Simone Biles reigns supreme with fifth world all-around gymnastics title

Simone Biles continued to stake her claim as one of the most dominant athletes of the generation as she bulldozed all competition to win her fifth world championships individual all-around gold medal in Stuttgart with a score of 58.999. She took with a cushion of 2.1 points, the biggest of her career, as Xijing Tang of China won silver and Russia’s Angelika Melnikova took bronze.

“It means the world to me,” she said afterwards. “For my fifth, that’s kind of unheard of so it was really exciting. But we finished strong and we gave it our all it’s super exciting that we had the opportunity to do this.”

One year ago, Biles fell twice in the all-around final and left the arena seething despite her clear victory. She seems to have learned from those mistakes. Instead of opting for all of the risky, mind-blowing skills that she has written into gymnastics history in the past two years, she decided to play things relatively safe. The greatest measure of Biles’s dominance is that her version of ‘safe’ is still far beyond what any of her rivals could ever dream of.

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