Simone Biles will compete in the Olympic final of the balance beam today, despite suffering from a mental block which has prevented her participation in other events.
Biles, who won four gold medals at the 2016 Olympics and was expected to be one of the defining stars of these Games, has not competed since withdrawing from the team all-around final last Tuesday after her opening vault.
She subsequently withdrew from the individual finals of the all-around, vault, uneven bars and floor, but will now compete for a gold medal at the last opportunity, setting up the most intensely anticipated moment of these Olympics.
USA Gymnastics announced Biles’s participation in a statement, saying: “We are so excited to confirm that you will see two US athletes in the balance beam final: Suni Lee and Simone Biles.” Lee won the individual all-around title in Biles’s absence.
Although Biles has spoken of wanting to conclude her career at Paris in 2024, she is 24, relatively old for a gymnast, and has also talked about being “really excited . . . to see what else I’m good at”. It is not impossible that tomorrow’s final could be her last appearance on the Olympic stage.
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Biles has been suffering from the “twisties”: a mental block peculiar to gymnastics, which causes gymnasts to lose their awareness or orientation in the middle of performing a somersault or other inverted skill, with potentially dangerous consequences. “It’s honestly petrifying, not having your mind and body in sync,” she explained.
Speaking before Biles’s participation in the beam was announced, Max Whitlock, the British pommel horse gold medallist, empathised with the mental pressure created by her position as the world’s most famous gymnast.
“She’s incredible and I think what she’s done out here shows a lot of strength,” he said. “She’s got a ridiculous amount of pressure on her shoulders, labelled the GOAT [greatest of all time] every single competition she goes to.
“A lot of people look at someone who has reached the pinnacle of their career and think the next [achievement] is easier because they’ve done it before, the pressure’s off, the next one’s a bonus. Actually, it works the opposite [way] and that’s really hard mentally to deal with.”
Biles’s usual beam dismount is a double-twisting double-tucked salto, one of the most difficult, but it remains to be seen whether she will perform that move in the competition, which begins at 9.50am UK time.
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The balance beam was the only event in which Biles failed to win gold in Rio de Janeiro — she took bronze, behind Sanne Wevers of the Netherlands and Laurie Hernandez of the United States — and she only qualified for this final in seventh place, well behind China’s Guan Chenchen. She is, however, a three-times world champion on it, most recently winning gold by a wide margin at the 2019 World Championships in Stuttgart.
Biles has been using a foam pit to train safely since withdrawing from the team final. She was an enthusiastic spectator as her team-mate Jade Carey claimed gold in the final of the floor exercise. Carey had qualified third for the final, one place behind Biles, but stepped up in her compatriot’s absence, nailing a difficult routine to whoops of encouragement from her team-mates.
Her higher difficulty score was just enough to edge out Italy’s Vanessa Ferrari, who earned her first Olympic medal at the age of 30, a full 15 years after being crowned the world champion in the individual all-around. Bronze was shared between Angelina Melnikova, of the Russian Olympic Committee, and Japan’s Mai Murakami.
Great Britain’s Jessica Gadirova received the best mark for execution of any finalist, but her relatively low difficulty score put her in sixth place, one spot ahead of her twin sister Jennifer.
“I landed all my tumbles, I did all my leaps the best I could and I really enjoyed it,” Jessica, 16, said. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t really up there but I did the best I could with my execution because I know my difficulty isn’t up there. I can’t wait to get back into the gym, work on my difficulty, get some more big skills and come back stronger.”
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In the men’s rings final, the gold was won by China’s Yang Liu. France’s Samir Aït Saïd, who suffered a horrific leg fracture at the 2016 Olympics and had been aiming to crown an extraordinary comeback, competed with an injured bicep and finished fourth. The gold medal for men’s vault was won by South Korea’s Shin Jea-hwan.
Lower risk for return
The beam is the most low-risk apparatus for Simone Biles to perform on, because it involves much less twisting than the other events.
It is twisting — rotating about a lateral axis as opposed to simply flipping hips-over-head — that has been proving particularly problematic for Biles; on Instagram, she wrote that she “seriously cannot comprehend how to twist”.
The most difficult part of Biles’s beam routine is her dismount, which normally involves a double twist, but she could modify that for today’s final.
