Simone Biles Breaks a Major Gymnastics Record

On this day, in 2018 Simone Biles breaks a major gymnastics record

  August 19, 2018

Sport: Gymnastics

Simone Biles won her fifth gymnastics title and became the first woman to win four all-around national titles since 1974.

Simone Biles won her fifth U.S. National Gymnastics Championships all-around title at TD Garden in Boston on Aug. 19, 2018. In just her second competitive event since the 2016 Rio Olympics, Biles broke the women’s record for the most U.S. National Championship titles previously held by Joan Moore Gnat (1971-74). She also tied the mark for most individual all-around titles (man or woman), sharing the honor with Blaine Wilson (1996-2000) and Samuel Mikulak (2013-16, 2018).

Biles’ victory was her most dominant to date in the National Championships and announced she was back to form after a one-year self-imposed hiatus from gymnastics due to the rigors of training and competing. Her all-around score of 119.850 was 6.55 points ahead of second-place finisher Morgan Hurd. For comparison, that margin of victory was greater than the difference between Hurd and the 11th-place finisher of the event.

Biles’ national championship was punctuated by individual titles on every apparatus over the two-day competition, matching the accomplishment last done by Dominique Dawes in 1994. Biles claimed her fourth national championship gold medal on the vault, third on the beam and the floor exercise, and first on the uneven bars. 

Simone Biles’ resume includes four Olympic gold medals (1 team, 3 individual) and 19 World Championship gold medals (4 team, 15 individual) in addition to her success at the U.S. National Championships. Biles and Mikulak each won a sixth U.S. National Championship all-around title at the 2019 event in Kansas City, Missouri.

Source: www.usagym.org