At the world championships in Glasgow, Scotland, in October, U.S. national champion Simone Biles took an uncharacteristic step on her vault landing. She had a major wobble during her beam routine. She landed out of bounds on floor.
It was neither her cleanest performance nor her most dominant, yet she won by 1.083 points over her teammate, defending Olympic all-around champ Gabby Douglas. It was Biles' third consecutive world title and her biggest margin of victory. In the past decade, an American gymnast has held the world all-around title seven times.
To say the U.S. is dominating women's gymnastics is like saying Serena Williams is having a respectable career. In the two decades since the Magnificent Seven became the first U.S. team to win an Olympic team gold in 1996, the American women's team has finished in the top three at every Olympics -- and the 2004, 2008 and 2012 individual all-around gold medalists were Americans. In Rio, the American women will compete routines and vaults so weighted in difficulty that it is plausible for them to have multiple falls and still secure a dominant team victory.
As we prepare to watch the five-woman U.S. team compete in Rio, we take a look at four of the reasons for the dramatic shift in gymnastics dominance and ask if the rest of the world will ever catch up.
1. The breakup of the Soviet Union
Most gymnastics experts point to one world event as being the most influential in reshaping the landscape of the sport: the dissolution of the Soviet Union, once home to the most dominant gymnastics program in the world. From 1952 to 1992, the Soviet Union won every Olympic team gold except one, when the Soviets boycotted the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. (In 1992, 12 of the 15 former Soviet republics competed as the Unified Team and won gold.)
As athletes departed for their respective republics in the early '90s, the powerhouse Soviet team was diluted, and eventually the programs of once dominant eastern European teams faced the same hardship. Coaches from Russia, Romania and Ukraine left for the U.S. and western European countries such as France and Italy in search of more opportunities and better-paying jobs. The most significant line in that story came when Bela and Martha Karolyi defected to the United States from Romania in 1981.
2. The semi-centralized national team training program
"I don't know if there has been a system that was as well thought out," NBC analyst Tim Daggett said of the U.S. national program, which has been run by the Karolyis since 1999. "In the past, the dominant teams were those with centralized programs, and everyone thought that was best."
The problem with centralized programs, Dagget said, is motivation. It is difficult to keep athletes motivated inside a bubble, when they train in the same place with the same coaches beside the same gymnasts day in and day out for years.
"With the U.S. women's team's semi-centralized program, they get together on a regular basis, but there is always a freshness to it," he said. "It's motivating to the athletes and their coaches, and when they go back to their home gyms, the amount of knowledge that transfers from gymnast to gymnast and coach to coach is amazing."
That spread of information and training techniques means Olympic-caliber gymnasts no longer have to leave their homes and families to train with Olympic-caliber coaches. Aimee Boorman, who was recently named head coach of the U.S. Olympic team, is bringing her first elite gymnast in Biles, and Maggie Haney will do the same with 16-year-old Laurie Hernandez, the first elite gymnast to train at her gym.
"This is what we want, to educate," said national team coordinator Martha Karolyi, who is retiring after Rio. "To pick up young kids and expose them to the expectations for world-class gymnasts. Laurie [Hernandez] doesn't feel so intimidated because she was part of the training camps and her coach comes to the program. Now she has international experience that is good for her coaching and her gym. We also coach the coaches."
3. The massive number of gymnastics clubs in the U.S.
After the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, little girls across the U.S. wanted to be Mary Lou Retton, the first American gymnast to win an Olympic gold medal. To accommodate that interest, gymnastics centers began cropping up across the country.
"When I started gymnastics, there was no gym in my area," said Kathy Johnson Clarke, a former Olympian and commentator for the SEC Network. "I had to move away from home to train."
Today, there are more than 175 gymnastics clubs in Florida, where Clarke grew up.
"There are more quality gyms that can develop an athlete now," Clarke said. "We have that system in place, and it's taken our sport to a whole new level."
In other words, while coaching and training techniques improved, the talent pool deepened. Today, there are more than 2,000 gymnastics clubs around the country training upwards of five million kids. The chance, then, of a future Simone Biles or Gabby Douglas walking into a gym is much larger than in countries with inadequate grassroots programs.
"Just at our gym in Norman, Oklahoma, we have 1,500 kids and 35 coaches, and if we never put a kid on a national team, it is still a good business, and parents feel their kids got a quality experience," said Olympic gold medalist Bart Conner, who, along with his wife, Nadia Comaneci, runs the Bart Conner Gymnastics Academy. "European coaches come here, and they look around the gym for the best one or two athletes. In the U.S., we work with everyone. There aren't grassroots programs left in those former powerhouse countries. There is no feeder system, and now we're seeing the results of that. We could have predicted this shift 30 years ago."
4. The open-ended scoring system
In 2006, the 10-point judging system was dropped in favor of the current Code of Points, which was created in response to several judging controversies at the Athens Olympics and intended to make judging less subjective.
In the new open-ended scoring, each element is assigned a point value and connections between skills increase that value, which places a premium on power and difficulty.
"When they went to the open-ended scoring system, the genie came out of the bottle, and good luck putting it back in," Johnson Clarke said. "You would be crazy to not jam-pack your routine with as much difficulty as possible to elevate that area of the scoring."
That is exactly what the U.S. women have often done.
"In Simone's third tumbling pass, she does what many men do in their opening pass," Johnson Clarke said. "She is an extraordinary physical talent, and then you add using the Code of Points to her benefit, and she's made herself untouchable. She can make mistakes and still be points ahead. That's unfortunate. I don't think they had that in mind when they changed the Code of Points. I'm sure other countries are trying to find and develop that type of athletic component in their gymnastics. We are just so way ahead."
The Code rewards power skills, which the U.S. has been known for since the days of Retton. That also opens the sport to more body types and more mature gymnasts. Just look at this year's squad: They are muscular and powerful, and the average age on the U.S. team is 19.2. Three-time defending world champion Simone Biles is 19. Aly Raisman, who returns for her second straight Olympics, is 22. Douglas, the reigning Olympic all-around champion, is 20. For comparison, the average age of the 1996 Magnificent Seven squad was 17.7.
But Daggett insists that while the Code favors the type of athlete the U.S. currently boasts, if the Code changed tomorrow, those same gymnasts would still rule the podium: "They could completely rewrite the rules, and if the same effort and work ethic and dedication continued, this group of girls would be just as dominant."
However, he cautions, nothing lasts forever.
"Dynasties always fall," he said. "I don't know how it can happen when I look at the U.S. relative to everyone else, but I'm not foolish enough to not recognize that whoever is on top doesn't always stay on top."
For now, the U.S. program is so strong that its gymnasts will likely remain on top, even if they fall in competition.