Time and again, Simone Biles has proved to the world that she still has a lot of fuel left when it comes to pursuing her first love—gymnastics. She might be the senior-most gymnast currently competing and performing, but that doesn’t mean she has stopped learning and skilling up.
After a successful run at the Paris Olympics, where she walked away with three golds and one silver, Biles still owes her success to her teammates, friends, and family who stuck around with her.
With their help, she could prepare herself for upcoming challenges and feel liberated enough to return to the stage at her own pace. Recently, she has been preparing to put on a special show across the country with her entourage of gymnasts.
The Gold Over America Tour will be a pop-concert-style show where popular Olympians and fellow gymnasts will showcase their skills along with dance and good music on a grand stage.
To ensure the success of this show, Biles is putting her best foot forward, along with her teammates, by learning new skills.
— Sam John (@SamJohn1190) September 12, 2024
She posted a glimpse of the team’s rehearsals for the tour and showed off a new trick on the balance beam. This trick came courtesy of her fellow gymnast and good friend, Skye Blakely, whom she credited in the clip.
“learned another new thing“
The trick involved catching the beam and doing a full headstand with no support at the bottom, flipping twice horizontally along the beam, and landing at the same position. Due to its trickiness and difficulty, Biles was stunned that she could pull it off.
But this wasn’t the first instance of the senior gymnast learning a new trick to amp up her skills and credibility. Before this, she made a clean attempt at a pommel horse move on a gymnastics mushroom during one of the rehearsal sessions. The Paris Olympics qualifiers also witnessed something similar: Biles was extremely close to having a sixth skill named after her.
Biles introduced a new uneven bars skill in Paris
The qualifiers during the Olympics allowed gymnasts to set their strategies for the final showdown. This included finalizing their roster, their arsenal of tricks on each apparatus, and assigning these apparatuses to each gymnast on the team.
Biles took the opportunity at the time to tease a brand new move on the uneven bars, with the potential of performing it during the finals. It could’ve been the Biles VI since she was the only gymnast so far who could pull off the skill.
For her regular uneven bars routine, the GOAT would generally perform the ‘Weiler half’ – circling the bar before transitioning into a handstand.
However, this new move involved a one-and-a-half turn – rotating 540° – before continuing into a similar routine. Biles eventually scratched this out during the finals, but not before she left the world in awe of her talent and strength.
