Yu-es ei! you are ei! you are ei! you are ei!the Parisian stands shout in thunder, referring to the United States covered in gold.
The Bercy Pyramid is collapsing. What is this? Saint Paul, Minnesota? Houston, Texas? Maybe Reno, Nevada?
No, it's Simone Biles in Paris, conqueror.
And with her, a supportive leader on an afternoon when she sought safety without thinking of risks to the team, her best friend Jordan Chiles, the pale Jade Carey, Tokyo Olympic Champion Sunisa Lee and the fifth woman, the reserve teenager Hezly Rivera. The United States regains the team gold that Russia took three years ago in Tokyo, when Biles was lost in the air. That is why she herself, her more defined features, her deeper gaze, the same spectacularity in her jumps and pirouettes, defined the Paris Games as the Games of her redemption. What the 19-year-old Biles, a 19-year-old teenager who won four gold medals and one bronze, enjoyed in Rio and was lost in Tokyo by the 24-year-old Biles in an identity crisis under the pandemic, was found again in the capital of the Seine by the mature and leader Biles. And after closing the Parisian afternoon with a combination of Taylor Swift-Beyoncé-stroking mortals, pirouettes and stratospheric bounces on the floor, and Afro-jazz dancing, under the admiring gaze of Serena Williams in the stands, she soaked herself from head to toe in the screams of the devoted fans who greeted their beloved queen.
Quickly installed on the stage on the elastic floor mat – springs, planks, spiral foam— The United States shared space with, to their right, the silver Italy of the magical Manila Esposito, 17 years old, the European champion, the rising star. Esposito, a Neapolitan raised in Rome who competes with Xelska, a club from Palma de Mallorca, in the Spanish league, led the Italian women's gymnastics to its first Olympic team medal since 1928. And to her left, the bronze, the absolute force of luck of Rebeca Andrade and her very good friend Flavia Saraiva, small and explosive, a bombshell with golden eyebrows, who brought the Brazilian team to an Olympic podium for the first time in its history.
Also Rebeca Andrade, the best gymnast in the world who is not named Simone Biles, announced on Thursday that she will be battling hard with the beloved North American for the individual title in the all-around competition. He did it with a foal jump, a cheng (circle plus half a turn to enter facing the platform and a somersault into a plank with one and a half pirouettes), rated at 15.100 points, the highest score of the night, two tenths more than the 14.9 he scored on the cheng with which Biles opened the evening, not wanting to take any chances with her namesake double mortal in a tent so difficult that only she can do that among women. For Brazil, that note from Andrade meant the difference between a medal and fourth place behind the British. For the United States, Biles' safe start in the same apparatus, in the same situation (first in the final) in which her head exploded in Tokyo, marked the beginning of a smooth route to gold.
He was in charge of the team, which could not count on a 100% Jade Carey (and she was not on the ground, her best device, after she had an episode of twistiesof loss of space awareness) and in which Lee, after a difficult period, and two kidney operations, after his coronation in Tokyo, assured the right decision.
Biles’ individual score, lower than Sunday’s qualifying, was the best of the afternoon, and Andrade’s, better than two days ago, was the second closest. Fans hope that sparks will fly between the two on Thursday, even brighter than those given off by the combination of four stripes and many stars of the American team. Reality tells us that there will be no game. Biles will probably be the Olympic champion of the event again, as he was in Rio 2016. The absence from Tokyo will thus be definitively closed.
Before the competition began, while the stands were already full, the organization showed two dancers, a woman in a tutu, tights and pointe shoes, and a man in Michael Jackson style. Perhaps unintentionally, they personified in both, and even more so when the dancer performed a rock 'n' roll on pointe and the companion slid across the floor towards her, what the adult and happy Simone Biles is in the gym, energy flooding her body. of 1.42 meters high, and sometimes soft. And also, more difficult, control. Maturity means doing safer things, but no less impressive, and always with maximum difficulty, so that mistakes cannot kill her.
All night long he could concentrate on the balance beam and the floor with fear. A four-inch board on which you dance and swing and do somersaults and from which you have to fly by bouncing hard with both feet on the four inches that don’t even fit. Bile, overcoming imbalances and tremors. Her bare feet and the discreet bandage around her sore left calf propelled her steadily forward. Exchanged. Leader. The total balance.
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