Winners and Losers from Women's Gymnastics at the Tokyo Olympics

Women's gymnastics at the Tokyo Olympics was probably best known for the star who barely competed there. When Simone Biles withdrew from the women's team final one rotation in and then from all but one of her other individual event finals, the field opened up and the competition grew closer.

Many podiums featured athletes competing for smaller and up-and-coming programs, like Italy, Belgium and host country Japan, or countries without a full team in Tokyo, like Brazil and South Korea. Their results will energize their programs for years to come.

Athletes from around the world expressed their support for Biles after she experienced "the twisties"—and for one another—with most events ending with rounds of hugs and selfies that seemed genuine.

Many learned a lot about the importance of listening to athletes during this competition. Simone Biles, 24, the reigning Olympic all-around champion, was widely expected to defend her title, lead the U.S. team to a third straight team gold and medal in all four individual events.

But on her first event, vault, in the team final, Biles appeared to lose her place in the air midflight and landed awkwardly. Moments later, she had scratched from the entire final, citing mental health reasons and the desire not to cost her teammates a medal. 

That's some sportsmanship and points to a deep knowledge of her body and mind. It's reminiscent of the courage she and many other gymnasts showed in detailing their survival of years of sexual abuse by former USA Gymnastics physician Larry Nassar, and Biles' continued fight as the only known survivor competing at an elite level to hold USAG accountable for its failures in preventing it.

After explaining to the world the meaning of the twisties and why they took her out of the running to defend her Olympic titles, Biles went on to withdraw from the individual all-around final, sitting in the stands as her teammate, Sunisa Lee, won gold.

She then withdrew from the vault, bars and floor finals as well, where she watched MyKayla Skinner earn silver, Lee bronze and Jade Carey gold, respectively. She returned to competition this morning, earning bronze in the balance beam final with a routine free of twisting elements, and earned a standing ovation.

United States women's high-performance team coordinator Tom Forster got very, very lucky in Tokyo after his questionable approach to team selection caused problems from the beginning of his tenure three years ago. The Olympic team selection was no exception.

Forster reportedly opposed Jade Carey's plan to vie for the World Cup vault spot and tried to discourage her from going for it; as it turned out, Carey was one of the only members of the U.S. delegation to not find herself ensnared in Forster's selection process. Forster chose the top four all-around finishers at Olympic trials for the Tokyo team, a strategy—or lack thereof—that he had followed for other international teams.

In this case, he suggested, Biles was so dominant that she would effectively carry the team, so why not just be fair? Problem was, he didn't account for whether different team composition might result in higher scores; he scoffed publicly at the idea that the team final would come down to tenths of a point. 

Then, of course, the team final was lost by more than three points. But after Biles removed herself from the individual all-around and three event finals, Forster began to look like the luckiest person in Tokyo.

Sunisa Lee won gold in the all-around. MyKayla Skinner, who thought her Olympics were over and that she would return home with no medal, took silver in the vault final. And Jade Carey won gold in the floor final. Every athlete on the American team and its two specialists will go home with at least one medal.

But that's no thanks to Forster, whose desire to preserve what he called the "integrity of the process" in team selection may have caused several of his athletes unnecessary stress.  

Oksana Chusovitina, 46, competed in her eighth and final Olympics.

She began the sport as a Soviet gymnast and then competed with the Unified Team in 1992 before competing for Uzbekistan in 1996, 2000, and 2004 and for Germany in 2008 and 2012. She returned to Uzbekistan after her son finished treatment for cancer in Germany and began competing under the Uzbekistan flag again. Her son Alisher, now 22, is older than many of her competitors these days.

Chusovitina went out on a high note, wearing a green leotard emblazoned with the No. 8, representing her three decades of Olympic appearances. She won a team gold in the 1992 Games in Barcelona and a silver medal on vault at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. There are five skills named for her in the Code of Points: two on vault, two on bars and, on floor, a double layout with a half twist out of the second flip.

Chusovitina had hoped to compete in one last vault final in Tokyo but failed to make the top eight after qualifications finished July 25. She choked up as she left the podium, waved to the cameras and made a heart sign with her hands as she received a standing ovation.

