Three years after withdrawing from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics after a case of the "twisties," decorated gymnast Simone Biles will compete in her third Summer Games, hoping to add to the seven medals she's accumulated since 2016. She leads a women's gymnastics team with varying levels of experience, from first-timers to seasoned veterans, but they are all aiming to leave Paris with some golden hardware.
Biles earned a return to the Olympics with a top score of 117.225 at the U.S. Olympic trials in Minneapolis in June. Fellow returners Suni Lee, Jordan Chiles and Jade Carey also qualified for the games with scores in the top-five. Chiles and Lee also earned silver medals with the women's team in Tokyo, and Lee also earned a gold medal in all-around competition and bronze on uneven bars. 16-year-old Hezly Rivera, the youngest member of Team USA, also made the cut with her fifth-place finish.
Olympic gymnastics features several events happening at the same time. The gymnastics events for women are vault, uneven bars, balance beam and floor exercise, and they go through all of these apparatus for six rotations. According to NBC Olympics, the rotation order for women is as follows: vault, uneven bars, balance beam and floor. While athletes typically compete in all exercises, there are some who specialize in particular events, such as Jade Carey on vault and floor exercise and Suni Lee on uneven bars.
In Paris, the men's and women's teams begin with qualifiers on two separate days to see who will advance to the team and all-around finals, which also happen over the course of two days. The U.S. men's team completed their qualifying round Saturday, and two of the three Americans competing have made it to the all-around final. The same will happen for the women's team Sunday. While all of them share the collective goal of a team gold medal, they are also competing for spots at the all-around final, which means they are competing against each other in addition to the rest of the field. The team final will consist of eight spots, while the all-around final consists of the top-24 athletes – two from each country.
The women's team final is scheduled for Tuesday, July 30, at 12:15 p.m. ET on NBC, and the all-around final will take place on Thursday, Aug. 1, with the same time and channel. Olympic gymnastics will conclude with apparatus finals for individual athletes from Saturday, Aug. 3 to Monday, Aug. 5.
