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Biles, Sunisa Lee, Jordan Chiles and Grace McCallum make up the American team. Biles and McCallum will compete on all machines. Chiles will do the vault and floor exercise, and Lee will tackle the uneven bars and beam.
This week, Tom Forster, the high performance coordinator who oversees Team USA, appeared to select the top three Americans from the qualifying round to compete in each event of the final. This is an approach he has used in the past, but which many in the gymnastics community have criticized as non-strategic, as it can exclude gymnasts with higher scoring potential.
To win gold, the US team must run clean. Biles could perform a Yurchenko double pike, the most difficult jump in women’s gymnastics, but will pay special attention to better controlling all of her landings to increase her execution scores.
The United States are betting on Chiles, who fell in qualifying, to return to his usual rock-solid form. On bars, Lee will aim to tie together his most demanding skills so that his routine, the most difficult in the world, achieves its maximum difficulty score. McCallum is the key to the safe and will be looking to increase his scores on the beam and floor.
Jade Carey and MyKayla Skinner will be absent as they are not team competitors. Carey will be back for the vault and floor finals next week. Skinner, however, will be the first American gymnast in 33 years not to win an Olympic medal, despite being ahead of some Americans in qualifying. She also misses the individual finals due to the two-per-country rule, but qualified third in vault and 11th in all-around.
China and Russia were initially scheduled to compete for the silver medal. This perspective has changed.
Expect the Russian team, led by Olympic veteran Angelina Melnikova, to impress on uneven bars. The team’s biggest handicap, however, is the beam. The Russians had the best score there on Sunday, but face pressure to repeat that demonstration if they want a scoring cushion. In addition, Russia profited the most from the delay in the Olympic year: Viktoria Listunova, 16, would have been too young to compete if the Games had been held in 2020.
Russia qualified ahead of China by nearly five points. The Chinese team will need to set high marks on the beam, their flagship event, but even the perfection there will not make up for any weakness in the jump and floor exercise. Tang Xijing, who placed second behind Biles in the all-around at the last world championships, is crucial to the team’s hopes: she is the only Chinese gymnast to participate in every event of the final.
France had a good first outing, qualifying fourth. In contrast, Japan qualified eighth. Mélanie de Jesus dos Santos, the best French gymnast, and Mai Murakami, the multiple world medalist from Japan, will need extraordinary encounters – and will need the best teams to do some crashes – for their countries to win a medal.
Great Britain and Italy will likely struggle to fight for the podium. Great Britain had a tough qualification after leaving veteran Becky Downie at home, despite her big goal potential on bars. Italy’s top gymnast Giorgia Villa is sidelined with an ankle injury.
The Belgian team qualified in fifth place, securing their best result in the team event since 1948, when they placed 11th. The Belgians are best known for their offbeat choreography on the ground, and for Nina Derwael, the world champion who qualified ahead of Lee on the bars.
The United States has reigned supreme in women’s gymnastics for more than a decade, with Russia’s last team loss in 2010 by just two-tenths of a point. Since then, and especially with the emergence of Simone Biles on the world stage in 2013, the American team seems unstoppable.
But Biles and his teammates are human, and humans aren’t perfect. On Sunday, the Russian team beat the odds by qualifying for the Olympic team final in first place. The USA team finished second, behind by more than a point, which created a potentially exciting showdown in Tuesday’s final.
The U.S. team were far from their best at the start and were perhaps rated more critically and fairly than they had been at home during the pandemic. In international competitions, judges tend to take larger point deductions for execution errors – not hitting a perfect jump, not pointing the toes, or making a tumbling pass with a low chest position. – compensating for high marks for difficulty.
These kinds of mistakes, and more obvious ones, hurt the Americans in qualifying. The slate is cleared for the team final, where every score counts.
The competition is scheduled for 7:45 p.m. Tuesday in Tokyo, or 6:45 a.m. EDT (a 13 hour shift).
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TO WATCH LIVE: The action can be streamed live via the NBC Olympics site, Peacock or the NBC Sports app.
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TAPE DELAY: Many fans will prefer to watch the delayed broadcast, which will air on NBC at 8 p.m. EST Tuesday night or to air a rerun. To avoid spoilers, turn off mobile news notifications and try to stay away from social media.
The eight countries in the final are Russia, the United States, China, France, Belgium, Great Britain, Italy and Japan. They will be divided into four pairs of teams that rotate between vault, uneven bars, beam and floor exercise.
Eight countries will present three gymnasts on each apparatus – vault, uneven bars, beam and floor exercise – and all scores will count towards the total score of each team. The American and Russian teams will both start on vault. (With their country technically banned from the Games due to a state-sponsored doping program, Russian athletes compete under the banner of the Russian Olympic Committee or ROC)
Each routine will receive a “D score” for difficulty (such as a 5.4 for the common Yurchenko double twist jump) and an “E score” for execution (starting at 10 and decreasing for errors). The two scores are combined, so the Yurchenko double twist could earn a maximum possible score of 15.4. For a more detailed explanation, watch this helpful video:
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