Gymnast Simone Biles adds new move to floor routine

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The competition isn’t the judges. Or the rest of the field. Or even the sport she’s dominated for most of a decade. Simone Biles conquered all of them long ago.

What drives Biles is the voice in her head, the one that tells the best gymnast in the world that perfection is the only standard, even while attempting skills that no other woman on the planet (and very few men) can match.

That’s why her anger was so palpable during the opening night of the U.S. women’s gymnastics championships Friday. She shorted her triple-twisting double-flip (a “triple-double”) on floor, a mistake that had the Olympic champion on the verge of tears. Her uneven bars were messy. The block on her Amanar vault dangerously close to disaster.

That her all-around total of 58.650 led Sunisa Lee by 1.750 — putting a sixth national title easily within reach heading into Sunday — is immaterial.

“I still get really frustrated because I know how good I am and how well I can do,” she said. “So I just want to do the best routine for the audience and for myself out here.”

For Biles, that means packing her sets with an unparalleled level of difficulty, a choice she makes not out of ego by respect for her immense talent.

She didn’t have to add the triple-double to the end of her first tumbling pass. She just wanted to see if she could do it. She didn’t have to throw in a double-twisting double-flip dismount on beam. But after toying with it in practice for the past five years just for kicks, she figured it was time to see if she could do it when it mattered.

Her results on Friday were mixed. She was a little too jacked on floor and the inability to control her adrenaline “efficiently” as coach Laurent Landi put it, cost her. She shorted the landing,...