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This is part of Slate’s 2024 Olympics coverage. Read more here

It only took three years of waiting and training and untold hours in therapy, but after a traumatizing Tokyo Games, Simone Biles is having the Olympics of her life in Paris. Her five-woman squad just won a gold medal by a margin of almost 6 points and came up with the greatest team name of all time. She enters the women’s all-around competition on Thursday favored to win what will be, if most things go right for her, her fifth Olympic gold medal.

But what if, as happens all too often in gymnastics, things go only mostly right?

Well, in that case, I have to be real with you: The greatest gymnast ever to grace the sport is realistically beatable. This will be a first. For as once-in-a-lifetime phenomenal as Biles is, a 25-year-old from Brazil is almost as good. In most meets where Biles competes, the only realistic all-around fight is for second place; it’s been called, wryly, “Winner, Non-Simone Division.” In fact, Biles has literally not lost an all-around competition since 2013.

This time, however, Rebeca Andrade’s spectacular gymnastics just happens to reside comfortably inside Biles’ margin of error. But what does this mean? What kinds of “errors” would actually have to happen to reverse the predicted order on the women’s medal podium? And what would have to go right for the bespectacled Brazilian? (Like American hero Stephen Nedoroscik, Andrade competes without her glasses on, but then cannot read her own scores without vision correction.)

It’s falls, right? Falls? Will Biles have to fall to “lose”? (A silver Olympic medal is hardly “losing,” but still.) Bite your tongue. I am about to show you several scenarios where Andrade could scoop up the gold with both gymnasts having more or less a “hit meet” (i.e., no falls!), because I am not a monster, and I refuse to put fall energy into this universe. Yes, that’s right, I just hope both teams have fun! But seriously: Our world is full of strife and woe, and we deserve to see the two greatest female gymnasts in the world go head-to-cabeça, both doing their best.

Let’s begin with both gymnasts’ least favorite event, on which neither is actually bad: the uneven bars. Traditionally, gymnasts who excel on the lower-body events—floor, vault, and beam, which we’ll get to in a second—tend not to enjoy the upper-body event, bars. You can think of it like this: On all the other events, the gymnast dominates the apparatus; on bars, the apparatus dominates them. And while Biles packs an impressive amount of difficulty into her compact routine and usually executes well, Andrade simply has a better “swing,” and can outscore Biles on this event by a few tenths. So in the all-around, if both gymnasts hit a bar routine in line with their usual execution and sustain only a small hop (or a stick!) on their dismounts? Advantage: Andrade.

Balance beam, of course, will present both gymnasts with their biggest opportunities to you-know-what off the apparatus, and while Biles may have one fall’s worth of cushion, as she did over Andrade at 2023 world championships, she also may not. Andrade has some stealth difficulty she can pull out that she hasn’t yet this Olympics; she can, for example, upgrade her beam dismount to the same one Biles does, which would push her difficulty value to within one tenth of Biles. Both gymnasts usually execute beam cleanly—though both did count nonfall major breaks in team finals. Anything can happen! However, just because of difficulty alone, all other things being more or less business as usual, Biles has a slight advantage on beam. Still, it remains the biggest wild card for both and may decide the competition.

Floor exercise is where both of these gymnasts tip from world-class into stratospheric, and also where Biles’ normally massive advantage may slightly erode this Olympics and this Olympics only. What might happen, first of all, is Andrade bringing a thrilling upgrade to her first tumbling pass—in human Earth parlance, this means she could throw a huge flip straight out of another flip, which would give that first pass a combined difficulty value equal to Biles’ massive Biles 2 (or triple double), which was previously assumed impossible for anyone to catch. Even with that upgrade, however, Biles’ difficulty has a major advantage. But with the new “artistry” change in scoring, Andrade’s enthralling dance comes out on top.

The competition will end on floor, and while Andrade’s potential upgrade may come into play, it will likely come down to landings. Both of these gymnasts tumble so powerfully that they often have issues landing in control, and this is not helped by the fact that women have to “stick” in an anatomically improbable position. (The men get to do it with their legs apart and butts out! Patriarchy!) And both of these gymnasts have seen their floor scores fall from stratospheric to merely very good by stepping, hopping, or bouncing out of bounds, which carries a tenth penalty for one foot over the line, and three tenths for both. Biles could, conceivably, bounce out of bounds on three out of four passes while Andrade stays in and pulls off the new pass. This is where the margin of error comes in the second most.

Where does it come in the most? The vault, which will also begin both athletes’ competition and set the tone for whether that gold might be in Andrade’s realm of possibility. Biles currently has the most difficult vault in the history of women’s gymnastics, a vault that most men can’t do: the formidable Biles 2 (or Yurchenko double pike) start valued at a stratospheric 6.4. Does that mean Biles could technically score in the unthinkable 16s with it, which would give her a basically insurmountable advantage? Yes. Does she now compete this vault without the “spotter penalty” of her coach, Laurent Landi, on the podium, as she did during her comeback year of 2023? Yes. Does she, against history and physics and all reasonable Earth laws, usually land this vault on her feet? Yes—but not always!

Because the double pike is so high off the ground, landing it “short” (or underrotated) runs far more risk of catastrophic injury than overrotating it, after which Biles knows to fall safely, rolling backward with her arms thrown up to brace her neck. As such, twice in the past year when she has completed the double pike, she’s overpowered it and fallen—and one of those times, when Landi was on the podium with her and she sustained the 0.5 spotter penalty, she lost the world championship title to Andrade, who landed both her vaults on her feet with her usual exquisite form.

Which brings us, finally, to how Andrade could do this, even if Biles doesn’t fall, because again, I refuse to send that into the cosmos. It’s the most thrilling, movie-plot-worthy moment in a gymnastics meet since Steve Tevere (Mitch Gaylord) did a literally impossible dismount (amid flash photography, ha!) in the 1986 movie American Anthem, except this will be real. Andrade could break out her alleged secret vault, the elusive triple-twisting Yurchenko! If so, Andrade would not only get a vault named after her. (She has, indeed, submitted it for naming and valuation—6.0—to the International Gymnastics Federation.) If she lands the triple with her usual gorgeous execution, and Biles has a tough landing on the double pike? Well, then, it would turn into a very close meet.

But here’s the thing. Nobody has ever seen Andrade land that vault and lived to tell about it. (Or, you know, caught it on camera.) And here’s the other thing: Biles knows about all of this. She and Andrade are friendly, and the GOAT has said she enjoys being pushed to compete at her absolute best. And while another all-around gold would sure look good in Simone Biles’ house—and while the statistical advantage remains hers—it is thrilling to witness another gymnast on the international stage with such greatness and beauty. Iron sharpens iron, as they say—and here is hoping that both of these gymnasts come out on Thursday at their sharpest. No matter who wins gold, the biggest winner of all (besides the friends we made along the way!) will be the sport of gymnastics itself, pushed even further into greatness.




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