Biles became the first woman to win four world all-around championships, but she was still far from pleased with her performance.
DOHA, Qatar — Simone Biles tried to smile, but her eyes betrayed her. She was angry, paying little attention to the gold medal around her neck, the one that made history.
No, winning never gets old. But it’s not her only goal.
The challenge for Biles, whenever she steps onto the floor, is not to impress the judges so much as to meet her own impossibly high standards. She aims to outdo herself and push the entire sport forward.
And for two hours Thursday here at the world gymnastics championships, Biles was not satisfied. When she finished, she certainly didn’t sound like someone who had just become the first woman to win four all-around world championships, a feat she pulled off despite a handful of uncharacteristic errors.
Biles, 21, finished with 57.491 points in the four-apparatus competition, well ahead of the silver medalist, Mai Murakami of Japan, who had 55.798. Morgan Hurd, one of Biles’s American teammates, took the bronze with 55.723.
Battling a kidney stone that she insisted was manageable, Biles fell twice — sitting down her vault in the first rotation and coming off the beam on her third — and stepped out of bounds on the floor exercise.
“It’s not the gymnast that I am, to go out there and kind of bomb a meet like this,” Biles said. “Even though I won, I wish it were a little bit different.”
She was discounting the fact that, for example, what she does on the floor exercise is as hard as anything the men can come up with. Her vault is so tough no other woman even attempts it in competition.
Doing anything else would be “boring,” as Biles’s coach, Laurent Landi, put it. Yet Biles refuses to use the remarkably high difficulty of her routines as an excuse when she falls short of flawless.
Biles jokingly asked Landi if she needed an 18 in the floor exercise — a score not currently possible in gymnastics — to catch Murakami. The deficit was actually 13.308 points. Biles briefly thought about toning down her boundary-pushing set for something a bit easier just, to make sure she won. The internal wavering was fleeting.
“I would never,” Biles said.
Her right foot did slip into the red, out of bounds, during her first tumbling pass, but it hardly mattered. Her score of 15.000 was more than enough to rocket past Murakami and Hurd, the 2017 world champion.
“It’s absolutely insane that she fell twice and won,” Hurd said. “I have no words.”
Neither did Biles, at least not any positive ones.
Most meets with Biles typically start the same way. She drills the vault — an event for which she is the reigning Olympic champion — and then spends the next three rotations simply padding her lead to margins that look like typos.
Not this time. Attempting “the Biles” — a roundoff, half-twist onto the table, front double full off — her left arm barely touched the table, causing her to under-rotate. She landed and promptly sat down, her score of 14.533 placing her in third.
Known for getting angry with herself after mistakes, she responded with a significantly improved uneven bars set and executed her double-twisting double-somersault dismount to move slightly in front of Hurd halfway through.
Then things got weird.
Biles came off the beam early, hopped back up, then grabbed the 4-inch piece of wood moments later when she had trouble landing a front flip, a sequence she struggled with during qualifying. It was a stunning sequence, not just to Biles but also to the group that has been chasing her for the better part of a decade.
“Instead of expecting I can win, I felt like, ‘Oh, Biles can fall,’” Murakami said.
Hurd, 17, had a chance to catch Biles, her good friend, but wobbled twice during her own beam set, leaving her in a “rage” as she headed to floor and while also leaving Biles in the lead.
While Hurd put together what the U. S.’s high performance coordinator, Tom Forster, called “the best routine I’ve ever seen her do” it wasn’t quite enough to slide past Murakami.
Still, Biles, who took 14 months off from the sport after her triumph at the 2016 Olympics, stepped onto the floor facing external pressure for the first time in a long while. She came through, but her emotions tilted more toward disappointment than joy.
“I did so bad and I still won; I wish it could not happen,” said Biles, who plans to compete in all four apparatus finals on Friday and Saturday. “You have to earn it, and I’m not sure I earned it tonight.”
