Simone Biles officially wins more Olympic medals than any gymnast in U.S. history

Transcript

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

We turn to Simone Biles, who has now officially won more Olympic medals than any gymnast in U.S. history. With the U.S. gold medal in the women's gymnastics team all-around final today, Biles has won eight Olympic medals, five of them gold, a resounding win for the U.S. And our sports correspondent Becky Sullivan was there to watch. Hey, Bex.

BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Hi, Mary Louise.

KELLY: Hey. OK, so the U.S. women had been calling these Olympic games a chance for redemption - sounds like this gold surely must represent exactly what they were looking for.

SULLIVAN: Absolutely. Yeah. So let me take you back to 2021. It was the Olympics in Tokyo, this same event, the team all-around final, and all of the pressure in the world was on Simone Biles. People thought that this would be the first of just many golds she was going to win in Tokyo. But then in the very first rotation of that final - it was the vault - she got what is called the twisties. So basically, suddenly, her body forgot how to twist in midair, and she had to pull out partway through the competition.

And her teammates did their best, but they could only manage the silver medal that year. And Biles ended up taking two years off of gymnastics after that, and she only returned to competition last year. And so she has been amazing since then, and this gold in this particular event is really just a tribute to the incredible comeback that she has made.

KELLY: OK. But was there any hint of the twisties or anything like that happening to her when she went out to compete today?

SULLIVAN: Absolutely not. No. No, she has been very open about how much work she has done to recover from that. It took a lot of attention to her mental health. She's been very open about going to therapy. And all of that work has led to a Simone that, to my eyes, looks much happier and much more relaxed when she is competing. And tonight they actually started with the vault again, and she hit the routine great as usual. And after the competition, Biles said, you know, that moment felt very good to her.

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SIMONE BILES: After I finished vault, I was relieved. I was like, whew, because at least no flashbacks or anything. But I did feel a lot of relief, and as soon as I landed vault, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm definitely - we're going to do this.

SULLIVAN: And she was right. She was right. They did. And so between her and the rest of the team - Jordan Chiles, Suni Lee and Jade Carey - they didn't make any major mistakes, and so they won easily - by nearly six points, which, let me tell you, Mary Louise. In gymnastics, that is an absolutely massive margin of victory.

KELLY: OK, just to repeat, she has now won the most Olympic medals ever for any U.S. gymnast. Where does she go from here?

SULLIVAN: She has four more events coming up still in this Olympics, which is wild. So the first is the individual all-around competition. That's this Thursday. She'll be the favorite there. I'll name two of her biggest competitors. One is her own teammate, Suni Lee, who won the gold in this event in Tokyo after Biles withdrew. And then they'll face the wonderful Brazilian gymnast Rebecca Andrade. And then Simone also qualified for the finals in three of the specific events. Those are the vault, the floor exercise and the balance beam. So those events will come after the individual all-around. In the qualifying round earlier this weekend, Biles scored the highest on vault and floor exercise. So I think she'll be a favorite in those events, too.

KELLY: OK, so that is all the Simone Biles news we need to know. Becky, I'm looking at the clock. We've got, like, 30 seconds. Tell me literally everything else that happened at the Olympics today.

(LAUGHTER)

SULLIVAN: Yeah. Well, the Olympics are truly crazy, as you know, so it's impossible to cover everything. I'll tell you just about one little one I was pulling for, which is the U.S. has traditionally dominated shotgun events at the Olympics. But for whatever reason, there was one shotgun discipline, just one, that the U.S. hasn't won a medal in since the 1990s. That event is men's trap. And this year the U.S. had a really promising competitor in 38-year-old Derrick Mein, who grew up on a farm in Southeast Kansas hunting with his dad. He had placed 24th at his first Olympics in Tokyo. He'd been really working on his game over the past few years. Today was the final. I'm sad to say he fell just short of a medal. He finished fifth. But congratulations to him for a job well done 'cause fifth is nothing to sneeze at.

KELLY: Nothing to sneeze that. That's NPR's Becky Sullivan in Paris. Thanks.

SULLIVAN: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.