[imagesource: Twitter / Timothy Burke]

There isn’t too much we can say about US gymnastics superstar Simone Biles that hasn’t been said before.

She has radical moves named after her.

She recently became the first female gymnast to land the Yurchenko double pike in competition.

All in all, you won’t find much of an argument when people call her the greatest gymnast that has ever lived.

Another near-universal truth is that everything looks better in super slow-motion, including one of Biles’ moves during Friday’s routine at the US Gymnastics Championships.

For her floor routine, Biles performed two back-to-back eponymous moves, starting with a triple-twisting double back, and it’s her first pass that has been slowed way, way down.

She sticks the landing, too, of course:

Marvellous.

The song is Courtney Love’s ‘Highlights’. Saved you a Shazam – you’re welcome.

Here’s the Twitter video which first propelled the footage to virality, racking up more than four million views:

Simone Biles, in extreme slow motion. pic.twitter.com/d43PPTg87O

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) June 5, 2021

Burke, who posted another viral slow-mo of Biles in 2019, explained some of the technical aspects of the video to Huff Post:

“In that time I’ve worked on developing better, GPU-accelerated neural net processes to slow down video, and this was a test of that,” Burke explained.

“The new video was slowed down 16x, and then ironically sped up 2x because Twitter couldn’t handle the resulting high-speed frame rate.”

Thanks, but the real star of the show remains the truly extraordinary athlete.

[source:huffpost]