Simone Biles, Team USA compete in women’s team final

After qualifiers over the weekend, the top 8 teams advanced to the team final.

The U.S. has a five-point lead over second-place Italy heading into the final today. Here is where everyone stands:

1. United States
2. Italy
3. China
4. Brazil
5. Japan
6. Canada
7. Britain
8. Romania

After winning the team silver medal in Tokyo, the U.S. women aren’t afraid to say it — they want that gold medal.

Biles called the Paris Olympics a “redemption tour” for the Tokyo returners.

“I feel like we all have more to give and our Tokyo performances weren’t the best,” Biles said at the trials in Minneapolis. “We weren’t under the best circumstances, either, but I feel like we have a lot of weight on our shoulders to go out there and prove that we’re better athletes.”

Even Suni Lee, who came away from Tokyo with the all-around gold medal, is hungry to top the Olympic podium with her teammates.

“I think this time around, we’re so much more mature and know what we can do and what we can’t do,” Lee said.

Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles will do all four events in today’s final. Suni Lee will compete on the uneven bars, balance beam and floor.

Jade Carey will only vault after a disastrous floor routine in qualifying. Hezly Rivera will be on stand by, ready to step in if anything goes wrong.

Biles’ Paris prospects seemed suddenly in peril Sunday after she appeared to suffer a rough landing during floor warmups in the qualifying round.

Her coach, Cecile Landi, said after the competition that Biles “felt a little pain in her calf,” but she never considered pulling out.

The apparent injury was also bothering Biles in training a couple of weeks ago, according to Landi, but was improving until Sunday’s flare-up. Biles is set to compete on all four apparatuses, so any pain she is feeling isn’t preventing her from going all out in Paris.

Stephen Nedoroscik is not only known for his pommel horse skills, but also for his ear tug. The reason is a special one, as it was always a signal to his “dziadziu,” which is grandfather in Polish.

Nedoroscik is named after his grandpa, Stephen John Nedoroscik, who died last year at age 94.

“I’ve kept the tradition up and now it always means, ‘Hey,’ to everyone that I love,” he explained in a video showing behind the scenes footage.

This has been an ongoing tradition for Nedoroscik since he was in college at Penn State. When he was on TV, he said he’d tug his ear to say hi to his grandfather who was watching at home.

After winning a bronze on the team event yesterday, the U.S. men’s gymnastics team had some words of encouragement for the women, who will compete in the team final in just under 30 minutes.

“Go out there and kill it,” Brody Malone said. “Y’all know what to do.”

Designing the Olympic leotards for the Paris Games is a medal-worthy feat. Jeanne Diaz, the design director at GK Elite, the official leotard manufacturer for the U.S. Olympic team, began working on the Paris Olympics leotards more than two years ago.

“We really connected the designs to Paris as the host city,” Diaz said. “Paris is known to be the fashion capital of the world, and we know all eyes are on Team USA, so we made sure that we had that cohesion of fashion throughout but also that the whole collection was unmistakably Team USA.”

The “Go for Glory” design, which the U.S. women are expected to wear in today’s final, aims to capture the “radiant moment when an athlete, draped in the flag, transcends to become a symbol of triumph.”

It is adorned with 9,929 meticulously placed crystals cut into diamond shapes, weighing nearly a pound.

Read the full story here.

When Dominique Dawes competed in the Olympic trials for the 1992 Barcelona Games, she was the first Black gymnast to ever qualify.

“To see now, 32 years later, women of color dominating the sport of gymnastics definitely gives me reason to at least know that the sport is becoming a little bit more inclusive,” Dawes said in an interview with NBC News.

Eighty percent of the U.S. women’s Olympic gymnastics team competing in Paris are women of color, making it the most racially diverse in the team’s history.

The most dominant gymnast in the history of the sport is powered by chocolate croissants. Biles posted a video on TikTok praising the Olympic host city’s famed pastries after the qualifying round on Sunday.

Jonathan Owens, the Chicago Bears safety perhaps better known as “Simone Biles’ Husband,” will be in Paris cheering her on today.

After the Olympic trials in June, Biles told reporters that the Bears were granting Owens some time off from training camp to head to the Games.

