Simone Biles could try new move at Paris 2024 Olympics
Simone Biles is making her return to Olympic competition on Sunday even more hotly anticipated with the possibility she may perform another new move.
The American, the most decorated gymnast in history with 37 world and Olympic medals, will get the first chance to try to get an uneven bars skill named after her in the women’s qualifying event at Paris 2024.
The 27-year-old already has five other eponymous skills but this would be the first one on bars and would make her the only active female gymnast to have one on all four apparatus.
She submitted the original skill to the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) technical committee last week and so if she performs it cleanly here in Paris, it will bear her name.
Biles is back on the Olympic stage three years after pulling out of several events at the last Games in Tokyo with the ‘twisties’ – a disorientating mental block.
She already announced her arrival as a huge favourite to add to her seven Olympic medals when she nailed her Biles II vault in podium training on Thursday – the most recent of the skills named after her.
She and her American team have been keen to keep the pressure off her at these Games, with her coach fulfilling media commitments on her behalf and the gymnast herself being reassured that she does not need to compete in all events.
Bars would be the most likely one she would opt out of – with it being her ‘weakest’, if you can call an apparatus on which she has a world silver medal. Perhaps you can if ‘just’ one out of 30 world medals has come on bars.
However, with this new skill in the mix, that now seems unlikely.
She is scheduled to begin her qualification round at 10:40 BST on Sunday, the session after Great Britain’s women begin their Olympic campaign (08:30 BST)
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