Simone Biles reacts after the balance beam portion of the women’s individual all-around gymnastics competition at the Paris Olympics on Thursday. She has now won six Olympic gold medals — the most of any American gymnast.
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PARIS — Incomparable gymnast Simone Biles won the Olympic individual all-around final for the second time in her remarkable career, just two days after leading the U.S. women’s team to a repeat of the team event. Win the gold medal.
Unlike many of the other medals she has won over the years, this one did not come easily. Her gold medal required overcoming an unusually poor performance on the uneven bars, which briefly saw her trail two formidable rivals, including Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade, widely considered the world’s No. 2 Good gymnast.
But the setback wasn’t enough to stop her from winning her sixth Olympic gold and ninth Olympic medal, more than any other American gymnast.
Biles became the third woman in Olympic history to win two individual all-around gold medals and the first since the 1960s. (The first two-time champion was Larissa Latinina of the Soviet Union, and her nine Olympic gold medals remain the most ever won by a gymnast.)
But Biles, 27, was the first to win a second eight crowns, not her four years later. At the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, Biles withdrew from the individual all-around after struggling with a “distortion” and losing the ability to control her body in mid-air. Biles said at the time that the intense stress affected her mental health and she eventually quit the sport entirely for two years.
Olympic champion Simone Biles, left, and U.S. bronze medalist Sunitha Lee celebrate after the women’s all-around gymnastics final at the 2024 Paris Olympics on Thursday.
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She has been dominant in her return to the sport, including a performance at the Olympics that cemented her legacy.
Andrade ended up winning the silver medal. The bronze medal went to American gymnast Suni Lee, who won gold at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics after Biles withdrew.
Biles started Thursday on her best apparatus, the vault, and took the lead. Biles performed her signature Yurchenko double volley and scored 15.766, two-thirds better than Andrade.
But her lead evaporated in the next round. On the uneven bars, Biles had a particularly bad time, slowing her momentum as she swung from the high bar to the low bar, causing her knees to almost scrape the floor. Her regular training score was only 13.733, more than half a point lower than her previous two uneven bars scores in Paris. That moved her to third place, behind Andrade and Algeria’s Kelia Nemours.
A strong performance on the balance beam moved her back into first place, just 0.166 points ahead of Andrade.
The final event of the night is the floor exercise, and Biles has surpassed Andrade twice in the competition so far. As everyone in the 10,100 seats at Bessie Arena watched, Biles was dazzled, smiling as her routine came to a close, stepping off the mat with two index fingers in the air — #1 . In the end, she won with 1.199 points.
Biles will compete in three other events at the Olympics, the individual finals on vault, balance beam and floor exercise.
