Entering the women’s all-around, no one else can do Simone Biles things

PARIS - Before Simone Biles steps into the arena, her peers have a disadvantage. The other gymnasts here know it, and there’s nothing they can do. Biles’s difficult routines that captivate the crowd also grant her a competitor’s greatest luxury - margin for error.

This is Biles’s winning formula: For years, she has pioneered new skills and packed tricky elements into her performances. She doesn’t settle for simpler routines, even though she probably still would win, and her reward is a difficulty score that other competitors cannot match. Results combine both difficulty and execution, so even if an athlete performs relatively easy routines nearly perfectly, she won’t finish near the top of the standings.

Biles’s difficulty score in the qualifying round at the Paris Games was more than two points higher than Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade, her closest challenger. That’s a significant margin in gymnastics, which has a rule book that prescribes a one-point deduction for a fall, the most common major error. As soon as Biles returned to competition last year, she proved she had pushed the trouble with “the twisties” in Tokyo into the past. From then on, as long as she stayed healthy, she was sure to be the gold medal favorite in Thursday’s all-around final. If Biles is on the floor, the more competitive battles are for silver and bronze.

In 2021, before Sunisa Lee became the Olympic all-around champion after Biles withdrew, Lee described her approach: “I’m just competing for second place, because I feel like that’s the only place that somebody’s going to get, because nobody’s going to beat Simone.”

When Biles returned to the Olympic stage, she soared to a 59.566 all-around score in Sunday’s qualifying - her second-best mark since the Tokyo Games despite dealing with a minor calf injury during the competition. Andrade (57.700) finished the closest to Biles but a sizable gap between them remained.

As gymnasts construct their routines, they constantly weigh the risk of including a skill compared to its reward. Biles frequently bounds backward, or even falls, on her Yurchenko double pike, the most difficult vault in women’s gymnastics. But that skill gives her a scoring ceiling that is 0.8 points higher than other top athletes, including Andrade.

Biles sometimes steps out of bounds after her tumbling passes, but the elements are so complex that their value factored into Biles’s difficulty score outweighs those landing errors. On the other hand, Biles is able to perform a super difficult beam dismount - a double back tuck with a double twist - but because it adds just one-tenth to her score, she opts for a simpler variation.

Across the four events in the qualifying round, Biles’s difficulty scores combined to be 25.8, with her jaw-dropping elements on vault and floor providing the biggest edge. Andrade tallied a 23.7. Biles had room to make mistakes. Yet she finished with an overall execution score of 33.866. Andrade was slightly better with a 34.100, the best mark in the 58-gymnast field, but that was well short of what it would take to challenge Biles.

Biles’s difficulty justifiably attracts the most fanfare - the height she reaches as she propels her body off the vault is a marvel - but her clean execution and ability to avoid mistakes contribute to her dominance. An all-around final featuring Biles is similar to the most talented football team with the best in-game execution getting a two-touchdown lead before the game kicks off.

Biles and Andrade will begin the final on vault, perhaps the apparatus most critical to Andrade’s gold medal hopes. Biles has performed two vaults this season: the Yurchenko double pike, which has a difficulty value of 6.4, and the Cheng, a skill with a half twist onto the vault and then a 1½ twist in the air. The Cheng is worth 5.6 points. In the qualifying round, Biles performed both, which is required to advance to the apparatus final, but in the team final, she opted for the Cheng. It’s safer, mentally and physically, her coach, Cecile Landi, said. But it also allows Andrade to climb closer.

Andrade can execute a Cheng that outshines Biles with its amplitude and technique. The Brazilian star also has indicated that she might try a triple-twisting Yurchenko at these Games. It’s a skill that has never been successfully performed in women’s gymnastics, and the vault would receive a 6.0 difficulty score.

If Biles chooses her simpler vault and Andrade attempts the new element, Biles might face far more pressure than usual to perform with her best execution. The two athletes have similar potential on bars and beam, while Biles will have an advantage on floor in the final rotation. On that apparatus, her highflying tumbling always becomes a highlight.

“She’ll go and do a pass, and I’m just like, ‘How the heck can she do that?’” Lee said. " … Nobody knows. But it’s just amazing to see.”

Andrade has posed a greater challenge than any gymnast Biles has faced in years. Andrade, in many ways, mirrors Biles. She performs difficult routines with excellent technique. Kaylia Nemour, who is from France but represents Algeria, nearly matched Andrade’s difficulty in the qualifying round but had a much lower execution score. The rest of the field was nearly a point lower than Andrade and three points behind Biles, setting up a final with Biles as the front-runner for gold, Andrade as the favorite for silver and several contenders, including Nemour and Lee, battling for bronze.

At the world championships in 2018, as Biles dealt with severe pain from a kidney stone, she fell twice and still won the all-around competition. Biles probably does not have that much room for error this time if Andrade performs to her potential.

But even if Andrade unveils the new element and has the best meet of her career, Biles controls whether she finishes on top of the podium, because when Biles avoids errors, she is unstoppable.