Simone Biles leads U.S. women's gymnastics team to world gold after teammate's injury

Simone Biles led the U.S. women’s gymnastics team to another team gold medal at the Artistic Gymnastics World Championships in Antwerp, Belgium, on Wednesday.

The win is the seventh in a row for the U.S. team and the 26th world medal for Biles.

The competition started on a tough note for Team USA, with Joscelyn Roberson, who trains alongside Biles at World Champions Centre in Spring, Texas, sustaining an injury in warmups and being carried off the podium before the first rotation. Roberson appeared to land at a low angle while she was warming up for a difficult vault called the "Cheng," which Biles also performs.

Her teammate Leanne Wong substituted for Roberson on the vault and the floor exercise. Wong had planned to compete in only one event — the balance beam — and she delivered clutch routines in Roberson's place on extremely short notice.

Despite competing with only four gymnasts instead of five, the U.S. team finished over 2 points ahead of the silver medal-winning team, Brazil. It was the first world team medal for Brazil, led by the reigning world champion, Rebeca Andrade. The team from France claimed the bronze for its first team medal since 1950.

Shilese Jones, the 2022 world all-around silver medalist, started Team USA off with a strong double-twisting Yurchenko on the vault. Wong performed the same vault after a very brief warmup, cementing her spot on the team as a reliable athlete in a pinch. Biles did not compete with her new Yurchenko double pike vault but opted for a Cheng — the vault Roberson fell on in warmups — and scored a 14.800.

After a stellar bars rotation for Team USA, Wong fell off the balance beam, incurring a full point deduction. The routine scored a brutal 11.700, but hit routines by Jones and Biles kept the U.S. in first place going into the fourth and final rotation.

Biles anchored the team's effort on the floor exercise, solidifying their win with an enormous 15.166.

The team from Great Britain, which entered the final as the silver medal favorites, counted three falls in a performance that took it off the podium. The other teams in medal contention — Brazil and China — had falls on the beam and in the floor exercise respectively, opening the door for France to contend for a medal. It was the only team with no falls Wednesday.

"Nobody wants these medals," NBC commentator Samantha Peszek, a 2008 Olympic silver medalist, joked on the Peacock broadcast.

The U.S. women dominated the qualification round, with two members qualifying for every final. Biles qualified in first place for the all-around, vault, floor exercise and balance beam finals and in fifth place for the uneven bars final, which is considered to be her “weakest” event.

Biles will be joined by Jones in the all-around, floor, uneven bars and balance beam finals. Roberson qualified to the vault final, as well, but the status of her injury has yet to be announced.

The reigning Olympic champion in the team competition, Russia, was banned for the second consecutive year because of the war in Ukraine. It was the final opportunity to qualify a team for the 2024 Olympics, and Russian's absence here makes it ineligible to compete in Paris as of now.

In the qualification round Sunday, Biles became the first woman to land a new vault, the Yurchenko double pike, successfully getting the skill named after her in the code of points. It has been awarded a difficulty score of 6.4 — the highest of any vault in women’s gymnastics — and will be called the "Biles II," as it is her second original skill on the apparatus.

The championships are being held in the city and venue where Biles made her international debut and won her first world title 10 years ago at age 16. The qualification round Sunday marked her return to international competition after she struggled with the "twisties" and pulled out of multiple events at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.

“I think we have to be a little bit more cautious about the way we do things,” she said in a recent interview with NBC's “TODAY” show. “Everything that we’re doing leading up to [Paris 2024] is very intentional. We’ve kind of been playing it on the down-low this time, making sure mentally and physically are both intact.”

Biles took a two-year hiatus from the sport, during which she married NFL player Jonathan Owens and focused on “being intentional, going to therapy and making sure everything is aligned so that [she] can do [her] best in the gym, be a good wife, good daughter, good friend, all the good things.”

The all-around final, in which Biles and Jones will compete for individual all-around medals, will be broadcast live on Peacock on Friday. The individual apparatus finals for the vault and the uneven bars are scheduled for Saturday, and balance beam and floor finals are scheduled for the final day of competition Sunday.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com