PARIS, France — In the final event of her comeback campaign in Paris, Simone Biles stunned audiences with her stellar floor exercise.
Biles added an 11th medal to her Olympic career in Monday's floor finals with another silver. Her epic medal performance came within hours of slipping off the apparatus in the balance beam event final.
Brazil's Rebeca Andrade won gold in the floor exercise by .033.
The 27-year-old Biles, considered the greatest in the history of the sport, wasn’t at her usual best during a routine set to music from pop icons Taylor Swift and Beyonce.
But with a uniform change and a fresh mindset, Biles clinched her fourth medal in Paris — just one less than she did eight years ago in Rio de Janeiro.
“I can’t be more proud of how I’ve done," Biles said. “I’m 27 years old walking away from this Games with four medals to add to my collection. Not mad about it.”
Her fellow teammate Jordan Chiles also performed a fan-favorite routine set to Beyonce tunes. She also earned a spot on the medal stand, alongside Biles and Andrade.
Chiles won a bronze medal after a last-minute score change.
The 23-year-old — the last competitor of the day — initially received a 13.666 from judges. After some delay, her total was boosted by 0.1 when she filed an inquiry about her difficulty score, pushing Chiles past Romanians Ana Barbosu and Sabrina Maneca-Voinea and into third.
Biles ended nine days of competition in Paris by silencing the critics once and for all who have long derided her for pulling out of multiple events at the Tokyo Games three years ago.
There was plenty of history on the line for Biles in what could have been the last competition of her Olympic career.
The 27-year-old Olympian is now tied with Czechoslovakia's Vera Caslavska for the second-most medals by a female gymnast in Olympic history, trailing only former Soviet Union great Larisa Latynina's 18.
Floor exercise is Biles’ signature event, one that allows her to mix boundary-pushing tumbling passes that are the hardest ever done in her sport with charismatic choreography that work together to produce perhaps the most exciting 75 seconds in her sport.
The excitement, however, was tinged a bit by an uncharacteristic lapse in execution.
The routine ends with Biles blowing a kiss, a little wink that she has incorporated into her program in various forms for years.
Whether it served as a kiss goodbye remains anyone’s guess. Maybe even Biles’.
She has stayed relatively quiet on what lies ahead for her beyond the Paris Games, though she did nudge the door open a little for a possible return when the Olympics shift to Los Angeles in 2028.
“Never say never,” Biles said after claiming her second Olympic vault title earlier in the Games. “Next Olympics are at home. So you just never know. I am getting really old.”