Simone Biles won her sixth Olympic gold medal, and her second of the Paris Games, on Thursday, seeing off a stiff challenge from Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade to capture the women’s all-around title for a second time.
A once-in-a-lifetime athlete who makes the unthinkable look elementary and the extraordinary look effortless, Biles paced the field of 24 gymnasts with 59.131 points.
Andrade finished nearly two points adrift to match her silver medal from Tokyo, while Biles’s US teammate Suni Lee, the defending Olympic all-around champion who spent much of the last two years dealing with multiple kidney diseases, took the bronze.
Biles also became the oldest women’s all-around Olympic champion since the Soviet Union’s Maria Gorokhovskaya, who won the gold in 1952 when she was 30.
The historic gold marked Biles’s 39th career medal between the Olympics and world championships, extending her record as the most decorated gymnast in history.
Although it was the first all-around final to include multiple former Olympic champions in Biles and Lee, Thursday’s contest was largely framed as a showdown between Biles and Andrade