Biles became the first woman to win four world all-around championships, but she was still far from pleased with her performance.<\/b>
\nDOHA, Qatar \u2014 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\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s American teammates, took the bronze with 55.723.
Battling a kidney stone that she insisted was manageable, Biles fell twice \u2014 sitting down her vault in the first rotation and coming off the beam on her third \u2014 and stepped out of bounds on the floor exercise.
\u201cIt\u2019s not the gymnast that I am, to go out there and kind of bomb a meet like this,\u201d Biles said. \u201cEven though I won, I wish it were a little bit different.\u201d
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 \u201cboring,\u201d as Biles\u2019s 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 \u2014 a score not currently possible in gymnastics \u2014 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.
\u201cI would never,\u201d 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.
\u201cIt\u2019s absolutely insane that she fell twice and won,\u201d Hurd said. \u201cI have no words.\u201d
Neither did Biles, at least not any positive ones.
Most meets with Biles typically start the same way. She drills the vault \u2014 an event for which she is the reigning Olympic champion \u2014 and then spends the next three rotations simply padding her lead to margins that look like typos.
Not this time. Attempting \u201cthe Biles\u201d \u2014 a roundoff, half-twist onto the table, front double full off \u2014 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.
\u201cInstead of expecting I can win, I felt like, \u2018Oh, Biles can fall,\u2019\u201d 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 \u201crage\u201d as she headed to floor and while also leaving Biles in the lead.
While Hurd put together what the U. S.\u2019s high performance coordinator, Tom Forster, called \u201cthe best routine I\u2019ve ever seen her do\u201d it wasn\u2019t 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.
\u201cI did so bad and I still won; I wish it could not happen,\u201d said Biles, who plans to compete in all four apparatus finals on Friday and Saturday. \u201cYou have to earn it, and I\u2019m not sure I earned it tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n

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