The 2024 U.S. women’s gymnastics team won gold during the women’s gymnastics team competition on Tuesday, July 30, marking their first victory of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.
Following an amazing floor performance from Simone Biles, her teammates Suni Lee, Jordan Chiles, Jade Carey and Hezly Rivera burst into cheers before joining her on stage to pose for pics with the American flag. The group shared several hugs before taking the flag on a celebratory run across the floor.
Winning silver behind Team USA was Italy’s women’s gymnastics team, followed by Brazil with the bronze medal.
With the team’s gold medal winner, Biles, 27, has officially surpassed Shannon Miller as the most decorated American Olympic gymnast.
Team USA remained at the top of the leaderboard through most of Tuesday’s competition, as Biles, Lee, 21, Chiles, 23, and Carey, 24, showed off their skills on the vault, uneven bars, balance beam and during the floor exercise. Though newcomer Rivera, 16, did not compete during the team event — as she did not qualify for any individual finals — she still received a medal alongside her teammates.
The Team USA women’s gymnasts will follow up their [victory/loss] at the women’s all-around competition on Thursday, August 1, followed by the individual event finals from Saturday, August 3, through Monday, August 5.
Ahead of her performance on Tuesday, Biles suffered a calf injury during the all-around qualifiers on Sunday, July 28. Pushing through the pain, she taped up her leg after her balance beam routine and continued to compete in her subsequent events. Biles sported more tape on her leg again on Tuesday.
“She felt a little something in her calf. But yeah, that’s all,” her coach Cecile Landi told CNN on Sunday.
The Paris Olympics marked Biles’ comeback to gymnastics after she withdrew from several events at the 2020 Tokyo Games due to the “twisties,” a term used to describe a gymnast’s loss of control during competition. The team ultimately scored silver in that year’s team competition.
In an interview with Today’s Hoda Kotb earlier this month, Biles described this year’s Olympics as being a “redemption tour” for her and her teammates. “In Tokyo, we all didn’t have our best performances, so we’re excited to go out there and kill it,” she stated.
While Biles overcame mental health struggles before heading to Paris, Lee battled her own health issues after the last Olympics after being diagnosed with two kinds of kidney disease.
“It feels absolutely insane. It was just such a hard, incredible journey,” Lee told Kotb, 59, of her health battle. “There were so many times where I thought about quitting and just giving up because I was so sick, and it was just so hard to stay motivated, watching everybody get better and I can’t even get back into the gym, and constantly self-doubting myself. But once I had those people around me who lifted me up and supported me, I knew that this is something that I wanted.”
