Gracious, petty and brilliant – Biles is arguably bigger than the US Olympic movement
There is a credible argument that the gymnast has been America's best athlete for more than a decade. And she now wields incredible influence
Eight years ago at the Rio Olympics, when Simone Biles made the quantum leap from gymnastics-famous to worldwide household name with her epochal four-golds-in-seven-days masterclass, the most common refrain to describe her greatness was that her routines were so preposterously difficult that she could fall multiple times and still win. For years Biles was so far ahead of everyone else it was almost embarrassing, performing elements and routines so juiced with difficulty an entire generation of successors would struggle to catch up with.
On Monday afternoon, the most dogged of her rivals finally did when Rebeca Andrade of Brazil, who had been closing the gap on the greatest gymnast of all time for years, edged Biles for gold on the floor exercise by less than four hundredths of a point. That Biles failed to medal on the beam, the sport's most precarious and unpredictable apparatus, was no surprise. But her silver on floor marked the first time she was beaten in her favorite discipline at any meet since Aly Raisman pipped her at the 2015 US national championships. During a week that saw gymnasts from Algeria, Ireland and the Philippines win the first ever Olympic titles for their countries, Andrade's gold may have been the biggest shock of all.
Continue reading...