Simone Biles lands 2 history-making moves and gets history-making 6th national title
Simone Biles made history this weekend, becoming the first female gymnast to land two new moves in competition -- and easily earned herself her sixth title at the 2019 U.S. Gymnastics Championships in Kansas City, Missouri.
Between preliminaries on Friday and finals Sunday, Biles made history three times over with two new moves and a record-tying all-around win. First, on Friday, she cleanly completed a double-double dismount (a double twist and double somersault) on balance beam.
Also Friday, she attempted a triple-double in floor -- but just barely missed a clean finish, which left her "really frustrated because I know how good I am and how well I can do," she said then.
She returned to competition Sunday rearing to get it right, and she did, becoming the first woman to cleanly complete the triple-twist, double-flip move in her first pass on floor, beaming with her accomplishment.
In doing so, Biles sailed to a first-place finish. With that, she tied Clara Schroth Lomady for most national titles; it's a record that was set in the 1950s.
And it wasn't just the all-around. Biles also got first place in individual events for vault, balance beam and floor. She finished third in uneven bars.
"I'm really happy with the beam dismount and how it's come along, because if you had asked me after [U.S. Classic] if I was going to complete it, I would've said no," Biles told Team USA at the competition of the beam move. "I feel like in those short two weeks we did a lot of work on a couple of the events, so I'm pretty excited with how it turned out."
If she successfully completes the floor and/or beam feat at an international meet, the skill will be named after her. The floor triple-double would be called the Biles II, as she already has one floor trick named after her. Her next chance to do so would be at the world championships in Germany in October.
This year's U.S. Gymnastics Championships has courted controversy in the wake of a massive sexual abuse scandal involving the disgraced, and now imprisoned, former sports doctor Larry Nassar.
Biles was among the hundreds of other gymnasts to publicly accused Nassar of sexual abuse.
Since then, USA Gymnastics, the sports' organizing body, has struggled to regain its athletes' trust, as Biles made clear Wednesday, saying, "It's hard coming here for an organization and having had them fail us so many times."
Biles had to adjust from that mood to compete this weekend and complete both her moves.
"I feel like the first day I was doing angry gymnastics and I was just really upset," she said Sunday, per Team USA, "and then today it was it was just like that's normal and happy."
"[Biles] shouldn't be saddled with that weight, but she's handling it with incredible grace," Rachael Denhollander, a former gymnast and the first to publicly accuse Nassar, told ABC News last week. "Her voice has a lot of power, and I hope she feels that, and she deserves that; she has earned that power."
