Olympic Gymnastics Live: Simone Biles, U.S. Women Have Off Day (For Them) – The New York Times

At the last Olympics, in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, she also didn’t dominate on the balance beam like she does on the floor and vault. In event finals, she ended up third and it still irks her. People always focus on her four gold medals from Rio, she said, but never mention that bronze medal, as if it never even happened.

Going into these Olympics, she had a not-so-secret weapon: her crazy-hard dismount. It was a double twisting double back somersault, and after she landed it in 2019, it was named after her.

She didn’t use that dismount on Sunday. Instead, she performed a full twisting double back somersault and over-rotated it, stumbling out of the landing to receive an underwhelming 14.066 points. A relatively bad day for the U.S. team, which was expected to dominate.

Still, she’ll almost certainly head home with a medal in the team final, where the United States will be aiming to deliver a much stronger showing.

A month ago, Chiles was the third-ranked all-arounder at the Olympic Trials, behind Simone Biles and Sunisa Lee. She is generally a well-rounded and consistent gymnast, and she was the only U.S. team member who made no major mistakes in any of the four major domestic competitions this year. That means she did 24 routines and hit all of them.

Chiles, though, had a rocky route to the Olympics, frequently missing out on major international competitions and almost quitting in 2018 because, she said, “I didn’t think the sport wanted me anymore.”

Then Biles offered a suggestion: Why didn’t Chiles relocate to Texas to train with Biles at her gym, World Champions Centre? Chiles heeded that advice.

Perhaps no gymnast benefited as much from the postponement of the Games as Chiles did: She went from being left off the 2019 world championships team to doing so well in 2021 that she was pretty much a lock for Tokyo before the trials even started.

And for her skill on this event, Lee is a favorite to win the gold medal. It’s the one medal at these Tokyo Games that Simone Biles is not expected to win.

On Sunday, she warned her competition that it would be hard to beat her. She scored 15.2 points for her routine, the highest score so far on the event at these Olympics.

Lee is inching closer to winning a gold medal for her father, John Lee, who is her biggest fan. In 2019, he sustained a spinal cord injury in a fall from a ladder just a day before Sunisa Lee left for the national championships. With her incredible ability to focus, she won the national title in the uneven bars at that event. Now she wants to succeed on the biggest stage.

Her second vault was an Amanar, which is a back handspring onto the vault into a back layout with two and a half twists.

She is now in first place in the vault with a score of 15.183 points, with Jade Carey of the United States right behind her, in second.

Biles wants to perform the double pike during these Games so it can be yet another skill named after her. But there’s a risk in trying it, considering the margin of error is whisker-thin. She does a round-off back handspring onto the vaulting table and pushes off it with her hands, launching her 4-feet-8 body high enough into the air to complete two full back flips in a folded position before landing on her feet.

Other gymnasts are amazed that she has both the guts and the physical ability to land the move, and even she is amazed at herself. Before the pandemic, Biles never thought she would ever try the Yurchenko double pike in competition. But the extra training time she was given after the Olympics postponement was what she needed to hone the vault and feel comfortable with it.

Even now, though, there is a chance of disaster. If she fails to flip fast enough and land squarely on her feet, she risks breaking her already sore ankles or sustaining a neck or head injury. The other scary part of the vault, which only a handful of men can do successfully, is that once she is flipping in the air, she can’t bail out of it. She wouldn’t be able to stop her momentum.

She showed off the vault in public for the first time during the practice session for the U.S. Classic in May, and then landed it in that competition. The judges, though, lowballed her difficulty score, meaning she wasn’t given credit for the risk she had taken. Later, she said she wasn’t going to argue it because she didn’t want to seem like a brat, but that she’d continue pushing the sport forward whether her scores reflected her greatness or not.

Maggie Astor contributed reporting.

That essentially meant she had two chances to move on to medal events, vault and floor exercise. On vault, she is among the best in the world.

But only two gymnasts per country advance to a final, and Skinner, 24, fell short. She performed two complicated vaults — a Cheng and an Amanar, just like Simone Biles and Carey. Her Cheng had some form issues, and the landing of her Amanar lacked the control she showed just weeks ago at the trials, one of the best meets of her life.

Skinner averaged a total score of 14.866. (Any gymnast seeking a vault medal must perform two different skills, whose scores are totaled.) Carey simply had a better night, basically nailing her Amanar and qualifying with a 15.166 average — just behind Biles’s 15.183.

Skinner’s other strong event, floor, went relatively well. But while she has difficult tumbling, she sees deductions for execution. On Sunday, Skinner tied Chiles on the event with a 13.566, and, like on vault, Biles and Carey finished ahead of her.

