PARIS. – It definitely was not the ending Simone Biles was expecting as she was surprisingly upstaged in the floor exercise final by Brazilian gymnast Rebeca Andrade–but a silver medal on Monday capped the American’s remarkable Olympic comeback.
Stepping out of bounds with both feet at the end of two of her four tumbling passes meant she missed out on the top prize in the floor final, with the six tenths of a point penalty she incurred making the difference between gold and silver.
That score of 14.133 did not stop Biles from earning an 11th Olympic medal.
The final day of the artistic gymnastics program also saw Biles suffer disappointment in the balance beam final as she finished fifth after slipping off the 10-cm wide apparatus.
Italy won their first ever Olympic title in women’s gymnastics when Alice D’Amato emerged as the surprise winner in a beam competition where four of the eight finalists suffered falls. The celebrations did not end there for Italians, with D’Amato’s compatriot Manila Esposito scooping bronze behind Chinese silver medalist Zhou Yaqin.
Like Biles, Japanese sensation Shinnosuke Oka will be heading home with four Olympic medals, with three of them being glittering gold.
The 20-year-old’s Games breakthrough continued as he finished with the bronze in the parallel bars, behind back-to-back Olympic champion Zou Jingyuan and Ukrainian silver medalist Illia Kovtun.
Zou handed China their second gymnastics gold of the Games, while Kovtun earned Ukraine its first podium finish.
Just two hours later Oka emerged triumphant with his gravity defying routine on the horizontal bar, a final that was riddled with errors.
Colombian teenager Angel Barajas took silver and Taiwan’s Tang Chia-hung and China’s Zhang Boheng shared bronze despite botched performances.
With the hundreds of TV and still cameras capturing her every move, there was no doubt that Biles was the standout star of the Paris Olympics.
But she is also the ultimate teammate and rival.
She whopped with joy and hugged fellow American Jordan Chiles tightly after her friend was promoted from fifth to the bronze-medal position when her score was upgraded to 13.766 following a successful enquiry submitted by the Americans right at the end of the floor exercise competition.
Biles, the world’s most decorated gymnast with 41 world and Olympic medals, admitted that exhaustion had started to creep in on the final day of a grueling competition.
