DOHA, Qatar — Simone Biles attempted to smile but her eyes betrayed her. She was angry, paying little attention to the gold medal around her neck, the one that made history.
Yes, winning never gets old. It’s just not why she does this.
The challenge whenever the greatest gymnast of her and any other generation steps onto the floor isn’t to impress the judges so much as meet her own impossibly high standards. The one that keeps nudging the 21-year-old to propel herself and her sport forward.
And for two hours Thursday, for the first time in a long time, the momentum slowed. At least in the eyes of Biles, who didn’t sound like someone who just became the first woman to win four world all-around championships, a feat she pulled off despite a handful of errors to beat Mai Murakami of Japan and her American teammate, Morgan Hurd, by more than 1.6 points.
It’s a sizable margin for nearly everyone else, but not for Biles. Contending with a kidney stone she insists is manageable, she sat down her vault in the first rotation, came off the beam on her third and stepped out of bounds on floor exercise.
“It’s not the gymnast that I am, to go out there and kind of bomb a meet like this,” said Biles after posting an all-around score of 57.491. “Even though I won, I wish it were a little bit different.”
Only it wasn’t, a testament to the massive difficulty Biles packs into each event. What she’s doing on floor exercise is as hard as anything the men can come up with. The vault – the one that will carry her name when code of points is updated – is so tough no other woman even attempts it in competition.
Doing anything else would be “boring” as her coach Laurent Landi put it. Yet Biles doesn’t use the remarkably high start values of her routines as an excuse when she doesn’t hit them. There’s no grading on a curve, at least not for her.
Biles jokingly asked Landi if she needed an 18 – a score not currently possible in gymnastics – heading into her floor exercise to catch Murakami. The deficit was actually 13.308 points, totally doable. Biles briefly thought about toning down her boundary pushing set for something a bit easier just to make sure she won. The internal wavering was fleeting.
“I would never,” Biles said.
Playing it safe simply isn’t her style. While her right foot did slip into the red out of bounds during her first tumbling pass, it hardly mattered. Her score of 15.000 was more than enough to rocket past Murakami and Hurd, the 2017 world champion.
“It’s absolutely insane she fell twice and won,” Hurd said. “I have no words.”
Neither did Biles, at least not any positive ones.
“It just (stinks) that I did so bad and I still won,” said Biles. “I wish it could not happen. You have to earn it and I’m not sure I earned it tonight.”
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