In 2006, the International Federation of Gymnastics overhauled its scoring system, doing away with the traditional standard of the perfect ten. That score, once elusive but attainable, had become increasingly common in the years since the young Nadia Comăneci first earned it, after an iconic routine on the uneven bars, at the Montreal Olympics, in 1976. In the following decades, a grade inflation of sorts came to plague gymnastics. Tens went not to athletes who performed flawless routines but to those who outranked their rivals at a given tournament. There was no other way to recognize excellence; the scoring cap could accommodate only so many degrees of distinction. On occasion, the system inspired chaos—at the 2004 Olympic Games, in Athens, the crowd booed for almost ten minutes after a virtuosic routine on the high bar by the Russian gymnast Alexei Nemov garnered a mere 9.725. That routine placed fifth, even after the clamor forced judges to modify the score, behind less ambitious but technically cleaner showings by a host of other athletes, including the mild-mannered American Paul Hamm, who had to wait for the jeers to stop before he took his turn.
The old system, according to critics, failed to recognize innovators such as Nemov for challenging the sport’s standards. The new system, introduced two years after the Athens debacle, sought to reward risk, and it comprised two scores: one for execution, worth up to ten points, and another for difficulty, which is theoretically limitless but practically capped around seven. The sum of the values yields a gymnast’s start value, the maximum score possible for a given routine. Proponents of the open-ended model lauded it for promoting the evolution of the sport, but it also provoked outrage. Bela Karolyi, the legendary coach of Comăneci and a former national coördinator of the American women’s team, once called the death of the perfect ten “the stupidest thing that ever happened to the sport of gymnastics.” Others predicted that the scoring overhaul would emphasize showy acrobatics over artistry and precision—and that its predetermined start values, which can differ widely, would deflate the spectacle of competition. The new system is also inscrutable enough that gymnastics fans and officials feared that it would deter non-experts from tuning in. The perfect ten was a comprehensible classic. What’s a gymnastics dilettante to make of a 15.9?
Among the beneficiaries of the new system have been American women, whose international eminence in the past decade has depended on the successful execution of daring routines filled with difficult elements. No gymnast embodies the limitless ethos of the open-ended scoring system more than Simone Biles, whose routines of unmatched difficulty allow her to win by entire points in a sport more often determined by hundredths. On Thursday, she won her fifth all-around title at the World Championships, in Stuttgart, Germany, by a margin of more than two points. In the past, her start values have afforded her an astounding latitude for error: at last year’s worlds, where she competed with a kidney stone, she won by a staggering margin despite falling twice. Biles has not lost an all-around meet since 2013, and her victory this week was as much an achievement as an inevitability. The true thrill of her set was the début of a few unprecedented skills, which, now that Biles has performed them on the international floor, bear her name in the vaunted Code of Points. In the current code, each skill receives a letter that designates its difficulty in a unit of tenths, ranging, generally, from A to I. One of Biles’s new skills, the triple-twisting double back flip, on the floor, was credited as a heretofore unseen J element, worth an entire point of difficulty on its own. The trouble was the other mark, for her upgraded beam dismount, which includes two flips and two twists. Devotees of the sport expected that it would receive at least an I. In what has become the greatest controversy of this year’s competition, it earned a mere H—high, perhaps, but not high enough for Biles, who took to Twitter to call the valuation “bullshit.”
Under most circumstances, only gymnastics aficionados would care that the start value for a single beam routine received a few tenths less of credit than the system’s existing logic would suggest. (Adding a twist to a tumbling skill on most apparatuses usually guarantees two to four extra tenths of difficulty, not the sole tenth coughed up by the federation.) But Biles’s status as a celebrity often draws attention to otherwise arcane controversies in the sport. Last week, U.S.A. Gymnastics issued a statement of solidarity. “Simone is an amazing gymnast who continues to develop and challenge the norm with creative and technical ability and skill, and we applaud and support her efforts,” the statement read. The international federation replied the same day with a statement of its own, justifying the decision by its women’s technical committee, whose ruling supposedly incorporated “the risk” of Biles’s skill and “the technical direction of the discipline.” The statement added, “The W.T.C.’s task is to ensure the safety of all athletes around the world and decisions are not based purely on one gymnast.” In short, officials wanted to avoid incentivizing other athletes to attempt Biles’s dismount, lest they maim themselves.
