Simone Biles scores today: How Olympic star became most decorated USA gymnast ever with eighth medal

Jacob Camenker

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Simone Biles scores today: How Olympic star became most decorated USA gymnast ever with eighth medal image

Simone Biles entered the 2024 Olympics tied with Shannon Miller as the most decorated women's gymnast in USA history.

Biles broke that tie Tuesday in the United States' dominant team competition victory.

Team USA jumped out to a quick lead in the eight-country contest at the Olympics, earning a combined total of 44.100 points on the vault. From there, they continued to dominate each apparatus in a 5.802-point victory over silver medalist Italy.

Jordan Chiles and Suni Lee were key in the U.S. victory, as Chiles fared well on all four apparatuses while Lee held the fort in the three on which she competed. Vault specialist Jade Carey also had a stellar showing, landing a 14.800 in her lone event to bolster Team USA's chances right out of the gate.

But, of course, it was Biles' greatness that shone through as she nailed her routines to power the United States to gold.

Here's what to know about her scores and performances from the women's gymnastics team final.

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Simone Biles' scores today

Biles posted an all-around score of 58.322 during Tuesday's team competition. That ranked best among the 40-gymnast field, 0.366 points ahead of second-place finisher Rebeca Andrade (Brazil).

Biles posted top-six marks in each event. Below is a full breakdown of her scores from the team final, along with their rankings within the field.

EventScoreRank
Vault14.9002nd
Uneven bars14.4006th
Balance beam14.3663rd
Floor exercises14.6661st

The most impressive part of Biles' performance? She could have done better if she so desired.

While she executed well on each apparatus, Biles didn't perform her most difficult vault — the Yurchenko double pike — and opted for a slightly easier uneven bars routine.

As such, Biles' difficulty scores (D scores) were slightly lower than her ceiling.

Biles made up for the lower difficulty by earning higher execution scores (E score), but still, there's room for improvement in her potential point total if she ups her difficulty in the all-around and the event finals.

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Additionally, Biles posted the best floor exercise score despite having 0.2 points in penalties due to stepping out of bounds. Her routine was far from shaky, however. It simply came at the very end of the competition, when the USA had the event wrapped up — barring any massive mistakes from Biles.

With that in mind, she was likely willing to accept those minor deductions to avoid major ones en route to the gold.

Biles' strategy was a sound one. By taking on slightly easier routines, she set herself up to execute at a higher level than her more difficult routines. That helped give Team USA a high floor in a competition they were heavily favored to win.

Biles also avoided putting extra stress on her body ahead of Thursday's all-around finals. That may be the event at which she breaks out some of her more difficult moves to run up the score and keep competitors like Rebeca Andrade and Suni Lee at an arm's length in the competition.

Either way, Biles was stellar on Tuesday and was key in Team USA avenging its silver medal finish from the 2021 Olympics.

And she will continue to be the top gymnast to watch as Olympic competition continues.

Jacob Camenker

Jacob Camenker Photo

Jacob Camenker first joined The Sporting News as a fantasy football intern in 2018 after his graduation from UMass. He became a full-time employee with TSN in 2021 and now serves as a senior content producer with a particular focus on the NFL. Jacob worked at NBC Sports Boston as a content producer from 2019 to 2021. He is an avid fan of the NFL Draft and ranked 10th in FantasyPros’ Mock Draft Accuracy metric in both 2021 and 2022.