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Gymnastics: A lot of people will be wanting to know what’s happening with Simone Biles after a couple of mistakes in qualifying today. The short version is that we’ve had three subdivisions of qualifying and the USA were in the third. There is a subdivision happening now including the teams from Canada, France, Spain and Switzerland, and there’ll be a fifth subdivision later including Korea, Germany, Brazil and Belgium.
Currently the USA team is ranked second. On the individual apparatus results, Biles is first on vault and second on floor, but liable to be knocked out from eighth spot on uneven bars and sixth on beam. So most likely she’ll contest the floor, vault, all-around, and team medals.
Cycling: This is quite the twist. Watching the scenes over the finish line, van Vleuten actually thought that she’d won. There was that breakaway of three, then the peloton caught two. At that point, van Vleuten must have thought that they’d reeled in all the attackers. They never knew that there was still one attacker way out there in front, all on her own. So instead of trying to catch her they played cat and mouse with one another. Kiesenhofer was so far ahead that they didn’t know she existed anymore, and she crossed the line so far ahead that there was no sign of her when van Vleuten pushed up towards the line herself. So van Vleuten was in tears of joy at coming first, but then had to be told that she’d come second instead. The expressions on her face alone have told a story.
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