No one has done more to convince us that gymnastics is not just for the young than Chusovitina.      

Russia's state government ran an extensive doping operation when it hosted the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi and then covered it up, making it impossible to know the depth and breadth of its reach. As punishment, Russian athletes could not compete under their own flag in Tokyo.

A pity, because Russian athletes have not demonstrated this kind of strength and mettle in competition since the Soviet Union disintegrated. The women's artistic gymnasts competing as the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) beat the United States by more than a point to qualify to the team final in first place.

It wasn't a fluke, either; the Russian women, led by Angelina Melnikova in a triumphant role after she crumpled in Rio, won gold in the team final by nearly 3.5 points, its first team gold medal for the motherland since the Unified Team won gold in 1992.

Not to be outdone, the Russian men competing as the ROC also won gold in their team final, despite, as one blogger tweeted, having only three healthy legs between them. Artur Dalaloyan tore his Achilles tendon in April; Denis Ablyazin has titanium plates in both shins after fracturing them in practice in 2019. Both teams stood atop the podium, but their nation's past offenses meant their country's anthem could not be played. 

Brazil, the host country for the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, failed to qualify a full women's gymnastics team for Tokyo. Gymnastics fans breathed a sigh of relief when Flavia Saraiva qualified as an individual competitor for Brazil after placing in the all-around at the 2019 World Championships.

Saraiva injured her foot in Tokyo but qualified for the beam final and finished in seventh place. But the Cinderella story for Brazil was the amazing comeback of Rebeca Andrade, who, after recovering from a third surgery to repair a torn ACL, only found out she would compete in Tokyo in June after qualifying at the Pan American Championships. She snagged one of two continental championship spots available there.

But she came prepared and healthy, and blew everyone away with her superior execution of some difficult routines. Andrade won the silver medal in the individual all-around, becoming the first female Brazilian gymnast to medal at the Olympics. Then she followed that up with a gold medal on vault. Andrade finished fifth in the floor final, going out of bounds on a tumbling pass that hurt her in the all-around.

After her competitions ended, Andrade, who grew up walking two hours to train at her gym, spoke about hoping to inspire other Brazilians. The Brazilian Federation will benefit from Andrade's success in Tokyo, and the country will hopefully return subsequent Olympics stronger for her and Saraiva's performances.

The worst report-card note applied to the Chinese women's team in Tokyo: did not perform up to its potential. 

China was composed of the country's strongest all-arounders in order to compensate for perceived weaknesses on floor and vault while maintaining its prowess on beam and bars. The reality was a team that seemed to succumb to nerves in qualifications, placed a surprising seventh in the team final after two crashes on vault and Lu Yufei's fall off the uneven bars. It failed to medal at all in three out of four event finals.

Fan Yilin, who had clinched the bars spot in the World Cup apparatus meets, fell on her signature dismount in the final. In a redeeming moment, Guan Chenchen—in China's individual spot—won gold on the balance beam on the final day of Olympic gymnastics competition, and team member Tang Xijing took silver.    

Vanessa Ferrari, of Italy, was the first woman to win an all-around world title after the gymnastics scoring system changed from the 10-point system to the open-ended system in 2006.

In recent years, she focused on floor exercise, her favorite event, to preserve her body—she’s 30, and this was her fourth Olympics. She competed on the apparatus World Cup circuit for two years in pursuit of the floor exercise title, which would earn her a nominative spot for the Tokyo Games because she wanted to win a floor medal there.

And in the final meet before the Olympics, in Doha, Qatar, in June, Ferrari got her win and the spot.

Then Italy's four-woman team lost its top all-arounder, Giorgia Villa, to injury just two weeks before Tokyo, and Ferrari was put on the team in her place, with her individual spot going to fellow Italian Lara Mori, the World Cup runner-up for the floor spot.

Ferrari needed to compete in all four events at the Olympics to keep her team in the mix for a medal while also training for the one medal she felt she lacked after she finished fourth on floor at both the 2012 and 2016 Games. She pulled it off, leading the Italian team to a fourth-place finish in the team final.