“It’s super exciting that we get to be in each other’s elements and supporting each other’s dreams and goals,” Biles said at the time. “It’s these memories that we make that we’ll never get back, so any time we can show up for one another and support, we just get super excited because our schedules don’t align that much so whenever it does, it’s really important for both of us to show up and support.”

Due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, the Russian gymnasts, who are the reigning Olympic champions, are banned from competing in the Paris Olympics.

Team USA’s primary competition will instead come from Brazil, China and Italy.

After a dominant performance at the qualifying rounds, the women’s gymnastics team is heading into the team final as the heavy favorite. NBC’s Kaylee Hartung reports for “TODAY.”

After earning their much-deserved and long-awaited bronze medal yesterday, the U.S. men’s team has a few more shots at adding to their collection of hardware.

Tomorrow, Frederick Richard and Paul Juda will compete in the individual all-around final. They finished 10th and 13th respectively at qualifiers.

While neither is at the top of the pack, after an explosive showing in the team final yesterday, Richard could contend for a spot on the podium.

One-hit-wonder Stephen Nedoroscik will show what he’s made of at the pommel horse final on Aug. 3. He placed second in the qualifiers and is expected to take home a medal for Team USA.

Olympic dreams came true for Hezly Rivera, 16, before she even got her driver’s license. She was selected to join an Olympics team laden with medals and international star power, but being on a stacked squad like the U.S. team has its downsides, too.

Rivera did not make the cut for the team final lineup, where no scores can be dropped. Although she won’t compete today, she is still on the competition floor as a backup, in case of disaster, and to cheer on her teammates.

If the team makes the podium, Rivera will also receive a medal for her effort toward the team score in Sunday’s qualifying round.

If the U.S. women win a medal today, Simone Biles will officially become the most decorated American gymnast in the history of the Olympic Games.

She is currently tied with “Magnificent Seven” star Shannon Miller at seven Olympic medals. A podium finish today would bring her Olympic medal collection to eight.

Biles is already the most decorated gymnast in history from any country if you include world championship medals in the tally. She currently has 37 world and Olympic medals combined.

Hezly Rivera, 16, can become the youngest gymnast from any country to win Olympic gold since American Kyla Ross in 2012.

Rivera is not in the team’s final lineup but competed in prelims and will win a medal if the team finishes top three.

Simone Biles, 27, would be the oldest woman from any country to win Olympic gymnastics gold since 1964, according to the OlyMADMen, which is the database used by the International Olympic Committee.

Aly Raisman is currently the oldest U.S. female gymnast to ever win Olympic gold, when she was 22 in 2016. 

When U.S. Olympic gymnast Jordan Chiles was 17, one of her former coaches called her “double head,” because, as she recalled, her “hair was too big.” Someone also questioned whether she was her mother’s daughter because of her darker skin.

Those common occurrences — and an overall lack of diversity within amateur gymnastics — caused Chiles to contemplate leaving the sport she loved.  

“I wanted to be done, because I didn’t think … the sport wanted me,” Chiles said on NBC’s “My New Favorite Olympian” podcast. “I didn’t think people around me wanted to see this beautiful Black girl in a [leotard] anymore.”

But Chiles chose to persevere. Instead of quitting, she continued embracing her true self and embarked on a journey of empowering women of color.

Read the full story here.

The “Perfect 10” still exists in gymnastics, but it is no longer the only metric used to calculate a score. Today’s gymnasts receive scores in two separate categories for each routine: difficulty and execution. The difficulty score is open-ended, while execution is scored out of a 10.00.

The difficulty and execution scores are combined to produce the final number. To optimize their scores, gymnasts perform the most difficult routines they can while minimizing execution deductions.

Learn more about what Olympic judges look for in our gymnastics scoring 101 guide.

You won’t see host country France on the mat today.

After Sunday’s qualifying round, the French team did not make the cut for the top eight teams that advanced to today’s team final. France placed 11th out of 12 teams.

Team USA, in first place after Sunday, will face off against Italy, China, Brazil, Japan, Canada, Great Britain and Romania in a quest to return to the top of the podium today.

The women’s team final kicks off at 12:15 p.m. ET. Catch all the action on NBC and Peacock.