Simone Biles nailed her signature move to win the gold medal in the floor exercise.
Dmitri Lovetsky/Associated Press
For anyone who doubted her after a subpar performance on the balance beam, Simone Biles sent an emphatic message on Tuesday: She is unbeatable in the floor exercise.
Biles bounced back from a bronze medal performance on the beam to dominate the floor, completing her Rio Olympics with four gold medals and the bronze. She is the fourth American female gymnast to win five medals in a single Olympics, joining Mary Lou Retton (1984), Shannon Miller (1992) and Nastia Liukin (2008).
Biles scored a 15.966 in the floor, considered her best event.
Her signature floor move is the Biles, a double layout with a half-twist and a blind landing. She performed the move nearly perfectly, ending it with a stag leap, which she had left out of her performance in the team event but added back for the individual all-around.
Her score dwarfed those of her competitors. Her teammate Aly Raisman won the silver medal with a routine slightly less difficult than Biles’s, sticking every landing on every tumbling pass. The bronze medal went to Amy Tinkler of Britain, the first female gymnast from that country to compete in a floor final.
Raisman earned her sixth Olympic medal and her third at these Games. She won the team gold and the silver in the individual all-around, behind Biles, who also won the vault.
Tuesday’s victory put Biles in an exclusive sorority. Just three female gymnasts before her — Ecaterina Szabo of Romania (1984), Vera Caslavska of Czechoslovakia (1968) and Larisa Latynina of the Soviet Union (1956) — have also won four gold medals in one Olympics.
Also Tuesday, the American Danell Leyva won the silver medal in the parallel bars and in the horizontal bar. Leyva, 24, was the bronze medalist in the all-around at the 2012 London Games, but was not initially selected for the U.S. team. An alternate, Leyva was added to the team when John Orozco sustained the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee during Olympic training in July.
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