Eight years ago at the Rio Olympics, when Simone Biles made the quantum leap from gymnastics-famous to worldwide household name with her epochal four-golds-in-seven-days masterclass, the most common refrain to describe her greatness was that her routines were so preposterously difficult that she could fall multiple times and still win. For years Biles was so far ahead of everyone else it was almost embarrassing, performing elements and routines so juiced with difficulty an entire generation of successors would struggle to catch up.
On Monday afternoon, the most dogged of her rivals finally did when Rebeca Andrade of Brazil, who had been closing the gap on the greatest gymnast of all time for years, edged Biles for gold on the floor exercise by less than four hundredths of a point. That Biles failed to win a medal on the beam, the sport’s most precarious and unpredictable apparatus, was no surprise. But her silver on the floor marked the first time she was beaten in her favourite discipline at any meet since Aly Raisman pipped her at the 2015 US national championships. During a week in which gymnasts from Algeria, Ireland and the Philippines won the first ever Olympic titles for their countries, Andrade’s gold may have been the biggest shock of all.
