In the total chaos of the team final at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, as the sky seemed to be falling and Simone Biles was forced to withdraw mid-competition, USA responded to the unexpected adversity with admirable resolve. They finished with a silver medal, a proud achievement, but one that left them even hungrier than before.
Every member of that team has faced significant challenges on the road back: combining college gymnastics with their elite ambitions, significant injuries, a serious kidney illness, multiple stalkers and unravelling the twisties.
Four of them – Biles, Sunisa Lee, Jordan Chiles and Jade Carey – remarkably found the strength and determination to make the team again. Three years on, they reasserted USA’s dominance over women’s gymnastics with an untouchable gold medal.
Their triumph was underlined by another superb performance from Biles on a night that could have brought flashbacks to her previous difficulties. In the Tokyo team final, Biles’s vault attempt ended with her losing herself in the air and nearly seriously hurting herself before her withdrawal.
This time, she completed a brilliant Cheng vault, which set the tone for an expert series of results. Biles said she was relieved to feel no flashbacks: “At the beginning of the day, I started off with therapy and I told her I was feeling calm and ready and that’s exactly what happened.
“But after I finished vault, I was relieved. I was like: ‘Phew, at least no flashbacks or anything.’ But I did feel a lot of relief and as soon as I landed I thought: ‘Oh yeah, I’m definitely going to do this.’”
Chiles, who trains with Biles in Texas, had reacted to Biles’s vault by gleefully jumping into the air: “That’s what I was thinking. I was like: ‘Hallelujah, no flashbacks or anything. OK, like all she needs to do is just do her normal.’
“Me jumping up and down was just relief. From there on, she’s the greatest of all greats, so it was: ‘OK, we’re about to really do this and just go out there and be us.’”
After the USA team marched through the four apparatus with one fall, the night ended with every single eye in the arena trained on Biles as she beamed through the final routine of the evening, sealing the gold medal with a spectacular performance.
With their return to the summit of women’s gymnastics, the USA have won gold at three of the past four Games. Biles, already the most decorated gymnast in history, now owns five Olympic gold medals and 38 medals at world championships and Olympics. Her eight medals mean she is the most decorated US gymnast at the Games.
Biles said she enjoyed this team gold even more than in 2016. “It didn’t hit the way that it does now,” she said. “Now that I’m much older and we have so much more experience and we’re out here really having fun and enjoying what we’re doing. It’s just different.”
As the USA celebrated, Great Britain digested the bittersweet sensation of finishing in fourth place behind the silver medallists, Italy, and Brazil, who finished 0.234 points above GB.
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Georgia-Mae Fenton said: “We really, really stepped up from qualification and it was so nice to see everyone put on their best performances. It’s gutting, missing out that close.”
Three years after their shock team bronze medal, GB had endured a difficult year with numerous top gymnasts ruled out because of injury and their error‑strewn seventh in the qualifying draw further underlined their distance from the best.
Starting on the floor exercise, though, everything was different. Their uneven bars rotation in qualifying had been so poor that the gymnasts had spent the following day poking fun at themselves on social media.
They rebounded with a strong rotation underlined by excellent performances from Fenton and another monster routine from Becky Downie, her score of 14.933 the third-highest in the competition at the time. They headed to the balance beam in third and handled the pressure, moving through three strong routines.
But it was not enough. Rebeca Andrade’s spectacular Cheng vault, two-tenths higher than her qualifying attempt, was just enough for Brazil to shut them out.
After their balance beam rotation, Britain briefly thought they had won bronze before they had to settle for fourth. Fenton said. “We didn’t know the exact scores and Rebeca’s vault is absolutely insane. We had that to compete against.
“But I couldn’t be more proud of how we stepped up and how much we showed we are still a fighting team.”