PARIS (Reuters) -Simone Biles clinched her fifth Olympic gold medal as she made a triumphant return to the women’s gymnastics team final at the Paris Games on Tuesday, reinforcing her status as one of the greatest athletes just three years after withdrawing from the same event at the Tokyo Games.
Biles, the most decorated gymnast of all-time, earned the United States their 11th Olympic medal in the women’s team event with a solid performance on all four apparatus after starting off on the vault, from which she soared high into the air while executing the Cheng to earn 14.900 points.
With the crowd rallying behind Biles and her teammates in the absence of the French team that failed to qualify for the final, the United States finished an impressive 5.802 points ahead of second-placed Italy.
While the Italians won their first women’s Olympic team medal since the 1928 Olympics, an incredible, high-flying vault by Rebeca Andrade landed Brazil the bronze, their first ever medal in the discipline.
(Reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber, Karen Braun, Chang-Ran Kim and Rory Carroll; Editing by Pritha Sarkar)
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