Simone Biles remains peerless. Even when she’s not quite perfect.
The American gymnastics star edged Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade during a tense Olympic all-around final on Thursday. Biles’ total of 59.131 was just more than a point ahead of Andrade at 57.932, one of the closest calls Biles has ever endured at a major international event.
Sunisa Lee, the Tokyo Olympics champion, earned bronze despite spending much of the last 15 months dealing with multiple kidney diseases that left her return to the Games very much in doubt.
Still, the meet ended the way all of those Biles has started and finished over the last 11 years have: with hugs and gold.
The margin was the smallest in a major international event since Biles captured the third of her record six world championships in 2015.
She was a teenager then. She’s an icon now.
The 27-year-old who is redefining what a gymnast can do — and just as notably, for how long she can do it — became the third woman to become a two-time Olympic champion, joining Larisa Latynina of the Soviet Union in 1956 and 1960 and Vera Caslavska of Czechoslovakia in 1964 and 1968.
Biles also is the oldest woman to claim the biggest title in her sport since then 30-year-old Maria Gorokhovskaya of the Soviet Union won the first-ever Olympic all-around in Melbourne, Australia, in 1952.
Yet the sixth gold and ninth overall medal — the same as Romanian great Nadia Comaneci, who was in the star-studded crowd that included the U.S. men’s basketball team — of Biles’ unparalleled career did not come as easy as so many that came before.
She misjudged a transition on uneven bars, the weakest of her four events, letting go of the upper bar too soon and forcing her to reach for a larger-than-expected gap.
While she didn’t fall — Biles muscled her way back into the routine — it blunted her momentum and led to major deductions that left her trailing Andrade through two rotations.
The deficit didn’t last.
Biles responded with a largely wobble-free 14.566 on the balance beam, the highest of the night among the 24 finalists.
In contrast, Andrade was forced to do a major balance check during her slightly easier set that dropped her down to second heading into floor exercise, Biles’ signature event.
Andrade, the silver medalist behind Lee in 2021, needed the best floor set of her life to catch Biles. It didn’t quite happen. Andrade stepped out of bounds at one point, a minor problem but enough to create plenty of wiggle room for Biles, who has rarely needed it over the years.
Biles incorporated music from pop icons Taylor Swift and Beyonce into her routine, a 75-second set that began with the opening bars of Swift’s hit “Ready For It” and featured the hardest tumbling ever done by a woman in the history of the sport.
When she was done — sealing gold that served as a redemption of sorts three years after pulling out of multiple finals in Tokyo to focus on her mental health — Biles sprinted to hug Lee just off the podium and blew kisses to the cameras that have become fixtures wherever she goes under the Olympic rings.
While there may be more medals on the way — Biles is in three event finals later in the Games — the all-around puts her into the conversation as perhaps the greatest American Olympian ever.
Biles is no longer the prodigy who triumphed in Rio de Janeiro eight years ago.
She’s married and a vocal advocate for survivors of sexual abuse and the importance of proper mental health. She openly volunteered after the Americans won gold in the team final on Tuesday that she met with her personal therapist that morning to help get her in the right mindset.
Biles relied on the internal work she’s done over the years after that rocky bars routine in Tokyo. She has said repeatedly over the last three years that what happened in Tokyo is a part of her past, not a part of her present, and if critics have a problem with it, that’s their issue, not hers.
She’s moved on to bigger things. Like setting a standard that may never be reached.
In her sport. And maybe all others, too.
