Now that’s a comeback story.
Three years after she bowed out of the Tokyo Games, Simone Biles dazzled in a difficult floor routine Thursday that clinched her the all-around gymnastics gold medal.
Biles, 27, narrowly edged out Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade to take home the gold, bouncing back after suffering a major error on bars. Sunisa Lee, Biles’ teammate and winner of the same competition in the last Games, won the bronze medal.
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Simone Biles, Rebeca Andrade, and Sunisa Lee pose after Thursday’s competition.
Hannah McKay/ReutersThe gold is Biles second of the Paris Games, with her first coming when the U.S. won the team gymnastics competition on Tuesday with Biles as its top scorer.
Andrade, who also won silver at the last Olympics, made for the stiffest competition Biles has faced in years. It briefly appeared that she’d pull off an upset after Biles’ low mark on bars, but the difficulty of Biles’ floor routine pushed her to the top of the leaderboard.
Biles scored a 59.131 compared to Andrade’s 57.932. After the win, The Washington Post reported that Biles pulled out a necklace that featured a sparkling goat—a nod to the greatest-of-all-time moniker that’d been bestowed on her even before she dominated these Olympics.
A USA fan holds up a cutout of Simone Biles and a goat’s head, a nod to Biles’ greatest-of-all-time moniker.
Paul Childs/ReutersBiles will have more chances to claim even more medals in Paris. She’s already qualified to compete in three of the four event finals: Vault, balance beam, and floor exercise.
Regardless of how those individual events shake out, Biles’ comeback has been solidified. After hordes of criticism for withdrawing from the Tokyo Games, including from VP-hopeful J.D. Vance, the Texas-native has proven her two years off from the sport did not diminish her legacy as one of the greatest American Olympians of all time.
