It was exciting until the last exercise: the new all-around Olympic champion in gymnastics is an American for the fifth time in a row, and her name is Sunisa Lee.

This is only a surprise insofar as the world assumed it would be the 2016 Olympic champion, team-mate Simone Biles, but who was watching the competition from the stands.

Like Lee, Rebeca Andrade from Brazil was second and Angelina Melnikowa from Russia was third among the favorites.

And it was really big in this final: around ten gymnasts were eligible for a medal. Not least because of this, the competition in the four rounds, in which six gymnasts act on the equipment at the same time, developed into a kind of elimination gymnastics: Those who got through without a fall or gross mistake stayed in the race.

In the first round, in which the six best of the qualification started on the vault, all remained flawless. The only difference was the level of difficulty. Rebeca Andrade took the lead with a so-called Cheng, which is worth 6.0 points, ahead of Jade Carey, the US gymnast who had moved up for Biles in the competition and showed the same jump. The difficulty of the competitors was 5.4 - six tenths, which cannot be caught up by no amount of good execution. In this first round, the Chinese Lu Yufei was eliminated from the race after falling on the parallel bars.

In the second round, it hit teammate Tang Xijing, who fell from the beam.

Just like the young Briton Jessica Gadirova, who - also a novelty - was in the final together with her twin sister Jennifer.

The group of the top six did not make a mistake.

Sunisa Lee took a razor-thin lead.

Better than Biles before

Lee had already defeated Biles in a four-way battle in the internal eliminations in the USA in June.

Her life has been marked by strokes of fate: After her father was paralyzed from the garden ladder shortly before her first World Cup in 2019, the 18-year-old lost several close relatives this year who died of COVID-19.

She is the first US Olympic starter from the Hmong community, an indigenous ethnic group from East and Southeast Asia.

In the third run, her team colleague Jade Carey dropped out of the race. Otherwise none of the top gymnasts were naked. Andrade and Melnikowa, the only two who already had Olympic experience from Rio 2016, were just behind them. In the interim result, the oldest gymnast in the field, 32-year-old Kim Bui from Stuttgart, was eighth for a short time. At her third Olympic Games she was in the all-around finals for the first time and should be satisfied with a flawless competition and 17th place in the final score.

At this point it was clear that in this final there would actually be a showdown of the best on the last device. The starting order is set so that the best gymnast in qualification is last in the competition. So Rebeca Andrade had it in hand. Alone: ​​Your feet left the border of the floor area twice. The corresponding deduction cost her the gold medal, but the 22-year-old, who had qualified as a single starter for these games after three cruciate ligament tears in the same knee, did not look sad about silver. Rather unnoticed by all of this, Elisabeth Seitz has advanced to a remarkable ninth place with her last device, the parallel bars, on which she stands on Sunday with hopes for a medal in the final.