Simone Biles continued to stake her claim as one of the most dominant athletes of her generation as she bulldozed all competition to win her fifth world championships individual all‑around gold medal with a score of 58.999 in Stuttgart. The 22-year-old American won with a cushion of 2.1 points, her biggest at a world all-around event, as Tang Xijing of China claimed silver and Russia’s Angelina Melnikova took bronze.

“It means the world to me,” Biles said. “For my fifth, that’s kind of unheard of, so it was really exciting. But we finished strong and we gave it our all. It’s super exciting we had the opportunity to do this.”

One year ago Biles fell twice in the all-around final and left the arena seething despite her clear victory. She seems to have learned from those mistakes. Instead of opting for all of the risky, mind-blowing skills she has written into gymnastics history in the past two years, she decided to play things relatively safe. The greatest measure of Biles’s dominance is that her version of “safe” is still far beyond what any of her rivals could dream of.

Biles opened her competition with the Cheng vault – a round-off, half twist on to the table with one and a half twists off, a half twist less than her eponymous vault, on which she fell last year. Despite landing with a foot slightly out of bounds, Biles flew high and far with supreme form and a small hop, immediately establishing her lead with a monstrous score of 15.233.

As medal contenders fell all around, Biles stepped up and produced a clean, assured uneven bars set, finishing with a stuck double-double dismount, a big score of 14.733 and a beaming smile. There was a time when the uneven bars were consistently Biles’s weaker piece, but with each passing year she improves a little more.

So often in gymnastics history, the balance beam has been the apparatus that decides medals and exposes nerves. Last year Biles fell victim to the beam and tumbled on a tricky front flip with a half turn. This year she eradicated the skill from her set and marched through with rhythm and ease as she scored 14.633. Instead of the breathtaking, undervalued double-double dismount she invented this year, Biles again chose to be ‘safe’ and opted for one fewer twist. It was still the most difficult dismount in the entire competition.

Biles on the balance beam. Photograph: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images

Only on her favoured floor did Biles show all she has, finishing with 14.4 to seal a record‑extending 22nd world championship medal.

For someone whose dominance has been uncontested for so long, it defies belief how much Biles has had to deal with in her short career; she arrived on the world stage to competitors who could not fathom the idea of two black gymnasts, and she returned still reeling from revelations of Larry Nassar, still competing for the organisation that had so badly failed her. This week, more trivially, she debuted a skill on the beam that was valued low, explicitly because nobody else is good enough to compete it. Biles’s strength on and off the podium have propelled her to achievements that nobody ever thought were possible. Now she is the face of the sport and it is difficult to imagine gymnastics without them.