During last week’s qualification rounds of the 2019 world championships, Simone Biles got two skills named after her. During the Americans’ first rotation on floor, Biles performed the triple twisting double somersault that went viral after the US national championships in August. And then as the anchor for the US on their final event, the balance beam, Biles did two back handsprings into a double twisting double somersault. She landed with just a small hop back. Biles turned to the judges, saluted and gave herself a round of applause before stepping off the podium to rejoin her team and await her score.

She scored 14.8. This was lower than she would’ve liked it to be, lower than she expected it to be when she first introduced the dismount at US nationals in August. When USA Gymnastics submitted the skill on Biles’s behalf last week before the start of podium training in Stuttgart, the women’s technical committee of the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) gave the double double – the most difficult beam dismount ever attempted – an H rating when everyone had been expecting them to give it a J, the same evaluation that her triple double on floor was awarded. (Skills are rated with letters with A being the easiest. As the letters progress through the alphabet, the difficulty rating – and point value – of the skill increases.) J skills are worth a full point. In a sport like gymnastics where margins of victory can be razor-thin, earning a point for a single element is a major boost.

Biles and many others had expected the J rating because of how other dismounts on beam are valued: the double back with just one full twist is an E on floor but a G when it’s done off the beam. That’s a three-level jump in difficulty. The double double when done on floor has a G rating so it was natural to assume that it would also jump up three levels when transferred to the beam. The women’s technical committee (WTC), which decides on the values for skills in the women’s repertoire, is clearly being inconsistent in this case. The question is why.

For Biles, the reason for the snub is personal. When Biles learned that her new dismount wouldn’t get the J, she called bullshit on Twitter. She also spoke candidly to NBC about being “pissed off” for not being properly rewarded for her innovation.

Before Rio, I wouldn’t have called Biles a particularly innovative, boundary-pushing gymnast. True, she had a skill named after her on floor but so do a lot of people. What made Biles special in the early years of her senior career was her capacity for difficult skills, the fact that she could do more of them in a single routine than most could, and the seeming ease with which she performed these incredibly difficult elements. But since the 2016 Olympics, Biles has placed a special emphasis on bringing new skills into the sport. The double double off beam is the third skill she’s introduced since 2018.

Biles said that she believed that a different gymnast from a different country would’ve been given the higher value. She seems to feel that this was deliberately targeted at her. “Am I in a league of my own? Yes, but that doesn’t mean you can’t credit me for what I’m doing.” Since returning from her post-Rio hiatus, Biles has been far more outspoken than she was before, whether it’s about corruption in USA Gymnastics, abuse, her own place in the sport, and now, something as arcane as skill values.

And the fact that we are even having this conversation about letter assignments to skills in women’s gymnastics in mainstream sports media is a testament to Biles’ broader significance. Typically these conversations are had in Facebook groups devoted to the sport or on gymnastics Twitter. But anything that affects Biles becomes top sports news, no matter how in the weeds. Such is the power of Simone.

And because of Biles’ outspokenness on the issue, the WTC was forced to respond and explain why they evaluated the dismount the way they did. They wrote in a statement that said that they take a lot of things into account when deciding how to assign values to a skill. It’s not just about how hard the skill is. The committee is also concerned with incentivizing elements that might result in injury. “There is an added risk in landing of double saltos for beam dismounts (with/without twists), including a potential landing on the neck,” the statement read.

One of the examples they cited was how they reduced the rating of the double front on vault, which is named after Russian gymnast Elena Produnova, after years of terrifying landings that could’ve resulted in serious injury.

Like Biles, I call bullshit on this.

Simone Biles can break the record for most medals won by any gymnast at this week’s world championships. Photograph: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty Images

First of all, beam and vault are not directly comparable. Vault is essentially a single skill. The only way to up your D-score is to do a harder vault, hence some gymnasts attempting to perform vaults that seem far above their ability to execute them cleanly and safely. On the other events, gymnasts perform routines with several skills, often done in combination. This means that there are many opportunities for a gymnast to earn extra tenths. You don’t need to chuck a super-hard dismount; you can do a super-hard skill inside the routine. Or you can do two medium difficulty skills consecutively to earn connection value. On vault, there is just one way to skin a cat; on beam, there are many.

And the WTC has already incentivized gymnasts who want to do easier beam dismounts by no longer counting that element towards the composition requirements of the routine. Before, if you did a D or higher, you got .5 (on top of the difficulty value of the skill). For a C, you only got .3 and for an A or B, you got nothing. You can see how the old rules could potentially push a gymnast to do a more challenging dismount, perhaps more difficult than they could physically handle. Since the change, we’ve seen more gymnasts go for simpler dismounts, executed cleanly and safely. If the goal is to get more gymnasts to do beautiful, clean gymnastics then mission accomplished. And the Biles dismount in no way detracts from this. Biles, typically lauded for her difficulty, is also one the most technically sound gymnasts out on the floor. She does the double double off the beam in a tight tuck, with her knees and feet together. She finishes the rotation with enough time to kick out of it and lands it far better than gymnasts performing “just” a double back, no twists.

It’s also highly implausible that too high a rating on the Biles dismount would incentivize gymnasts to throw the risky dismount when almost no one performs a full twisting double back dismount, despite it being rated a G, three levels up from the double tuck. This skill, which was introduced back in the 80s, is still only performed by a handful of gymnasts, one of which is Biles (when she’s not doing her eponymous skill). Let’s first see a bunch of gymnasts trying a full twisting double back before we even start worrying about the Biles.

I don’t know if this is any comfort to Biles, but she’s hardly the first gymnast to see her innovation undervalued by the WTC. In 1995, Chinese gymnast Liu Xuan introduced a one arm giant swing to the uneven bars and connected into a release skill. Back then, the ratings of skills went from A to E. The innovative skill – which was surely very difficult too – was only rated a C. Though the WTC didn’t comment at the time, it was assumed that they were hoping to discourage gymnasts from doing the skill by giving it such a low rating.

At a C, it was hardly worth the risk that it took to perform it so she eventually stopped doing it. It remains in the Code but has been downgraded ever further to a B. It’s basically worthless now. We won’t ever see it in the women’s competition again. (But if you happen to be a fan of one arm giants, fret not: they’re a mainstay of men’s high bar where they’ve never been discouraged.)

There’s an important distinction between what happened to Liu in the mid 1990s and what’s happening to Biles now: the Biles dismount is still the highest rated beam dismount in the Code of Points, even if it’s not worth as much as she had hoped it would be, but it’s still worth a lot whereas Liu’s skill didn’t even get close to what was the highest rating back in the day. Liu, more than Biles, was the one being disincentivized from doing it.

Whether the double double is rated an H, a J, or even a lowly C, it will have no impact on the results. The US team will walk away with their fifth straight world team title and Biles will win her fifth all-around gold. But the judges and officials haven’t done what they routinely demand from the gymnasts – to perform cleanly and consistently. They’ve made a big ol’ mess of things.

And Biles, like other gymnasts in the past, are the one who are forced to pay for the mistakes and miscalculations of others.