In her 1st of 2 gymnastic events on her last Olympic day, Biles misses out on a medal

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PARIS — The balance beam can bedevil even the finest gymnast, as Monday’s Olympic final showed.

It is perhaps the trickiest apparatus in women’s gymnastics. Athletes must pack as many skills as they can into a 90-second routine — back handsprings, one-legged turns, flips, jumps and leaps, all performed on an apparatus just four inches wide.

The U.S. gymnast Simone Biles, perhaps the greatest the sport has ever seen, had been near flawless in this Olympic Games. Before Monday, she had won the gold medal in every event she entered.

But in the balance beam final, a flip layout midway through Biles’s routine proved too off-kilter, and Biles slipped and fell to the mat. Ultimately, her score of 13.1 was not enough to earn her a medal.

It was one of those days on the balance beam; many of the other competitors in the final also fell or wobbled badly. Italy’s Alice D’Amato, one of the few to perform her routine without a major error, took the gold. China’s Zhou Yaqin won silver, followed by Italy’s Manila Esposito with bronze.

The beam final was the first of two competitions for Biles on Monday. The second, the floor exercise, in which she is the favorite to win gold, will follow about two hours later.

The U.S. gymnast Suni Lee also participated in Monday’s beam final, but a bad fall during her routine doomed her chances too at a medal.

Monday marked Biles’s final day of competition at the 2024 Olympic Games, and perhaps as what may be her final Olympic Games comes to a close. She has won 10 Olympic medals in her career, seven of them gold.

At 27, Biles is already older than most elite female gymnasts. After the 25-year-old Rebeca Andrade and 23-year-old Jordan Chiles, no competitor who faced Biles on Monday was older than 21. Most were still in their teens.

Biles has not said whether she intends to retire from gymnastics after the Olympics. On Sunday, she chastised journalists for inquiring.

“You guys really gotta stop asking athletes what’s next after they win a medal at the Olympics,” she wrote on the social media site X. “Let us soak up the moment we’ve worked our whole lives for.” (When one user asked what her next step would be after Paris, Biles replied: “babysitting the medal.”)