Simone Biles leads at US Olympic trials, but shaky beam routine gets her fired up

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MINNEAPOLIS — The expletive wasn't audible amid the cheering at Target Center, nor heard on NBC's television coverage. But it was clearly visible on the jumbotron as Simone Biles walked away from the balance beam Friday night, evidence of the frustration she felt after a shaky routine at the U.S. Olympic gymnastics trials.

That score, and a bit of rotational happenstance, briefly left the world's greatest gymnast in second place.

"She was very, very pissed," her coach Laurent Landi said.

None of it lasted very long, of course. Biles proceeded to drop a masterful floor routine and another one of her iconic Yurchenko double pikes on vault, drawing a standing ovation from the crowd. By the end of the night, she was 2.5 points clear of the rest of the field and roughly 48 hours away from her third trip to the Summer Olympic Games.

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That Biles is atop the leaderboard after the first night of trials, with a score of 58.900, is hardly a surprise given her recent performances and general dominance. The interesting part was that, unlike some of her recent meets, she had to block out some metaphorical noise Friday night to get there.

Biles started off on uneven bars, which has generally been her least-favorite event − even though she registered the second-highest score of the night on it Friday. Then she moved to balance beam, where she started with an uncharacteristic wobble and ended with a hop on the dismount, resulting in a score of 13.650 that was more than a full point lower than her two beam routines at nationals.

"I'm so upset about beam," Biles told NBC in a brief interview posted on Instagram. "I'm really disappointed in myself because that's not how I train. And so going forward, I'm going to try to compete how I train on that event. Because I know I'm good at it. I know I can do better. So that's what I'm going to work on."

Biles, 27, was also likely rattled to some extent by the injuries earlier in the night involving two of her potential Team USA teammates. She checked in on Shilese Jones, the reigning world bronze medalist, after Jones injured her knee on a vault in warmups, which prompted her to withdraw from three of her four events on the night. And she couldn't have avoided seeing Kayla DiCello being helped out of the arena after sustaining her own injury on vault.

"She needs to really calm herself down. She needs to rely on her practice," Landi said. "Podium training, you should have seen, she hits everything perfectly normal. And because of this, there is anxiety. Am I the next one to get hurt? What's going to happen to me? You can't control this. So control the controllable."

And for Biles, those controllables have often been her best two events: Floor exercise and vault.

On floor, Biles didn't eclipse the 15-point mark like she did at nationals, but she turned in a performance that Landi called "almost perfect." The highlight was a particularly soaring and emphatic version of the eponymous Biles II on her first tumbling pass − a triple-double that ranks among the most impressive skills in her repertoire. "Two flips, three twists − you can't even count it fast enough. Incredible," Samantha Peszek said on NBC. A slight step out of bounds was one of the routine's few blemishes.

And that set the stage for vault, where Biles' famed Yurchenko double pike drew a 9.75 execution score from the judges (out of a possible 10) and brought the Target Center crowd to its feet. Biles smiled as she walked back to the start of the runway, then waved as the standing ovation continued.

"So at the end of four events, and (a) very stressful (night), it was a great recovery," Landi said.

Contact Tom Schad at [email protected] or on social media @Tom_Schad.