Still, Skinner’s scores here will have some fans continuing to question U.S.A. Gymnastics’ decision to give her the individual spot rather than name her to the team. She outscored members of the four-person team on every event, and thus could have boosted the Americans’ disappointing total — the team ended the qualification trailing the Russians by more than a point.

It’s also worth noting that Skinner improved her execution on all four events since being named an Olympic alternate in 2016 — one of many results she made clear she disagreed with. After those Games, she enrolled at Utah, where she amassed a litany of gymnastics achievements, including the N.C.A.A. record for consecutive routines without a fall (161). She returned to elite competition in 2019.

Skinner recently announced that she would retire after Tokyo and complete her college degree. The past year has been trying: She has also been nursing a bone spur in her ankle. “My body definitely needs a rest,” she wrote on Instagram.

At the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, Biles’s signature move on the floor was a double layout with a half-twist and a blind landing, now officially known as “The Biles.” It was the first skill named after her because she was the first one to do it at the world championships or Olympics.

Since then, she has added “The Biles II” to her floor repertoire, and that’s a triple-twisting double-tucked backward somersault that you need to see in slow motion to count the flips and twists. It looks like she is being tossed around inside the eye of a hurricane. But in the end, like a cat, she somehow lands on her feet. In gymnastics, that quality is called air awareness and it’s one of Biles’s many athletic gifts.

She also has been working on her choreography since the last Olympics. In an effort to “spice it up,” she enlisted professional dancer Sasha Farber to help. He was her partner on “Dancing with the Stars,” and together they finished fourth in that TV competition. Here, though, Biles wants a gold medal, not a glittery mirrorball trophy.

She just performed both of her Biles moves, and landed both of them. But her third tumbling pass, a full twisting double back somersault, gave her trouble. While she landed it with both feet, her momentum caused her to fly out of bounds and even off the beige raised competition floor. It was one of her worst floor performances of the year, and even with her wildly difficult moves she received a score of 14.133.

The score placed her in second place so far, just behind Vanessa Ferrari of Italy, who has 14.166 points. The top eight finishers at the end of the day qualify for the event final next week.

A squad without Biles would almost certainly score lower yet still win gold. Spencer Barnes, a host of the gymnastics podcast Gymcastic, has estimated that the Americans could count up to four falls and still beat a “hit” meet from all of the other teams.

The Americans have won the team event in every Olympics and world championship since 2011.

At podium training on Thursday, Carey played it safe, instead performing a still-tough Moors (a double-twisting double layout). She followed that with a powerful front layout through to a tucked double-double.

If she lands the triple-double layout in either the qualification or the floor exercise final — if she moves on to that event — the skill will be named for her.

Carey, 21, is also capable of winning a medal on vault; she placed second on the event at the 2017 and 2019 world championships. Like MyKayla Skinner, her fellow Arizonan, she is not part of the team competition. She secured her spot at the Olympics through the multiyear World Cup series.

But China challenged her score, filing what’s called an inquiry. Countries can do this when they believe a gymnast was not sufficiently credited for the difficulty of a routine. (Execution scores cannot be challenged.) The judges re-examined Lu’s routine and increased her score by two-tenths, to 12.666, moving her from third to second place among the Chinese women and shutting Zhang out of the all-around final instead.

The two-per-country rule will also keep Viktoria Listunova of Russia, the reigning European all-around champion, out of the final because her teammates Angelina Melnikova and Vladislava Urazova finished ahead of her. Additionally, Listunova and Urazova will miss the uneven bars final because Melnikova and Anastasia Iliankova scored higher on that apparatus.

The sport looks a lot different than it did decades ago, when it was common to see 14- and 15-year-olds winning medals. Part of that has to do with rules. Since 2000, women must turn 16 or older in the Olympic year to compete. The code of points has also changed several times since and now rewards many skills that arguably improve with experience and muscle. Take the hardest vault: Biles’s Yurchenko double pike. It would be extremely difficult for a girl to generate the power it takes to execute the skill properly and safely.

While several previous U.S. teams had adults on them (Annia Hatch, for one, was 26 at the 2004 Games), it seems now that more Americans are competitive well into adulthood.

The German team’s average age is 26; its oldest member is 32. Simona Castro of Chile is 32. Vanessa Ferrari of Italy is 30. The Dutch twins Sanne and Lieke Wevers are nearly 30.

Like Biles, many of these athletes push their own limits. The Olympic beam champion in 2016, Sanne Wevers recently debuted the most difficult uneven bars element in the world.