– Niall Kelly reports from Rio Olympic Arena, Rio de Janeiro
TO THOSE WHO casually dip into the gymnastics world once every four years, their interest peaking and dipping with the Olympic cycles, Simone Biles seems like the world’s best-kept secret.
Four years ago, when the focus was on McKayla Moroney, her “unimpressed” face, and Aly Raisman’s heartbreaking medal miss, Biles hadn’t even made her senior debut. She was just 15-years-old.
While everybody else got on with their lives in the four years since London, the teenager from Spring, Texas not only exploded onto the scene; she changed the game, transformed perceptions of what was possible, and put clear daylight between herself and the next best gymnasts in the world.
How do you know that you’re in the presence of greatness? Sometimes you just know; sometimes the American media will tell you.
Anticipating that the vast majority of the world would be meeting a superstar for the first time this summer, the effusive profiles started to appear. In May, the New Yorker explored how Biles was raising the bar to previously unthinkable levels, becoming the first female gymnast in history to win three straight world championships along the way, often by wide margins.
Now her story is known, her reputation transcending gymnastics and America: how her mother’s addiction problems saw her grandmother and grandfather adopt her and her sister at a young age; how they built her own 52,000-square foot gym when it became apparent that her talent was something special.
The Guardian dubbed her “the best athlete in America today”; back home, commentators debated whether crowning her “the Michael Jordan of gymnastics” did justice to her dominance.
“All the girls are like, ‘Simone’s just in her own league,’” Raisman, her team-mate, revealed. “‘Whoever gets second place, that’s the winner.’”
Dominance is the only word for the woman who arrived in Rio this week targeting an unprecedented five gold medals, something which no female gymnast has done before and which few could even consider attempting.
She wears the crown lightly. Hours before wowing the world on Thursday, she tweeted: “What to do, what to do with my makeup today? Hmm.”
The first two of those medals are in the bag, Biles adding individual all-around gold to the team gold she collected here on Tuesday.
She did it in typically emphatic fashion, winning by a full 2.100 points. (For context, the winning margins in the last two Olympic Games since the scoring system was changed away from the “perfect 10″ were 0.259 and 0.600. Today, Biles was exponentially better than the next best.)
Raisman was second, tearing up as she nailed the landing on her floor exercise and guaranteed the medal she missed out on by a hair’s breadth in London. Considering the circumstances, considering the opposition, silver must have felt as good as gold.
Bronze once again went to Russia’s Aliya Mustafina, third four years ago.
But this day — this Olympic Games, as far as gymnastics is concerned — was all about Biles who is making athletic feats that once seemed extraordinary now look commonplace.
On the vault, she nailed the Amanar, a back handspring and layout finished with two-and-a-half twists — a move that’s dizzying to describe, never mind execute.
On the worst of her apparatuses, the uneven bars, only half-a-dozen of her rivals could better her score. Weakness has always been a relative term.
Even when she briefly fell back into second place at the half-way point behind Mustafina, reigning Olympic champion on the uneven bars, the result was never in doubt.
On the balance beam, she spun and flipped as though oblivious to the fact that just a 10-centimetre strip separated her from disaster.
The medal standings had effectively been decided by the time she finished on the floor, the final act of the evening, rewriting the laws of physics with a routine that left jaws on the ground and the crowd on their feet.
It included her signature, ‘the Biles’, described as a double layout with a half-twist and a blind landing — a move so complex that she was the first person in history ever to pull it off.
The record books will show that her floor routine was even better than her spectacular run at it in Monday’s team event, scoring 15.933.
As she arced her back into her final pose, the rest became a mere formality. Believe the hype.
