Simone Biles wins fifth all-around gymnastics world title
Simone Biles dropped the mic as she continued making history Thursday at the 2019 World Gymnastic Championships in Stuttgart, Germany. Just days after winning a record 21st medal at the competition, the superstar gymnast captured her fifth all-around world title.
Biles scored 58.999 points, beating China's Tang Xijing by a whopping 2.1 points — her largest-ever margin of victory at the world championships. Russia's Angelina Melnikova was third with 56.399 points and 16-year-old American Sunisa Lee finished eighth after an unexpected fall on the uneven bars.
As she finished her floor routine, the 22-year-old American gymnast dropped an imaginary mic. "It wasn't my best routine but we just thought it would be fun," she said of the move.
— Team USA (@TeamUSA) October 10, 2019
As Biles said, the routine was not her best performance. She stepped out of bounds twice, but her degree of difficulty was so high that those missteps still earned her the top spot.
Thursday's win brings Biles' all-around world titles to five, two more than any other female gymnast in history. It brings her world championship medal count up to 22 — 16 of them gold — the most of any woman and just one away from Belarus' Vitaly Scherbo's men's record.
"I feel like right now actually I'm pretty confident in my gymnastics and myself and the performances I put out there, so I feel like I'm probably more confident going in today than I was at the Olympics," she said.
Not only does Biles' victory mark her fifth, it also marks Team USA's seventh in a row in the woman's all-around, matching the Soviet Union's record streak during the 1970s and 1980s.
we did the damn thing 🥇
— Simone Biles (@Simone_Biles) October 9, 2019
2019 world champions pic.twitter.com/tGrnnevF2t
Biles has a chance to earn four more medals this weekend before the end of the competition. She'll be competing on vault and uneven bars Saturday and balance beam and floor Sunday for individual honors. She took home medals in all four of those events last year and is expected to beat Scherbo's record for most world championship medals.
Last Saturday, Biles landed two new skills that had never been performed in competition. Both are expected to be named after her, bringing her total number of signature moves to four.
On Tuesday, Biles won a record 21st medal, leading her team to their fifth consecutive world team championship in what is likely Biles' last world championship.
"Every year it feels better and better just because we're adding to the legacy," Biles said after the team win. "I feel like I never think of records. I just go out there and do what I came to do, which is compete for the country."