For Olympic silver medalist Jordan Chiles, every gymnastics floor seems to be a dance floor — and that’s absolutely the case with her latest floor routine. At UCLA’s women’s gymnastics home opener this weekend, Chiles performed a ’90s hip-hop floor routine that wowed in energy, vibe, and execution, earning the near-perfect score of 9.975.
She opens the routine with DJ Kool’s “Let Me Clear My Throat,” powering through a double layout pass and demonstrating the definition of “sticking the landing.” Then she dances through Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” and “Shoop,” nailing a double back tuck pass, and finishes with an absurdly high double pike. The crowd gets louder after every landing and explodes when she finishes, with attitude, on the floor, her legs and arms crossed.
The Instagram video of the performance, posted by the PAC-12 conference (the NCAA conference, which broadcasted the meet), was captioned with: “Jordan Chiles ATE this routine 🔥.” Fans can’t get enough of Chiles or her performance. One user commented, “as usual, ate and left no crumbs,” while another wrote: “She just sent everybody a message –I don’t care different country or continent. UCLA, HipHop is real; it’s taken over gymnastics! For black history month Lady Chiles going to be the first person I show. Amazed!”
Back in September 2022, Chiles told POPSUGAR: “What people see is Jordan Chiles, the Olympian, the girl who stepped in and helped [at the Olympics].” But she wants to be remembered as more than an Olympic hero: she’s also “[t]hat same girl who’s going to bring the joy and the fun to the sport.”
And what’s better proof of that than this floor routine? On the same video posted by PAC-12 on TikTok, one user commented: “You can tell she was having FUN. Love to see that for the sport.”
The routine earned her and UCLA first place on the event, tying for first with fellow Olympian and Oregon State gymnast Jade Carey. In true Olympic fashion, the two gymnasts snagged every top spot at the meet: Chiles scored first on bars and Carey won beam, vault, and the all-around title for the meet with a score of 39.775, just ahead of Chiles’s score of 39.700.
Chiles and Carey also made history in August 2022 when they became the first US Olympic women’s gymnastics athletes to follow up a college gymnastics season with a return to elite competition. The 2023 NCAA gymnastics season is just beginning — and we’re still more than a year out from the 2024 Olympics in Paris — but we’ll place our bets on these two gymnasts making history again sometime soon.
Image Source: Getty Images / Katharine Lotze