Scores do not carry over to the team final, but with their difficult routines and Biles’s dominance, the U.S. women have room for error.
Chellsie Memmel, the technical lead of the U.S. high performance staff, said before the competition began that Biles would be given the opportunity to perform on fewer apparatuses in the team final if it helped ease the pressure on her. Landi indicated that bars, Biles’s weakest event, would have been the apparatus she skipped.
But Biles will be in all four lineups, which also means she has an opportunity to debut a new element on bars that will be named for her if she performs it successfully. Biles did not advance to the bars final, so the team competition and the all-around final are her only remaining chances to unveil that skill — a front circling element with a 1½ pirouette — at these Games.
Jade Carey, who said she recently has felt sick, is only in the vault lineup for the team competition. She’s the reigning Olympic gold medalist on floor but struggled in the qualifying round, bailing out of her final tumbling pass. Jordan Chiles is in the lineup on every apparatus. Chiles narrowly missed out on a chance to compete in the all-around final; she finished fourth overall, but because Biles and Sunisa Lee scored better, she could not advance. Countries are limited to two athletes per final.
In the team final, Lee will compete on bars, beam and floor. Hezly Rivera, 16, will not compete at all. Rivera was shaky on beam in the qualifying round, and that was the apparatus on which she had the best chance of competing. It appears the U.S. staff leaned heavily on the results from the qualifying round when determining lineups.
