US gymnast Simone Biles has made history yet again as she won her second Olympics all-around gold medal.
Biles – who was already the most decorated gymnast before the 2024 Paris Olympics even started – beamed as she became the third woman to become a two-time Olympic all-around champion.
Her total score of 59.131 was just over a point ahead of Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade at 57.932, one of the closest calls Biles has ever endured at a major international event.
But it was enough for the 27-year-old to win her second gold of the Paris Olympics and her sixth Olympic gold medal overall.
Biles also broke boundaries by becoming the oldest woman to claim the biggest title in her sport since 1952.
The past 12 Olympic all-around women’s champions were teenagers. The last non-teen winner, Ludmilla Tourischeva, had turned 20 only a few weeks before she won in 1972.
Simone Biles during a practice session before the Paris 2024 Olympic Summer Games. Pic: Reuters/USA Today
Biles’s latest win is a testament to her longevity as a record-setting athlete who has also established herself as a mental health champion following her shock Tokyo Olympics withdrawal in 2020.
At the time, she suffered what are known in the world of gymnastics as “twisties”, where the athlete loses air awareness and feels unable to land, potentially creating life-threatening conditions.
Biles, a sexual abuse survivor, stayed out of the limelight for almost two years, during which she focused on rehabilitation and her mental health.
Her struggle as she tried to bounce back from Tokyo has been documented in the new Netflix documentary, Simone Biles Rising, which also gives a glimpse into Biles’s married life.
Wearing a silver goat chain (standing for GOAT, or the ‘greatest of all time’) Biles reacted to her latest win by saying: “It is crazy that I am in the conversation of ‘Greatest of all athletes’ because I just still think, ‘I’m Simone Biles from Spring, Texas who loves to flip.'”
With the contest against Brazil’s Andrade being so narrow, Biles said: “I don’t want to compete with Rebeca no more.
“I’m tired. Like, she’s way too close. I’ve never had an athlete that close.”
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Biles made a last-minute decision to bring in her signature Yurchenko double pike vault, as she was worried about being caught by Andrade.
“I was like, ‘I think I have to bring up the big guns this time,'” she said.
She is the only woman to perform the extremely difficult vault, also known as Biles II. It earned her a massive 15.766 and made up for her mistake on bars during the second rotation.
“After the bars, when I saw the score come up I was like, ‘Thank God we did the double pike today,’ because I was not planning on it,” she said.
Biles performs on the vault during the all-around finals. Pic: AP
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Biles incorporated music from pop icons Taylor Swift and Beyonce into her current routine, a 75-second set that began with the opening bars of Swift’s hit Ready For It? and featured the hardest tumbling done by a woman in the history of the sport.
Asked about the eight-year gap between her all-around gold medals, Biles said: “It feels amazing. I was a little bit naive in the process. So I appreciate my craft a little bit more.”