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| 1 |  USA |
Simone Biles | 59.131 | |
| 2 |  BRA |
Rebeca Andrade | -1.199 points behind | points behind |
| 3 | USA |
Sunisa Lee | -2.666 |
Simone Biles earned her sixth Olympic gold medal, and her ninth Olympic medal overall, in Paris on Thursday, clinching a win in the women’s gymnastics all-around final by more than a full point.
The competition began with a commanding lead for Biles, who scored 15.766 for her namesake Yurchenko double pike, the hardest vault in the world. But she dropped behind Rebeca Andrade of Brazil and Kaylia Nemour of Algeria at the halfway point, after both of them hit their uneven bars routines and Biles made a mistake in hers.
How each athlete ranked by event
| Vault | Uneven Bars |
Balance Beam |
Floor Exercise |
|
| USA Simone Biles |
1 | 17 | 1 | 1 |
| BRA Rebeca Andrade |
2 | 4 | 5 | 2 |
| USA Sunisa Lee |
7 | 2 | 8 | 4 |
After two events, the margin separating Andrade, in first, from Biles, in third, was less than three-tenths of a point. Biles had a couple of small wobbles during her balance beam routine, but Andrade and Nemour had bigger ones, and the difficulty of Biles’s routine gave her some wiggle room. By the final rotation, Biles had regained the narrowest of leads. And Lee was in a tie for fourth place, poised to break onto the podium, after a beam routine that often stands out from the field for the height of her leaps.
Note: The Times measured vertical distance from the beam on site in Paris and calibrated the grid shown in this graphic from the same position in which photos were taken.
Photographs by Bedel Saget; composite image by Jeremy White
Biles’s explosive floor routine, in which she hit four difficult tumbling passes — a triple-double, a front full through to double-double, a double layout with a half twist, and a double layout — earned a massive score of 15.066, expanding that lead and securing her victory.
Andrade won the silver medal, just as she had three years ago in Tokyo. And Sunisa Lee, the defending Olympic all-around champion, trailed after the first three rotations but came back to win the bronze with a solid performance on floor.
Vault
How each top finisher scored on vault
Andrade performed a breathtaking Cheng vault, with impeccable form in the air and a nearly stuck landing, for a huge score of 15.1. But nothing could compete with Biles’s Yurchenko double pike, which is rated eight-tenths of a point more difficult than the Cheng. Even though Biles had so much power that she had to take a big step backward on the landing, resulting in an execution score slightly lower than Andrade’s, her overall score put her solidly ahead.
The other gymnasts in contention for a medal, including Lee, Nemour and Alice D’Amato of Italy, performed a less difficult vault called a double-twisting Yurchenko.
Photographs and composite image by Weiyi Cai
Uneven Bars
How each top finisher scored on uneven bars
Though Biles excels in all four all-around events, the uneven bars have always been her weakest, and it was on the bars that she made her only major mistake of the night. She misjudged a transition from the high bar to the low bar called a Pak salto, and she had to bend her knees to avoid touching the ground and do an extra swing to regain her momentum. She slipped behind Andrade, who had a solid routine, and Nemour, who had a spectacular one that could win her a gold medal in the bars final in a few days.
“When I saw the score come up, I was like, ‘Oh goodness, thank God we did the double pike today, because I wasn’t planning on it,’” Biles said after the competition, referring to the cushion she had gotten by doing the Yurchenko double pike vault instead of a less difficult option.
“But I just knew how phenomenal of an athlete she is,” she said of Andrade. “And on each event we’re very similar in scores. So I was like, ‘OK, I think I had to bring out the big guns this time.’”
The uneven bars helped give Lee, seventh after the vault, the comeback that would ultimately win her the bronze medal. Her routine — one of the most difficult in the Olympic field, even without a new release move that she had been practicing but decided not to debut here — included difficult passages in which she connected release moves directly into transitions between the high and low bars.
A move from Sunisa Lee’s uneven bars routine
Photographs and composite image by Jeremy White
Balance Beam
How each top finisher scored on balance beam
As is often the case, no one escaped the beam totally unscathed: Biles, Andrade, Lee and Nemour each had at least one balance check. Biles kept hers very small, and that, coupled with the difficulty of her routine, allowed her to make up the ground she had lost on bars.
Andrade kept herself strongly competitive. She wobbled on a back handspring, back layout series, but most of her routine was solid, capped with a difficult dismount called a double pike: two back flips with her hips bent and legs straight.
By the time the top gymnasts headed to the last of their four events, Biles was ahead of Andrade by just 0.166 points, D’Amato of Italy was in third, and Lee and Nemour were tied for fourth.
Rebeca Andrade’s beam dismount
Photographs by Bedel Saget; composite image by Scott Reinhard
Floor Exercise
How each top finisher scored on floor exercise
Andrade stepped out of bounds on her first tumbling pass but otherwise hit her floor routine, which is among the best in the world and has earned her a spot in the floor exercise final in a few days. Lee nailed her own routine, including a full-twisting double layout executed so well that a huge grin shot across her face as she landed.
With Andrade at her heels, Biles took to the floor to perform the last routine of the competition. It was her usual, which is to say, head and shoulders above anyone else: four world-class tumbling passes, two of them named after her. Her difficulty score was a full point higher than Andrade’s on the event, and her execution score was less than a tenth of a point lower. She ended up winning the competition by 1.199 points.
“I don’t want to compete with Rebeca no more,” she said afterward, referring to Andrade, with whom she is friendly. “I’m tired. She’s way too close. I’ve never had an athlete that close, so it definitely put me on my toes and it brought out the best athlete in myself.”
She added: “I was excited and proud to compete with her.”
A pass from Simone Biles’s floor routine
Photographs and composite image by Joe Ward
“All in all, I’m super proud of my performance tonight,” Biles said after the competition, “and the fight that I’ve had for the last three years mentally, physically, just to get back competing on the world stage.”
She is only the third woman in history to win two Olympic all-around titles in women’s gymnastics, and the first in more than half a century: Larisa Latynina of the Soviet Union accomplished the feat in 1956 and 1960, and Vera Caslavska of Czechoslovakia did it in 1964 and 1968.
But she was not the only history-maker on the podium. Since the first Olympic all-around competition in women’s gymnastics in 1952, only nine gymnasts had ever managed to win two medals of any color. On Thursday night, Biles, Andrade and Lee became the 10th, 11th and 12th, all in one go — and Lee was the first reigning champion to win another all-around medal in the Games after her victory since Nadia Comaneci in 1976 and 1980.
Rebeca Andrade of Brazil with silver, Simone Biles of the United States with gold and Sunisa Lee of the United States with bronze.
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
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