FORT WORTH — Winning a national title is not supposed to look this easy. And it’s not normal for the same gymnast to stand atop the podium time and time again for more than a decade. But this is Simone Biles, and for her, the extraordinary is routine.
The pressure of an Olympic year and the otherworldly expectations that follow Biles everywhere haven’t rattled her. She cruised through the national championships as she so often has, winning her ninth U.S. all-around title Sunday night in a testament to her longevity and excellence.
“I use the phrase ‘aging like fine wine,’ ” Biles said. “... It’s just getting better and better. We’ll see. Hopefully we get to ride this out for the rest of the year.”
One successful routine at a time, Biles proved she might be better than she has ever been. The 27-year-old’s all-around score of 119.750 was nearly six points ahead of runner-up Skye Blakely’s 113.850. Biles also won the gold medals on all four apparatuses, each one a reminder of how she’s poised to rack up more gold in Paris this summer despite the trouble she had in Tokyo three years ago.
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Biles makes the world’s most difficult routines appear effortless because of how she performs them so consistently without errors. Her only mistake during this two-day competition came Sunday night, when she rolled backward out of her difficult Yurchenko double pike vault, a one-point deduction and her only fall this season. Otherwise, she was fantastic.
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Biles didn’t come back after Tokyo with simpler, safer routines. She came back better.
This is all about Biles competing against herself. That’s how it has to be when you have long been the best gymnast in the world and you could win the national title while making several major errors. After the U.S. Classic last month, Biles asked Coach Cecile Landi whether she had broken the 60.000 benchmark in the all-around, which no woman had done during this Olympic cycle. Biles fell just short with a 59.500. Taking that leap became her goal, even with the quick turnaround between her season debut and the national championships. She soared past that mark with a 60.450 on the first night of the women’s competition here.
Landi admitted that Friday was perhaps Biles’s best outing but quickly added: “It’s not even the skills. It’s the attitude and her behavior. I really feel like she’s happy to be here. I know she says she’s ready to be done, but I think she’s really enjoying it and appreciating every meet she gets to do.”
On Sunday, the fall on vault brought down her all-around score, but on the other apparatuses Biles repeated her strong routines from two days earlier.
Her unflappable performances are a product of her work in and out of the gym. Biles has harped on her commitment to therapy and how that effort has steadied her over the past year. As she rotates around the arena, with one dominant performance after another, she’s unfazed by the roars and squeals that accompany her every move.
“It took a lot mentally and physically to trust my gymnastics again and most importantly trust myself,” she said. “I think that was the hardest part after Tokyo — I didn’t trust myself to do gymnastics.”
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But now she’s back to routines just as difficult as the ones she performed in the lead-up to the Tokyo Games.
Biles’s floor performance is a highlight of any competition she enters. She opened by launching herself into the air, flipping twice and completing three full twists. It’s one of the hardest skills in women’s gymnastics, and Biles landed perfectly upright, with a step out of bounds just a minor mistake. Altogether, she tallied a 7.1 difficulty score, which means her maximum score is a 17.100, while many others are thrilled to earn around a 14.000. When the world’s best gymnasts performed in the floor final at last year’s world championships, the non-Biles competitors averaged a difficulty score of 5.6.
Those complex routines are why Biles always holds such an advantage, and the scores show she’s on a different level. Biles notched a 15.200 and 15.100 on floor here, while only two others reached 14.000. When she lands her Yurchenko double pike, she has a similar-size edge on that event.
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Some gymnasts view the season as a months-long progression toward their best performances. Not Biles. Sure, Landi sees ways Biles can improve — elevating her artistry on floor, hitting her handstands more precisely on bars and consistently connecting her leap series on beam — but this weekend’s version of Biles, two months out from Paris, would take the Olympic all-around title easily. This has long been Biles’s winning formula. She doesn’t ease in to anything. She is excellent at one meet after another, year after year.
“She needs to feel confident, and this is how she feels confident — competing well,” Landi said. “It builds up for her, and this is how it works.”
Biles will perform twice more at the Olympic trials, and then it’s on to Paris, where she is in line to face pressure and attention unlike anything she has experienced since Tokyo. The clips of Biles flailing through the air during her botched vault, exiting the Olympic arena and then watching from the sideline will return to the forefront. Nothing she experiences over the next two months can match the stress that Paris will bring, but each strong performance offers reassurance before the final, ultimate test.
“Having gone to two Olympics, every one I feel like gets a little bit more stressful because I know exactly what to expect,” Biles said. “I know exactly what I expect from myself.”
