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SAN JOSE, Calif. — Fifteen seconds.
That’s all the time Simone Biles needs to dazzle the world with a vault few humans are even willing to try. Put an effective end to a meet, too.
Already in a class by herself, Biles’ mastery of the Yurchenko double pike will distance her even further from the competition. No matter how high a score other gymnasts put up on uneven bars or balance beam, they will not come close to what Biles does on vault.
Especially when she makes it look as effortless as she did Friday night.
“No. No. No. It’s not normal. She’s not normal,” Laurent Landi, Biles’ co-coach, said. “She makes it in training, but she’s one of the rare gymnasts that goes to the meet and does it even better under the pressure.”
Ahead of the London Olympics, the U.S. women perfected the Amanar, another Yurchenko-style vault. Each of the Americans in the lineup for the team final had one while other countries were lucky if they had one gymnast who could do it. It provided such a big scoring advantage the Americans had the gold medal won after the first event.
The Yurchenko double pike gives Biles a similar advantage.
Biles is already the best in the world, a four-time Olympic champion who’s won more medals, and more gold medals, at the world championships than any other gymnast. In only her second competition in two years, her score of 59.3 on the first night of the U.S. championships was nearly 2½ points better than what Rebeca Andrade scored to win her first world title last year.
World silver medalist Shilese Jones was second Friday night, but the gap — 2.4 points — between her and Biles was larger than the gap between Jones and Jordan Chiles, who is in fifth place.
And that was with mistakes by Biles on both balance beam and floor exercise.
“I’m pretty happy with the overall meet today,” Biles told NBC after the meet. “My goal for the weekend is just to hit eight-for-eight and then hopefully come in on Sunday and hit a little bit of a smoother beam routine.”
Biles has never been driven by the competition, however. It’s about testing herself, pushing both her own boundaries and those of the sport, and there’s no bigger test right now than the Yurchenko double pike.
The line between success and serious injury is incredibly fine with the Yurchenko double pike. It has no bailout, meaning a gymnast is likely to land on his or her head or neck if they’re even the slightest bit off. It’s why Biles is the only woman to even try it in competition — Friday night was the third time she’s done it, after the U.S. Classic earlier this month and in 2021 — and why few men do it.
Watching her do the Yurchenko double pike, it’s obvious how much strength is required for Biles to pull her body around twice in a piked position. Her hands grip her thighs as she rotates, and her torso is taut. Only after she lands do she and Landi break into smiles.
But for as difficult as it is, as hard as Biles has to work to pull it off, she also makes it look deceptively easy. She took just a slight hop to the side on her landing, and judges rewarded her with a 9.8 for execution.
That’s about as close to perfection as you can get in gymnastics, and the score wasn’t inflated in the slightest.
It’s like watching Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Michael Phelps or Serena Williams in their primes. Fans know they’re witnessing greatness even if they can’t quite fathom how she’s doing it. Her competitors know that unless something catastrophic happens, like when anxiety manifested itself in a case of the twisties and forced her to withdraw from most of the Tokyo Olympics, she is further out of reach than she’s ever been.
The scary thing is Biles is only at the beginning of her comeback. The Yurchenko double pike will only get better in the coming months, as will her other skills.
“I just have personal goals that I want to meet and keep pushing for, so that’s what I’m aiming for,” Biles said.
It often takes greatness years to unfold. Biles needs only those 15 seconds or so.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.
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