It is true that women’s gymnastics poses immense risks to the physical safety of its athletes. Perhaps the gravest example is that of Elena Mukhina, the 1978 world champion, who became a quadriplegic after breaking her neck during a risky tumbling run in the lead-up to the 1980 Olympics. In 2015, a study of college athletes showed that women’s gymnastics has a higher injury rate than football. And precedent for the federation’s decision exists: in 2016, officials downgraded the value of the notorious Produnova vault, a handspring with a double front tuck. Before the downgrade, a handful of gymnasts had attempted it, hoping to capitalize on the skill’s astronomical start value. Only Yamilet Peña Abreu, from the Dominican Republic, keeps trying it—and I gasp every time she does; no gymnast since the move’s namesake, Yelena Produnova, has performed it safely or well. The danger of the Produnova is that, unlike the beam dismount débuted by Biles, it prevents gymnasts from sighting the floor as they land. If they over-rotate, they risk breaking their legs; if they under-rotate, their neck. Biles’s habitual amplitude on the vault suggests that she’d have little trouble with such a move, but even she doesn’t care to attempt it. When Reeves Wiedeman, in a profile of Biles, from 2016, asked her why, she raised an eyebrow and said, “I’m not trying to die.”
The last decade has produced a range of gymnasts who sacrifice form and safety to eke out brassy, high-scoring skills. One of the wonders of Biles, though, is that she pairs immense difficulty with impeccable execution. Although she could win even with falls—as, on her worst days, she has—she prefers perfection, and usually achieves it. Gymnasts train myriad skills that never make it into competition, and fans of Biles have known for some time—since at least 2016, when her former coach posted a tantalizing video of a private training session to Twitter—that she could complete the double-twisting backflip off the beam. Whether she would show it—or the triple-twisting double backflip on the floor, which she also had perfected in training years before she débuted it, this summer—was always up to her. That Biles didn’t try the dismount earlier is a reflection of the immense consideration that underpins her every move.
The federation, meanwhile, routinely neglects simpler opportunities to prioritize safety. It could, for instance, allow an additional landing mat in competition to Danusia Francis, a gymnast whose unconventional dismount off the beam forces her to land on a shorter strip of padding. It could allow gymnasts to practice, in the minutes before their finals, in the official arenas rather than in separate warm-up gyms, so that they could adjust to any differences in the equipment. It could discourage risky maneuvers by penalizing breaks in form more harshly—enacting stricter deductions for the execution scores rather than depressing the difficulty values of moves that gymnasts besides Biles are unlikely to attempt in competition. But the true fault of the recent ruling is that it constitutes a subtle affront to the athlete’s own judgment, ignoring her agency under the pretense of care and defying the very premise of the scoring system. “They keep asking us to give more artistry,” Biles said in a recent interview with NBC Sports, pointing out that, in this case, officials had failed to reward it. “Am I in a league of my own? Yes, but that doesn’t mean you can’t credit me for what I’m doing.”
In this weekend’s event finals, Biles is almost certain to medal, if not win, on the beam—not to mention the vault and the floor—with a few tenths to spare, even if she doesn’t include the upgraded dismount. (On Thursday, she didn’t.) She needs two more medals to become the most decorated gymnast ever. At this point, though, the greatest gift of her enduring presence is that she keeps pushing her sport to unseen extremes, as if to demonstrate her dominance to herself. There’s at least one more move that has been teased, to the delight of fans, in her training videos: the triple-twisting Yurchenko, a vault that no woman has ever performed in competition. Biles may well attempt it at this summer’s Olympic Games, in Tokyo, which she has said will be her last. If the abilities of other gymnasts were to serve as precedent, it would seem impossible for her to incorporate further upgrades. But Biles transcends precedent, and, once she retires, we may have to wait decades to see another gymnast capable of her level of innovation. The last thing the sport’s officials should do is discourage it.