By: Benjamin  He

Last Thursday, Simone Biles secured her second career Olympic title in gymnastics, making history as the first woman in more than half a century to win two Olympic all-around titles. She made the title by more than a full point after managing to recover from a mistake on the bar segment and beating Rebecca Andrade of Brazil, who ended up getting silver. Let’s go over her performance during the Paris Olympics.

First up was her vault performance. Biles chose to do the Yurchenko double pike, a vault that is widely considered the most difficult to do in the world, requiring expert skill and fitness, and clocking in at a 6.4 difficulty. She was the only woman to perform this vault in the Olympics. The extraordinarily difficult move put her at an eight-tenth point advantage over Andrade, who did a vault called a Cheng, an also difficult vault with a rating of 5.6.

Then came the uneven bars. Here Biles made a large mistake that cost her several points. Biles positioned herself incorrectly on the high bar low bar transition. The position made it so that, in order to avoid touching the floor mat, Biles had to bend her legs and do an extra swing to keep the rhythm. The mistake left her in third place at the halfway point while Bile’s teammate, Sunisa Lee, began to climb higher up in the rankings.

Biles then made a comeback on the balance beam. While every other contestant wobbled slightly on the beam, Biles managed to keep balance, ending her routine with the notoriously difficult full-twisting double back dismount. Biles pulled back to first place with this event. Andrade’s threat still loomed nearby, keeping within a couple of tenths of a point within Biles’s lead.

The last stretch of the contest (the floor routine) came next. Biles cemented her lead in the floor routine and consequently won first place. Biles’ routine consisted of a triple-twisting double back flip with her knees tucked to her chest, and a half-twisting double back flip with her body straight. On the other hand, Andrade stepped out of bounds once but still landed in second place. Biles became the first woman in more than half a century to win two Olympic all-around titles.