Simone Biles shocks the world with new vault routine in 2024

Biles scored 15.7 on her Yurchenko double pike to beat out Rebeca Andrade of Brazil and claim her seventh Olympic gold. Biles’s teammate Jade Carey won the bronze.

Simone Biles now has seven Olympic gold medals — tying her with Vera Caslavska of Czechoslovakia for the second most in women’s gymnastics — and 10 Olympic medals total. And she has two more chances, on beam and floor.

Simone Biles is the Olympic champion on vault, with an average of 15.3 across her two vaults. Rebeca Andrade of Brazil wins silver with an average of 14.966. Jade Carey wins bronze with an average of 14.466.

Three years after Simone Biles became disoriented while vaulting at the Tokyo Games, she finally put those nerves — and the entire apparatus — behind her.

On Saturday, Biles, the most decorated gymnast in history, dominated the vault final — her final performance on vault at these Games and final competition vault ever, perhaps, considering that she is 27 and has hinted at retirement.

The medal was Biles’s seventh Olympic gold and 10th Olympic medal overall. And she has two more events to go in Paris: the balance beam and the floor exercise, both on Monday. She also won gold in Paris in the team event and in the all-around.

Rebeca Andrade of Brazil, who finished second to Biles in the all-around, won the silver, more than three-tenths of a point behind Biles. Jade Carey of the United States won the bronze.
“After all these years of putting the mental work in, it’s paid off,” she said. “So I’m super excited to be on this stage again.”

Biles said on Saturday that she couldn’t say for sure if she would compete on vault again, because of the allure of the 2028 Los Angeles Games, on home soil, when she would be 31. But, she said, “I am getting really old.”

Not so old that she played it safe on Saturday. For the first of her two vaults, she performed the Yurchenko double pike vault, a dangerous vault that can result in serious injury with even the slightest mistake. No other woman has done it in competition.

The vault is a round-off onto the springboard, a back handspring onto the vaulting table and then two full flips in the air in a folded position, and it’s named after Biles because she was the first woman to do it in an international competition. She was supposed to do it at the Tokyo Games, but never did, after withdrawing because of a mental block that left her disoriented in the air.

“It was definitely my last Yurchenko double pike,” she said of the one she completed on Saturday. “I kind of nailed that one.”
Her score reflected that: The vault earned 15.7 points and put her so far ahead of everyone else that other gymnasts looked at the leaderboard with frowns, dejected.

Biles’s second vault was a Cheng, another tough vault done by only the world’s best gymnasts. She performed it with such exquisite height and length — scoring 14.9 — that the crowd leaped to its feet when she was done. Her score, an average of 15.3 points, was untouchable.

The two vaults performed by Andrade, who won the event at the Tokyo Games, didn’t match the difficulty of Biles’s because Andrade opted not to perform the triple-twisting vault that she had been practicing. She said she didn’t feel comfortable enough with the vault to try it.