Simone Biles rode yet another redemptive arc at the 2024 Paris Olympics on Monday, bouncing back from a shocking fall and a missed podium on the balance beam and returning two hours later to capture silver in the meet-closing floor exercise finals.
The 27-year-old Texan flew high and smiled broadly on the way to scoring 14.133 on the floor, taking second place after her gold medal at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's Rebeca Andrade took gold with a 14.166 and Biles' U.S. teammate Jordan Chiles earned bronze with a 13.700 after a scoring inquiry.
Biles qualified first ahead of Andrade and teammate Chiles, then performed Monday after a fall on a practice tumbling run ended with a limp and warranted additional training staff attention on an already-taped left calf.
She avoided any major issues with the calf but did step out of bounds with both feet twice, allowing Andrade -- who'd performed second -- to stay in first place. Biles began with a 6.9-point difficulty compared to her rival's 5.9, but Andrade made up the gap with an 8.266 execution score while Biles earned a 7.833 and lost six-tenths with the two fouls.
The inquiry changed Chiles' position based on the value of the start value of her routine, giving her a second medal at Games and third of her Olympic career while dropping Romanian teammates Ana Barbosu and Sabrina Maneca-Voinea into a tie for fourth.
It's the third time, after 2008 and 2016, that the U.S. has earned two individual podium spots on three different events.
Biles was heavily favored to repeat her four-gold dominance from Rio when she arrived at the 2020 Games in Tokyo, but she withdrew early after a much-publicized case of the "twisties" and had billed the trip to Paris as the climactic stop on a "Redemption Tour."
She won a team gold Tuesday and followed with wins in the all-around and vault competitions Thursday and Saturday. The misfires on the beam and floor kept Biles from joining Czechoslovakia's Vera Caslavska and becoming the second female gymnast to win four individual golds at a single Olympics. Caslavska did it at the 1968 Games in Mexico City, winning the all-around, vault, uneven bars and floor exercise.
Biles' teammate, Suni Lee, also fell on the beam and tied Biles for fifth, leaving the U.S. off the podium for the event for the first time since 2000. Four of the eight beam finalists fell, in fact, and several others made significant score-gutting errors.
"I feel like it was the pressure of the atmosphere and just knowing how close we were to being done," Lee said. "And it was so quiet. I don't like the silence. It was too quiet. I could literally hear myself breathing."
And though Biles came up short of joining swimmers Leon Marchand (four golds, one bronze), Mollie O'Callaghan (three golds, one silver, one bronze) and Torri Huske (three golds, two silvers) as five-time medalists in Paris, she still climbed an all-time ladder. Only 17 athletes from any country have surpassed her 11 career Summer Games medals, which tie her with track legend Allyson Felix -- who won seven golds, three silvers and a bronze from 2004 to 2020 -- as the most-decorated U.S. non-swimmers ever. Her seven summer golds are ninth all-time among Americans, trailing Michael Phelps (23), Katie Ledecky (9), Mark Spitz (9), Carl Lewis (9), Caeleb Dressel (9), Jenny Thompson (8), Matt Biondi (8) and Ray Ewry (8) among Americans.
The 2028 Games, back on U.S. soil in Los Angeles, would yield a chance to become the fifth American at 12 medals, alongside swimmers Jenny Thompson, Ryan Lochte, Dara Torres and Natalie Coughlin. Swimmers Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky are 1-2 on the all-time U.S. list with 28 and 14 medals, respectively.
Biles, already the oldest member of a U.S. gymnastics team since 1952, winked and smiled last week while leaving the door open for 2028 -- when she'd be 31.
"Never say never," she said. "The next Olympics is at home. So, you just never know. But I am getting really old."
