Simone Biles is gearing up to attempt a vault so dangerous that no woman has ever tried it in competition
- Simone Biles is ready to try a skill so difficult that no woman has ever attempted it in competition.
- The Yurchenko double pike vault features a roundoff back-handspring into two straight-legged flips.
- A recent 60 Minutes feature included a clip of Biles trying and nearly landing the stunt in the gym.
Simone Biles already has many unprecedented feats under her belt, but her latest stunt may be the most ambitious and most impressive yet.
The 23-year-old gymnastics superstar is set to try a skill so challenging and dangerous that no woman has ever even attempted to pull it off in competition before.
Biles has her eyes set on a Yurchenko double pike. The complex vault requires a gymnast to complete a roundoff back-handspring entry into the vaulting table, then execute two full backward rotations with legs extended before, ideally, sticking the landing.
"It's very, very challenging," one of Biles' coaches, Laurent Landi, said during a recent segment on "60 Minutes." "And what's scary, it's that people can get hurt. You do a short landing, you can hurt your ankles ... it's a very dangerous vault."
Biles certainly doesn't need to take the risk of this magnitude to find success at this point in her esteemed gymnastics career. With four Olympic gold medals and more World Championship victories than any other athlete in the history of the sport, Biles could easily lean on the skills she's employed in the past to cruise to victory.
But instead, she's choosing to push herself heading into the Tokyo Olympics. Landis explained that, without that motivation to reach new heights, Biles' final year as an elite-level gymnast would "become very, very boring for everybody."
During Biles' feature on "60 Minutes" that aired on Sunday, the superstar is seen in the gym working on the Yurchenko double pike. In one clip, Biles pulls off the approach and in-air components cleanly but doesn't manage to set her feet on the dismount. Her feet hit the floor hard after the second flip, and she falls back onto the mat with her arms above her head and legs in the air.
But in her second attempt shown on-screen, Biles completes the skill and lands on her feet. With padding beneath her, Biles needed just one step forward to maintain her balance and complete the trick without falling.
"I think she's opened the eyes to everybody that this can be done," Biles' other coach, Cecile Landi, told "60 Minutes." "When I think a lot of people believed that a female could not do it."
With five months remaining between the show's airing and the Tokyo Olympics, there's still plenty of time for Biles to fine-tune the rest. Check out her progress from the "60 Minutes" segment below: