Simone Biles continued her march toward the Paris Olympics on Friday with a dynamic day one at the US gymnastics trials that featured brilliance and a little reminder that she’s human, too.
The four-time Olympic gold medallist thrilled the Target Center crowd with her signature Yurchenko double pike vault, now also known as the Biles II.
She earned 15.975 points for the vault which no other woman has attempted in competition.
Biles topped the all-around standings after the first night of competition on 58.900 points, with the all-around winner after day two on Sunday guaranteed a trip to Paris, where gymnastics competition begins in just under a month.
The other four spots on the team will be decided by a selection committee, based on results at trials and in prior events with an eye toward maximizing the squad’s scoring potential in Paris.
Jordan Chiles, part of the US silver medal-winning team in Tokyo, was second with 56.400 points.
Tokyo all-around champion Suni Lee, eying a return trip to the Games after battling back from kidney disease, was in third on 56.025 points after a night when injuries to two Olympic contenders ratcheted up the stress for everyone.
Biles’s coach, Laurent Landi, said the injuries to Shilese Jones and Kayla DiCello at the start of the night affected everyone, Biles included.
“It’s always hard to see one of your teammates really getting hurt,” he said. “You need to be in your own bubble. We just told them to calm down and just to think about themselves, one event at a time, one skill at a time.”
Biles’s 37 world championship and Olympic medals make her the most decorated gymnast of all time. That haul includes a dazzling four gold from the 2016 Rio Olympics.
But three years ago, her Tokyo Games campaign came to an abrupt halt as she pulled out of a string of events as she battled the temporary mental block gymnasts call “the twisties,” which causes them to lose their sense of where they are in the air.
Once unsure if she would bid for a third Olympic team, Biles has only gained strength since her return to competition in August, capturing all-around gold at the World Championships last year and grabbing her ninth national all-around title earlier this month.
Biles enchanted the Target Center crowd with a floor routine that featured a breathtaking triple-twisting double somersault on her first tumbling pass.
She had launched her night with a rock-solid parallel bars performance that garnered 14.425 points.
But Biles was clearly unhappy with a shaky balance beam routine.
She had to fight to hang on as she mounted the beam and had another wobble on a spin.
Her score of 13.650 was well below the 14.800 she put up twice at the US championships and, after a big step back on her dismount, Biles departed the podium looking furious.
– Almost perfect –
“She was very, very pissed,” Landi said. “But she calmed herself down, finished the routine, made it and then hit an almost perfect floor and an amazing vault,” he said.
Jones, a world championships bronze medallist last year, was hurt in a warm-up vault, limping off with the help of her coach with an apparent knee injury
She returned, however, and with her left leg taped from thigh to calf delivered the top parallel bars routine of the night, although she opted out of the remaining three apparatus.
It’s yet another setback for Jones in her hunt for a first Olympics berth. A flare-up of an old shoulder injury saw the two-time world bronze medallist withdraw from the national championships this month and petition for entry to the trials.
Things looked even more bleak for DiCello, who suffered an apparent ankle injury on the first vault of the night and had to be carried from the podium, eventually leaving the floor in a wheelchair.
The scene echoed that on Wednesday, when Skye Blakely, a two-time team world champion and strong contender to make the squad, ruptured an Achilles tendon in floor exercise training.
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