MINNEAPOLIS — The yells couldn’t be heard amid the cheers at Target Center or on the NBC television broadcast, but they were loud and clear on the big screen as Simone Biles walked off the balance beam Friday night, evidence of the frustration she felt after a shaky performance at the U.S. Olympic gymnastics trials.
That score, plus a bit of a fortuitous switch, temporarily put the world’s best gymnast in second place.
“She was very upset,” coach Laurent Lundy said.
Of course, none of that lasted long. Biles delivered a stunning floor exercise, landed another of her iconic Yurchenko double pikes on the vault, and earned a standing ovation from the crowd. By the end of the night, she was 2.5 points ahead of the other competitors and about 48 hours away from qualifying for her third Summer Olympics.
It’s no surprise given her recent performances and overall dominance that Biles is atop the leaderboard with a score of 58.900 on the first day of the Trials. What’s interesting is that, unlike some recent competitions, she had to block out the figurative noise on Friday night to get there.
Biles began on the uneven bars, her least favorite event, but on Friday she recorded her second-highest score of the night. She then switched to balance beam, but began with an uncharacteristic wobbles and ended with a bounce on the landing, earning her just a score of 13.650, more than a point lower than the two balance beam routines she performed at nationals.
“I’m really disappointed in myself about the balance beam,” Biles told NBC in a brief interview posted to Instagram. “I’m really disappointed in myself because that’s not how I train. So going forward, I’m just going to compete the way I trained on the beam, because I know I’m good on it. I know I can do better, so I’m going to work on that.”
The 27-year-old Biles was likely also somewhat shaken by injuries to two potential U.S. teammates earlier in the night. Biles checked in on world bronze medalist Leslie Jones after she injured her knee on a warm-up vault and withdrew from three of the night’s four events. Biles also couldn’t help but watch as Kayla DiCello was helped out of the arena after being injured on vault.
“She really needs to calm down. She needs to rely on practice,” Lundy said. “You saw in the podium training that she was hitting everything perfectly fine. So that creates anxiety. Am I going to be the next one to get hurt? What’s going to happen to me? You can’t control this, so just control what you can control.”
And for Biles, those controllable events tend to be her two strongest events: floor exercise and vault.
On floor, Biles never scored above 15 points like she did at nationals, but she delivered what Randy described as “near-flawless.” The highlight was her first tumbling pass, when she soared especially high for a powerful Biles II, a triple-double that’s one of the most impressive moves in her repertoire. “Two flips, three twists. It’s so fast you can’t count them. It’s unbelievable,” Samantha Peszek told NBC. A slight miss was one of the few flaws in the performance.
Then the vault came, and Biles’s famous Yurchenko double pike earned her a score of 9.75 out of 10 from the judges and brought the Target Center crowd to its feet. Biles smiled and walked back to the start of the runway, waving as the standing ovation continued.
“It was a great bounce back after four events and a very stressful night,” Randy said.
Contact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on social media @Tom_Schad.