And on Monday, Ferrari won a silver medal on floor after a dramatic and beautiful routine to “Time to Say Goodbye.” She became the first Italian woman to win an individual gymnastics medal at the Olympics.

Great Britain botched the Olympic selection process for its women, and, as a result, one of the athletes who did make the team, Alice Kinsella, was cyberbullied after she did nothing but perform well at Britain's Olympic trials.

British Gymnastics, to be sure, has its problems. But the team in Tokyo—Kinsella, Amelie Morgan and 16-year-old twins and budding superstars Jennifer and Jessica Gadirova—did the work and emerged from the team final with bronze medals. It was the first team medal for the British women in gymnastics since 1928.

The team's composure belied the turmoil it endured, and its performances, particularly the Gadirovas' show-stopping floor routines in that final—they didn't medal, but they got what passed for an audience in Tokyo clapping along—showed immense promise for the next couple of Games.

Yeo Seo-jeong showed off her eponymous vault—a front handspring onto the vault table followed by a front layout somersault with two twists in flight—and got a bronze medal in return.

That vault had the highest difficulty score in the event final, but an unsteady landing on a less-difficult second vault kept her in third.

She became the first South Korean female gymnast to win an Olympic medal.

She had not performed the vault in competition in two years, after she fell while doing it at the 2019 World Championships and finished last.

Her father, Yeo Hong-chul, won the silver medal on vault for South Korea at the 1996 Olympics, and Yeo Seo-jeong's vault combines the two vaults named for him, the Yeo 1 and the Yeo 2, in the sport's Code of Points.   

Well, the critics were mostly right. The International Gymnastics Federation agreed and won't repeat this mess in 2024. But one thing it got right was having event specialists compete as individuals instead of on their countries' four-woman teams, and the ability to qualify for the Olympics through World Cup wins or nominations by their federations turned out great for those athletes.

It didn't start that way, of course, with the United States' MyKayla Skinner sobbing on the sideline in qualification after being eliminated from the event finals in her top disciplines, vault and floor, and from the individual all-around final as well. Her Olympics appeared over before they had started.

Skinner was a surprise presence in the U.S. individual spot, because her strengths matched those of Jade Carey, who qualified through the World Cup route, and it looked like the concern was warranted when Skinner did not make any finals.

Then Simone Biles could not compete, and Skinner was elevated to the vault final as the first reserve. She won the silver medal.

Carey, in turn, finished eighth in her first international all-around competition. She tripped on the runway during the vault final, causing her to miss out on the podium, but she returned with a vengeance on the floor, winning gold.

Anastasia Iliankova, an individual competitor for the Russian Olympic Committee, won silver in the uneven bars. Vanessa Ferrari, the winner of the floor spot through the World Cup, won silver in that event. China's Guan Chenchen won gold on the balance beam.

Overall, the rule resulted in greater geographic diversity in the finals and especially on the podium, and it increased the quality of competition in the all-around and event finals. Gym fans won't miss the mass confusion that resulted from the intricate qualification processes, but we might miss the results.

Despite finishing last, Danusia Francis, representing Jamaica, received the highest execution score in the women's gymnastics qualification round July 25. This was particularly impressive considering she performed the same skill twice before dismounting from the uneven bars and saluting the judges.

You might be wondering why she's in the W column, then.

Francis, an alternate for the 2012 British Olympic team, had hoped to qualify to the 2016 Games after she finished competing for UCLA. She helped Jamaica qualify, but her spot was given to another gymnast. Francis, though, returned to training after a one-year retirement. She qualified for a spot in these Games as an individual at the 2019 World Championships.

After she arrived in Tokyo, she discovered she had torn her left ACL. She withdrew from the vault, balance beam and floor exercise but was hopeful she could still pull off a bars routine, which would put the least pressure on her injured knee. She managed only two toe-ons and a delicate dismount.

But at the Games, the moment you start competing, you are an Olympian—and so Francis always will be. And she'll always have that less-than-one-point-from-perfect 9.033 execution score.