Simone Biles led her Olympic and club teammate Jordan Chiles by 2.5 points after the first day of competition at the Olympic trials.
Reigning Olympic all-around champion Suni Lee rounded out the top three.
Biles is four routines away from making her third quarter Olympic team. The women’s gymnastics team competing in Paris will be named on Sunday, but all three front-runnerd are injured.
Kayla DiCello and Shilese Jones both suffered apparent injuries on the vault and were carried off by medical staff. Dicello ruptured her Achilles and will miss the rest of the trials.
“While this is not the result I envisioned, there’s so much to be proud of,” DiCello said in an Instagram post.
“Years of tireless work and dedication in the gym with the dream of representing my country once more at the Olympic Games. Pushing myself to go after new skills, new dreams.”
Skye Blakely, a 19-year-old Texas native, also suffered a season-ending Achilles rupture during podium training Wednesday.
Biles started her night with a clean set on bars, and at halfway point for the first time in a long time Biles was not leading.
She was three-tenths behind Leanne Wong, who debuted a new vault upgrade, the Cheng. She initially received a 2-point deduction for a one-handed take off, but Wong appealed her score and eventually received a 14.450.
During her floor performance, Biles took the bull by the horn. The crowd in the arena immediately took to their feet in the fourth rotation once she landed her eponymous vault, a Yurchenko double pike. She became the highest for the night.
The Yurchenko double pike is the most difficult, piece of women’s gymnastics being done in the world right now.
Lee, the reigning Olympic all-around champion performed a Nabieva to a Bhardwaj, earning a 14.400.
The top all-around finisher after two days of competition at the trials will get an automatic spot on the five-member women’s Olympic team.
The four other women competing in Paris will be determined by a selection committee, which will use the results from the trials and previous competitions to complete the team.
