Olympic gymnastics live: Simone Biles goes for all-around gold in Paris | Paris Olympic Games 2024


Key events

It’s a 14.033 for Nemour, the third-best score on vault.

Alice Kinsella is on the floor now.

That’s a 13.866 for Esposito. Shows what I know.

Qiu gets a 13.900 on uneven bars, which shows how solid she was outside of the fall.

The vault moves quickly, and Algeria’s Kaylia Nemour is up last – now. Not bad, but clearly not in the Andrade/Biles stratosphere.

Italy’s Alice d’Amato gets a 14.000 with a well-executed vault.

Teammate Manila Esposito barely gets around on her vault. I’m going to guess – 13.325.

Stephen Curry is here.

In third place overall in the early going, it’s Canada’s Ellie Black with a 14.066 on uneven bars.

Qiu is up now on bars, and she’s unable to catch the bar on a difficult move and slips to the floor. That’ll be a deduction. She comes back with a fantastic finish, though.

Biles opens with a 15.766

My goodness.

6.4 difficulty, 9.366 execution.

Biles lands it!

She’ll get knocked down a bit for a big hop on the landing, but she did the most difficult vault in women’s gymnastics clearly.

Georgia-Mae Fenton has a 13.033 on floor.

Andrade matches her score from the team final – 15.100!

Up to Biles now, attempting the Yurchenko double pike, for which the difficulty score is astroronomical.

Suni Lee’s score is disappointing. It’s 13.933, two tenths lower than her qualifying score. But it’s a solid execution score of 8.933. The difficult was 5.000, which will not be in the same league as …

Rebeca Andrade, who just soars, flips and lands cleanly. She could take an early lead on Biles here.

Team GB’s Georgia-Mae Fenton is doing a floor routine to a symphonic version of Another Brick in the Wall. Interesting.

Japan’s Haruka Nakamura gets a 13.700 on beam.

The first score of the night is in – Germany’s Sarah Voss with a 12.866 on floor.

Still waiting on Lee’s score.

Suni Lee is up first. She seems clean in the air but lands considerably off-center with a little hop. She doesn’t seem overjoyed.

I apparently don’t have the “multiview” option that I had for the team event, so I’ll just say I think Germany’s Sarah Voss has cool music on the floor exercise.

Might be nice if the main feed would show other routines instead of 30 seconds of Suni Lee pacing, but …

Athlete introductions are just underway, because gymnastics is almost like a US sport in the sense that the posted start time isn’t really the start time.

Kaylia Nemour, who used to represent France, gets a nice roar from the crowd. Then Suni Lee and Rebeca Andrade draw an even louder reception. Then comes Simone Biles. I’d like to see a decibel reading on that.

A question has come in about BBC coverage and where to watch this. Being in the USA, I haven’t the foggiest. Can anyone share?

Rotation 1 preview

Biles and Andrade should leap out in front on the vault. Biles’ 15.800 in qualifying was the highest score on any apparatus in qualifying. Nemour was the only person to come close to that with a 15.600 on uneven bars.

Lee, Nemour and Esposito also broke 14 on the vault.

Qiu starts on her strongest apparatus by far, uneven bars, on which she posted a 15.066 in qualifying. None of her other scores were above 14.

Rebeca Andrade flies to a 15.100 in the team event. Photograph: Richard Callis/SPP/REX/Shutterstock

Schedule

The top six in qualifying (Biles, Andrade, Lee, D’Amato, Esposito, Nemour) will start on vault.

The group on uneven bars will include the two Chinese gymnasts (Qiu Qiyuan, Ou Yushan), along with Canadian Elsabeth Black and Australian Ruby Pass.

Team GB’s Georgia-Mae Fenton and Alice Kinsella will start on floor exercise.

Score breakdown

How did the top contenders here fare in qualifying and in the team event? Glad you asked …

Qualifying (Overall score, then vault, uneven bars, beam and floor)

1. Simone Biles: 59.566 – 15.800, 14.433, 14.733, 14.600
2. Rebeca Andrade: 57.700 – 14.900, 14.400, 14.500, 13.900
3. Suni Lee: 56.132 – 14.133, 14.866, 14.033, 13.100
4. Kaylia Nemour (Algeria): 55.966 – 14.000, 15.600, 13.200, 13.166
5. Manila Esposito (Italy): 55.898 – 14.133, 14.166, 13.966, 13.633
6. Alice d’Amato (Italy): 55.432 – 13.200, 14.666, 13.866, 13.700
7. Qiu Qiyuan (China): 54.998 – 13.233, 15.066, 13.533, 13.166
8. Elsabeth Black (Canada): 54.766 – 14.100, 14.166, 13.100, 13.400
9. Rina Kishi (Japan): 54.699 – 14.033, 13.566, 13.500, 13.600
10. Flavia Saraiva (Brazil): 54.199 – 14.100, 13.800, 13.133, 13.166,

Team event

Biles: 14.900, 14.400, 14.366, 14.666. Her vault was less challenging than what she attempted in qualifying. Her beam routine was just slightly less spectacular.

Andrade: 15.100, 14.533, 14.133, 14.200

Lee: no vault, 14.566, 14.600, 13.533. Huge improvement on beam.

(Nemour did not compete)

Esposito: 14.166, no bars, 13.966, 12.666. Maybe dealt with some nerves on floor.

D’Amato: 13.933, 14.633, 13.933, 13.466

Qiu: 13.133, 14.300, 14.600, no floor

Preamble

Welcome to the women’s gymnastics all-around final, where we will be following the biggest story of the Games …

What will be the impact of Big Parma on this event?

Well, that and the prospect of watching Simone Biles, the greatest women’s gymnast of all time, winning the all-around title eight years after doing so in Rio and three years after having to drop out in Tokyo.

Or maybe seeing Suni Lee go back-to-back after a couple of years in the relative wilderness.

Or maybe seeing Rebeca Andrade become the first Brazilian to win one of the most cherished gold medals of the Olympics.

We’ll be underway in about an hour. Let’s watch …

Beau will be here shortly. In the meantime, here’s how the team event went down:

Of course there was theatre at the very end. Two hours into this women’s Artistic Gymnastics Team final, with the USA coasting grandly at the head of the field, the logistics of competition left Simone Biles with one final act to stop the show.

Three years on from Tokyo and The Breakdown, the only discipline remaining in that same team event was the Biles floor routine. And so in front of Bill Gates, Gianni Infantino, Serena Williams and Spike Lee, in front of the eyes of the world as ever, Simone Biles got to dance like no one was watching.

Paris 2024 knew what it was getting with these gymnastics, a spectacle that would play out, as it did here, like a cross between the Super Bowl, Vegas and a Marvel movie. Mainly it was getting America: American flash, American show, American story-telling, the key event in a Games that has for many editions now been powered by US TV money and US sport tourism. Frankly, there haven’t been this many Americans in Paris since 1945.

And of course Paris was getting the Biles-industrial complex, the Biles narrative arc, which reached its full extension on a wonderful night of flex and twang and defiance of the elements; one that ended, naturally, with gold for the US women.

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