heavy plate.

After much contemplation and many weekly therapy sessions, she went into the Paris Games looking to satisfy only one judge: herself.

“For me, personally tonight, it means the world to me and it’s just so crazy,” Biles said. “I don’t want to compete with Rebeca no more, I’m tired. Way too close. I’ve never had an athlete that close, so it definitely put me on my toes.”

I can’t stop thinking about how different this is from the gymnastics competition at the Tokyo Games. It’s night and day; empty, silent stadiums because of Covid-related precautions back then and packed, screaming crowds now. Biles and Lee are walking around the arena waving and showing off their medals to cheers. The emotions in here are high and joy is palpable.

Some more historical context: Since the first Olympic all-around competition in women’s gymnastics in 1952, only nine gymnasts had ever managed to medal twice. Biles, Andrade and Lee became the 10th, 11th and 12th, all in one go.

Sunisa Lee is all smiles as Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, puts a bronze medal around her neck. At the Tokyo Games, Covid-related precautions were such that athletes were handed medals and they put them on themselves. It’s a little thing, but this medal ceremony is certainly different from the one held in 2021.

Fourth place is always a hard pill to swallow. As the cameras surround the new medalists, Alice D’Amato of Italy put her backpack on and disappeared from view.

Rebeca Andrade of Brazil has won two consecutive all-around silver medals. And Sunisa Lee, with gold in 2021 and bronze today, becomes the first reigning Olympic all-around champion since Nadia Comaneci in 1980 to come back and win an all-around medal at the next Games.

Biles becomes only the third woman in history to win a second Olympic all-around title after Larisa Latynina of the Soviet Union in 1956 and 1960, and Vera Caslavska of Czechoslovakia in 1964 and 1968.

And it’s not just that. All three of the medalists are second-time Olympic all-around medalists. That had never happened before in the history of women’s gymnastics.

Simone Biles scores 15.066 on floor, for a total of 59.131. She is the Olympic all-around champion for a second time, winning it three years after dropping out in Tokyo.

Sunisa Lee and Simone Biles grab the American flag and run. Biles wins the gold, Rebeca Andrade of Brazil takes the silver and Lee earns the bronze.

Everyone is on their feet as chants of “U-S-A!” ring out around the arena. Biles is taking it in as she waits for the score.

Simone Biles hit all four tumbling passes — triple-double, front full through to double-double, double layout with a half twist, double layout. The score will take a minute, but there’s no way that doesn’t clinch her the gold.

I feel as if I need those headphones little kids are wearing. The stadium has hit high decibels as Biles walks off the mat beaming.

Andrade moves into first place with a score of 14.033 on floor, for a total of 57.932. Simone Biles is the last gymnast to go, and she needs just 13.868 to win. She scored 14.6 in qualifying.

Simone Biles’s floor routine begins with “…Ready for It?” from Taylor Swift’s “Reputation” album. It feels especially fitting for this moment.

Rebeca Andrade steps out of bounds on her first tumbling pass.

The rest of Andrade’s floor routine was excellent. She blows a kiss to the crowd. She’s going to win a second Olympic all-around medal three years after winning silver. The only question is what color it will be this time.

Sunisa Lee nailed her first tumbling pass, a full-twisting double layout, so well that she looked overcome with joy as she landed.

And that joy was surely buoyed by the crowd’s reaction. Lee, the reigning all-around gold medalist, received a standing ovation. When her final score — 56.465 — was put on the videoboard, her jaw dropped.

Lee moves into first with just two gymnasts left. That means she’s guaranteed at least a bronze medal.

Kaylia Nemour’s landings on her second and final tumbling passes were a little off, leading to small deductions but potentially consequential ones. Whatever happens today, she has an excellent chance for a gold medal on the uneven bars, her specialty. And what a journey it has been for her to get here, representing Algeria after a dispute with her home federation in France.

A score of 13.1 on floor brings Nemour’s total to 55.899 — a little over four-tenths behind Alice D’Amato, with Sunisa Lee, Rebeca Andrade and Simone Biles still to come. She is unlikely to win a medal without major mistakes from the remaining three.

Manila Esposito of Italy was the fifth-place qualifier into the final, but she has had a shaky day today: She had a fall on bars, and she just landed her first tumbling pass to her knees. We’ll see her in the floor exercise final in a few days, though.

Alice D’Amato of Italy steps out of bounds on her first tumbling pass on floor, a one-tenth deduction. The rest of her routine was solid, but if the bronze medal comes down to a tenth of a point or less, that could be costly.

Barring a major surprise in the last rotation, we’re looking at two contests here. The first is between Simone Biles and Rebeca Andrade for gold; they are separated by less than two-tenths of a point right now. The second is among Alice D’Amato, Sunisa Lee and Kaylia Nemour for bronze; they’re separated by less than a tenth of a point, but are more than a point behind the top two.