Simone Biles’ path to Paris is off to a great start.
Biles made her season debut Saturday night at the US Classic at the XL Center in Hartford, Connecticut, and wasted no time dominating the field. She won the all-around title with 59.5 points, which marked her highest all-around score since the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Her score was also nearly two points ahead of runner-up Shilese Jones.
Biles had few problems in any of the competition’s events. He completed Yurchenko’s double pike, a move now named after him and widely considered the most difficult, on the vault to win 15.600. That was the highest mark of the night anywhere.
Biles placed second on beam and won the floor event with a score of 14.800. She also finished strong across the uneven bars and finished only behind Jones. Suni Lee defeated Biles on beam.
Biles was also one of eight Olympic and world championship medalists who competed, including Lee and Gabby Douglas, although Douglas withdrew from the competition after having trouble on the uneven bars in her first rotation. Lee only competed on vault, beam and floor. Fellow Tokyo Olympians Jordan Chiles and Jade Carey also finished third and fourth in the event.
Biles has not competed since October, when she led Team USA to the team title at the 2023 World Gymnastics Championships in Belgium. Biles competed on all apparatus in that competition and earned her 20th gold medal and the seventh consecutive for the United States at world championships. She also won a historic eighth all-around title at the U.S. Championships last year, making her the first gymnast, male or female, to win eight all-around national titles. She also achieved it at age 26, making her the oldest woman to do so.
Naturally, that earned Biles the Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year award last year. She outvoted former Iowa Hawkeyes basketball star Caitlin Clark and Spanish soccer star and Ballon d’Or winner Aitana Bonmati.
Biles has made it clear that she will compete in the Olympic Games later this summer in Paris, where she will surely be one of the most followed athletes as the sports world sweeps over France. It will be her first Olympic Games since she experienced curveball at the 2020 Tokyo games, which largely left her out of competition in Japan. So far, though, it seems like everything is going well for Biles in the lead-up to Paris.
The Olympic trials are scheduled for June 27-30 in Minneapolis, about a month before the start of the Olympic Games.
