Three years after withdrawing from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics after a case of the “twisties,” decorated gymnast Simone Biles will compete in her third Summer Games, hoping to add to the seven medals she’s accumulated since 2016. She leads a women’s gymnastics team with varying levels of experience, from first-timers to seasoned veterans, but they are all aiming to leave Paris with some golden hardware.
Biles earned a return to the Olympics with a top score of 117.225 at the U.S. Olympic trials in Minneapolis in June. Fellow returners Suni Lee, Jordan Chiles and Jade Carey also qualified for the games with scores in the top-five. Chiles and Lee also earned silver medals with the women’s team in Tokyo, and Lee also earned a gold medal in all-around competition and bronze on uneven bars. 16-year-old Hezly Rivera, the youngest member of Team USA, also made the cut with her fifth-place finish.
Olympic gymnastics features several events happening at the same time. The gymnastics events for women are vault, uneven bars, balance beam and floor exercise, and they go through all of these apparatus for six rotations. According to NBC Olympics, the rotation order for women is as follows: vault, uneven bars, balance beam…
