RIO DE JANEIRO _ On the night before the floor exercise Olympic final in women's gymnastics, Aly Raisman banged on Simone Biles' door at 9:45 p.m. and told her to "keep it down" because Raisman was trying to sleep.
Biles and Raisman recounted the moment Tuesday afternoon, after Biles had won gold and Raisman silver in the floor exercise to cap off another dominating performance by the U.S. women in gymnastics.
"You're fine," Biles said she told Raisman after the door knock. "It's not hibernating time. We always tell Aly you can sleep when you're dead."
Biles stayed up awhile longer Monday. And then she was very much alive one more time in Rio Tuesday, winning a fourth Olympic gold medal with another dazzling floor routine. Biles soaring through the air is a fierce kind of poetry, and her leaps will stand as one of the signature moments of these Rio Games.
"It's amazing," Raisman said of Biles. "I don't even consider myself competing against her. She's just at another level. She's incredible. I'm in awe."
That's the way the women's gymnastics turned out to be at these Olympics _ there was a category for Simone, and there was the non-Simone category for everybody else. The two intersected only once, when on Monday Biles had a bobble on the balance beam and ended up winning only a bronze. Biles won everything else she entered _ the team final, the individual all-around final, the vault and, on Tuesday, the floor exercise.
The beam misstep made Biles briefly seem human, but she was back to being otherworldly again Tuesday and making a case as arguably the greatest female gymnast of all time. That's an argument she would never make personally, though.
"I would never rank myself," she said. "It's weird."
Her floor exercise was 90 seconds of bliss for gymnastics fans, with Biles bouncing and flipping to Brazilian music. Her leaps were so much higher than everyone else's that even a completely untrained eye like mine could see the difference. Her score of 15.966 was nearly a half-point higher than Raisman (15.5), and both of the Americans were another half-point higher than everyone else.
