Days after a scare with injuries, Simone Biles and her U.S. women's gymnastics teammates won gold in the team final. First medal in 2024 Paris Olympics And it was a remarkable comeback for a historic athlete and the U.S. team.
Italy finished the final with 165.494 points, second to the United States team with 171.296 points. It was Italy's first Olympic medal in women's gymnastics and their first Olympic medal in artistic gymnastics in nearly a century. Brazil finished just one point behind Italy, winning the bronze medal.
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Female Gymnastics Team Finals Biles was joined in the match at the Bercy Arena by her US teammates Jordan Childs, Jade Carey and Sunisa Lee on Tuesday night. The match was important for the Americans, who are returning to the Olympics this year after competing last time out, and especially for Biles, who was forced to withdraw from the sport in 2020 after a dangerous psychological condition forced her to withdraw from the sport.
Biles and Chiles competed on the uneven bars, vault, balance beam and floor exercise, while Lee competed in every event except vault, while Carey competed only in vault. The only member of the U.S. team who did not compete on Tuesday was 16-year-old Hezly Rivera, who is making her Olympic debut this year. Rivera accepted her gold medal with her teammates at the awards ceremony.
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Team USA Having won consecutive gold medals at the 2012 London and 2016 Rio Summer Olympics, and winning the silver medal in the team event at the last Tokyo Olympics, they were considered strong favorites to win the final.
After standout performances on the vault, uneven bars and balance beam, Team USA turned to the highly anticipated floor exercise in the fourth and final rotation of the gymnastics final. Led by Biles, three Olympic veterans were expected to dominate the floor exercise, and all three delivered.
Lee was the first American gymnast to perform the floor routine and was visibly excited as she left the mat, delivering a powerful performance. Her family cheered her on loudly from the stands, as did the rest of the stadium. Lee received an impressive score of 13.9 out of 14 for her routine. Chiles also performed flawlessly on the floor, coming close to perfection with a score of 13.966.
Biles closed out the final with a spectacular floor routine to a standing ovation from the entire crowd. It was perhaps the most anticipated routine of Tuesday's team competition, and Biles lived up to the expectations. Her routine included some of Biles' trademark gymnastic moves, including her namesake double layout-half twist and triple double.
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The practice made Team USA's victory a certainty even before Biles' score was announced, as she blew kisses to the crowd, who chanted “USA!”
Earlier, Biles' bar routine drew rapturous applause from the audience, which included Olympic swimming legend Michael Phelps and film director Spike Lee. Both Lee and Biles received positive reviews for their solid performances on the balance beam, especially after Chiles fell off the apparatus during her previous performance on the beam. Chiles' fall was Team USA's only notable mistake throughout the final. In the final, the Americans delivered top-class routines and continued to lead their competitors in each round.
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With the highest scores from the weekend's preliminaries, Team USA advanced to the finals against seven other teams that placed highly in the preliminaries: Italy, China, Brazil, Japan, Canada, Great Britain and Romania, where three gymnasts from each team compete in each artistic gymnastics event.
Li is the reigning overall champion, but in the team final, the scores of all three skaters are taken into account together. This criterion leaves no room for error for any skater, making the final especially difficult, and more difficult than the heats where all four skaters compete and the lowest-scoring skater's score is deducted from the team total.
The 27-year-old Biles made her long-awaited comeback. Last weekend Qualifying Round Biles' dominant performance came despite being hobbled by a calf injury. Former Olympian and France's gymnastics coach, Cecile Landy, told reporters after the qualifying session that Biles was on the mend after hurting her calf a few weeks ago.
The coach said Biles had no intention of withdrawing from competition, saying, “She never has any intention of doing that.”
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The U.S. team finished Sunday's qualifying session with an impressive score of 172.296 to put itself in the lead heading into the final, with Biles herself finishing as the top individual scorer out of all competitors.
Biles, the GOAT of gymnastics, is currently competing in her third Olympics, her first since experiencing the “Twisties” condition, where gymnasts lose their sense of position in the air. Drop out of multiple events During the Tokyo Olympics.
With Tuesday's win, Biles surpassed Shannon Miller's seven as the most decorated U.S. Olympic gymnast of all time. The team gold was her eighth Olympic medal. It also tied her with 1904 Olympian Anton Heida as the most decorated U.S. gymnast of all time.
