New World Champion Simone Biles, 18, (left) and 19-year-old Olympic Champion Gabby Douglas are likely to be the main rivals for the latter’s individual all-round title at Rio 2016
American Simone Biles became, at eighteen, the most decorated woman gymnast of all time on the final day of the World Championships in Glasgow on Sunday.
The diminutive Texan – at 4’9” she is small even by gymnastics standards – won gold on the balance beam and the floor to add to the record third all-around and team titles she had already claimed at the Hydro Arena. Her tenth world title means she has won more titles than any female gymnast in history, surpassing Russia’s Svetlana Khorkina, Romania’s Gina Gogean and former Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina, who all won nine world gold medals.
“It’s a really amazing feeling and I don’t think it has hit me yet. I can’t even wrap my head around it,” Biles said of her record.
“I still don’t believe my ability to achieve such things. It’s crazy.”
It was the second straight World Championships in which the teenager has won gold in the four events just over two years since making her senior debut in March 2013. Biles is the first woman since Khorkina to win three all-around titles and first to win three in a row after triumphs in Antwerp in 2013 and Nanning in 2014. But Khorkina was already 18 when she won her first all-round in 1997 and had to compete for six further years to take her third.
Biles also got a bronze in the vault to bring her career tally to 14 medals – level with Latynina and behind only Khorkina (20) and Gogean (15). However Biles has not yet competed in an Olympics.
In Rio she will undoubtedly be hotly tipped to topple fellow African-American Gabby Douglas, the reigning all-around Olympic champion, who took two years off after the Games but has returned to sufficient form to take silver behind Biles in Glasgow.
Biles calls her grandparents Mum and Dad after they adopted her from her substance-addicted mother. Both grandparents were cheering in the stands in Glasgow last week.
She now sets her sights on competing in the Rio Olympics where legend status surely awaits if she can continue her meteoric progress.
“Three years ago I would have thought they were absolutely crazy and wouldn’t have believed it,” said Biles when asked if she was now the bookies’ favourite for Olympic gold.
