Simone Biles Takes Gymnastics to a New Level. Again.
Biles pushed the sport’s boundaries by doing a double flip with three twists at the U.S. championships on Friday. She plans to try again Sunday night.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — At a training session on Wednesday ahead of the United States Gymnastics Championships, Simone Biles wore a leotard with a bedazzled goat on the back.
It was a reminder, in case people somehow forgot, that she is the greatest American gymnast of all time. With a combined 25 world championship and Olympic medals, including 18 golds, Biles stands alone atop the medal standings.
She got to this point by fearlessly performing elements that no one else has dared go near, and as Biles began her quest on Friday for a record-tying sixth national title, she became the first woman to perform a triple double (two flips with three twists) in the floor exercise of a competition.
Though she had trouble on the landing and had to steady herself by putting both hands on the mat, the judges ruled that Biles had completed the element. They awarded her 14.35 points for the routine, the highest total for the floor exercise on Friday, and Biles promised to try the triple double again on Sunday, when the women’s all-around title will be decided. She finished Friday night in the lead, 1.75 points ahead of Sunisa Lee.
Biles said she thought she had too much adrenaline flowing to control her power on the triple double. “It’s such a hard skill that I shouldn’t be mad,” Biles said of her fall, “but I’m so mad about it because in training I’ve never done it before.”
Nevertheless, it was the third time in her career that Biles had introduced a new element to the women’s side of the sport.
Biles tried another novelty later on Friday night, a double-double dismount off the balance beam, and landed it with a slight hop. Though Biles later called the triple double “the hardest move in the world,” her dismount was another significant breakthrough for the sport.
“I feel like you should never settle just because you are winning or you are at the top,” Biles said after her Wednesday training session, where she successfully completed the triple double four times. “You should always push yourself.”
The triple double is a skill that, until this point, had been done only on the men’s side, where it is still rare. None of the men at the national championships are expected to try one, and most of Biles’s competitors can't even do a double double.
How Will Judges Score Biles’s New Skill?
Simone Biles unveiled a new skill in her floor exercise routine on Friday: the triple double, a double back flip with three twists. This skill had never been tried before in a women’s gymnastics competition, and it will not be assigned an official value for scoring until Biles tries the element at the world championships this fall. Here is a look at the level of difficulty and point value of similar skills. Adding a second twist to a tucked double back flip is worth nearly twice the point value (from 0.5 to 0.9).
Tucked
double back flip
with full twist
Tucked
double back flip
with two twists
Biles&s tucked
double back flip
with three twists
Tucked
double back flip
Flip
Spin
D
E
I
&
Difficulty
0.4
0.5
0.9
&
Point value
Flip
Spin
Tucked
double back flip
D
Difficulty
0.4
Point value
Tucked
double back flip
with full twist
E
Difficulty
0.5
Point value
Tucked
double back flip
with two twists
I
Difficulty
0.9
Point value
Biles&s tucked
double back flip
with three twists
&
Difficulty
&
Point value
“If you had told me 10 years ago that someone would be doing that, I’d be like: ‘That seems a little hard and dangerous. I don’t know,’” Nastia Liukin, the 2008 Olympic all-around champion who is now an analyst for NBC Sports, said earlier this week. “Of course, if anyone can do it, it’s obviously her.”
When Biles’s coach, Laurent Landi, approached her about working on the triple double last year, she had her doubts. She played around with the skill a few years ago, but only in a foam pit, which protected her from getting hurt if she messed up.
“My first reaction is no,” Biles said. “Then he has to push me towards it until I’m ready to do it myself, and I’m like, ‘O.K., it’s really not that bad.’
“He almost makes the impossible possible sometimes, and I don’t know how he does it.”
Now Biles has such a command of the move that she often bounces out of the landing, a sign that she has more than enough power to complete it.
After taking nearly two years off from competition after the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, where she won the all-around title, Biles has been as dominant as ever, winning six medals, four of them gold, at last year’s world championships.
Much has changed, though, within the United States national team. At 22, Biles is one of its oldest members, the designated leader of the team and an important example to the younger gymnasts.
She is also the only remaining member of the 2016 Olympic team and the only active elite gymnast who has publicly identified herself as a survivor of the sexual abuse perpetrated by Lawrence G. Nassar, the national team’s former doctor.
While others in the sport, particularly her 2016 Olympic teammate Aly Raisman, spoke out about the failure of U.S.A. Gymnastics to protect its young athletes, Biles remained relatively quiet. Recently, though, her stance has shifted. Biles has used her Twitter account to express frustration with the sport’s national governing body, and she became emotional while talking on Wednesday about the aftermath of the scandal.
“I do want to be a voice,” Biles said, “but it takes time.”
Although she is still figuring out how and when to best use her voice, Biles has always led by example. All eyes were on her during the training session: Her fellow athletes and coaches stopped their workouts to watch her, even applauding after she completed a skill.
Biles is also taking time to help the next generation. She was out on the floor 30 minutes before her training period, talking with the junior gymnasts, athletes under the age of 16, as they practiced.
“It’s super helpful,” said Karis German, 15, who trains at Biles’s gym. “She gives us tips on how to make things.”
At this stage, it has become Biles’s goal to build a community for herself and the other gymnasts. Few people on the outside, she said, can understand what they are going through, so supporting one another is important.
Biles trained alone in the lead-up to the 2016 Olympics, but now has elite teammates at World Champions Centre in Spring, Tex., the gym her family owns. She trains alongside about a dozen other gymnasts and regularly invites teammates over to her house just to chill between training sessions.
Biles began working with Landi — who previously coached Madison Kocian, one of Biles’s 2016 Olympic teammates — after she returned from Rio. She trained from age 7 to 19 under Aimee Boorman, who moved to become the executive director of a gym in Florida.
Biles has admitted that her love for the sport was sometimes diminished, especially as she grappled with the emotional trauma of the Nassar revelations. But she has worked to find more joy outside the gym, spending time with friends, family and Lilo, the French bulldog she adopted last year. It’s important, she said, to have balance in her life as she trains for her second Olympic Games.
“At the end of the day, once I look up and it’s coming to 6 o’clock, I’m out of there,” she said with a smile. “I don’t try to lollygag around the gym or anything. Sometimes I don’t even stretch. I’m just like, ‘O.K., I’m leaving, sorry.’”
The shift in priorities has not reduced Biles’s training, and she remains at the vanguard of her sport. If Biles completes the triple double at the world championships in Stuttgart, Germany, in October, the trick will be forever known as the Biles II.
Two previous innovations — a floor exercise pass that succeeded at worlds in 2013 and a vault she landed last year — are simply called the Biles, because each was her first addition to a particular event. The double-double dismount from the balance beam will also be called the Biles if she makes it in Stuttgart.
“They are being pushed by Simone,” Tom Forster, the performance director for the national women’s team, said of her competitors. “Let’s be honest: Everyone is trying to keep up.”
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