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One Impressive Fact About Simone Biles' Win

by Morgan Brinlee

The question wasn't so much if Simone Biles would win gold in the women's individual all-around, but by how much. If there was any doubt about her being the greatest gymnast of all time, this fact about Biles' score in the individual all-around final surely cleared things up. Biles didn't just win; she dominated. Biles captured her second gold medal of the 2016 Summer Olympics with a score more than two full points ahead of silver medalist Aly Raisman. That's a margin of victory practically unheard of in a sport where winners are often determined by a tenth, or even a hundredth, of a point.

Many have said Biles is in a league of her own. The 19-year-old hasn't lost a single all-around competition since 2013 and currently holds more World Championship gold medals than any other female gymnast in the history of the sport. Her performance in the individual all-around in Rio made it all the more difficult to dispute claims that there's no one in the gymnastics world currently able to compete on Biles' level.

A stunning floor routine gave Biles an overall score of 62.198 in the individual all-around, 2.1 points ahead of Raisman's impressive 60.098 and about 3.5 points ahead of the third-place finisher, Russia's Aliya Mustafina. While 2 points may not exactly sound impressive to those of us unfamiliar with gymnastics' scoring, it's a margin of victory quite rare to see at this level of competition.

To provide a bit of context on just how impressive Biles' 2.1-point margin of victory is, let's take a look at how gold and silver medals were decided at the last two Olympic Games. At the 2012 London Games, Biles' teammate Gabby Douglas captured gold in the individual all-around with a score just .259 points above Russia's Viktoria Komova. During the 2008 Beijing Games, American gymnast Nastia Liukin won gold with what was, at the time, considered to be a fairly significant margin of .6 points ahead of fellow American Shawn Johnson. The average margin of victory seen at the Olympics in the women's individual all-around event since 1972 is .208 points, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Even Raisman, who proved to be Biles' closest competition in Rio, knew her U.S. teammate competes in a league of her own with everyone else simply vying for silver. "I go into [the individual all-around] knowing that," Raisman told USA Today. "Just because she wins every single competition."