Four-time Olympic gold medalist, Simone Biles, has once again set a new record for the world of gymnastics, but she’s calling out the judges for their scoring. The 24-year-old athlete competed in the U.S. Classic this weekend, stirring up social media by landing a Yurchenko double pike. The Yurchenko double pike is considered so challenging that no other woman has attempted it in competition. Bile’s new vault is so dangerous that gymnastics currently limits the scoring rewards for trying it. Biles says that it is unfair. Biles is the most decorated gymnast in history and is known for performing moves so difficult, and so distinctive, that several have been named after her.
.@Simone_Biles successfully completed a Yurchenko double pike in vault at last night's #USClassic.
She is the first woman in HISTORY to perform the move in competition. @OnHerTurf pic.twitter.com/j07ZweTA0f
— #TokyoOlympics (@NBCOlympics) May 23, 2021
Biles performed the vault close to perfection, only making one flaw of over-rotating. The judges scoring her, however, were not impressed. Despite the move’s difficulty, they gave it a provisional scoring value of 6.6, close to what Biles’s other vaults have received. That limited the points available for performing it successfully, a point that a frustrated Biles suggested was unfair to her. “I feel like now we just have to get what we get because there’s no point in putting up a fight because they’re not going to reward it,” she says of judges and, ultimately, the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG), which has the final word on starting values for new vaults done in competition. “So we just have to take it and be quiet.”
She believes her score should be 6.8 and U.S. high-performance team coordinator Tom Forster is with he; he agreed with Biles that a 6.6 was not high enough given the vault’s difficulty. “It doesn’t seem to be consistent with what they’ve done with other vault values,” he says, “and I don’t know why they do that.”
Biles compared the judges scoring to that of 2019 when she debuted a balance beam dismount that was given a difficulty score two tenths lower than what she believed it should be. Biles called that decision “bullsh*t” two years ago. The FIG chose the lower value in part due to concern over safety. Gymnasts could be more willing to try the dismount — a double-twisting double back — before they were ready if the difficulty value was higher. “There’s no point in putting up a fight because they’re not going to reward it the correct value, but that’s OK,” Biles said on Saturday, May 22, of the vault. “They’re both too low, and they even know it, but they don’t want the field to be too far apart. … They had an open-end Code of Points [instituted in 2006], and now they’re mad that people are too far ahead and excelling.”
Simone Biles is a legend. pic.twitter.com/586eYpt5jd
— stas (@AstasiaWill) May 23, 2021
Biles continues to excel within gymnastics and exceeds the expectations the sport originally created. After a successful competition this weekend, fans are excited to see what else Biles will do. The US Olympic Trials are set to take place from Friday, June 18 to Sunday, June 27. The 2020 Olympics after a postponement due to COVID-19, will begin July 23, 2021, in Tokyo, Japan.,
