Jordan Chiles recorded her first-ever ‘perfect 10’ on the vault as she propelled UCLA to a win over Nebraska on Saturday.
The Olympian competed in the Bruins’ home opener of the season as they took on the Cornhuskers at a packed Pauley Pavilion.
And the 24-year-old finished the meet on cloud nine. Fresh off winning back-to-back Big Ten gymnast of the week awards, she walked away with the all-around individual title at the weekend.
But her highlight came on the vault where the Dancing With The Stars alumna somersaulted to a personal milestone.
Chiles nailed her first career perfect 10 on the apparatus with her vault featuring a double twisting Yurchenko.
The move – named for its originator Natalia Yurchenko – involves a roundoff onto the springboard, a back handspring onto the vault and a layout somersault with two full twists before landing.
Jordan Chiles recorded her first-ever ‘perfect 10’ on the vault during UCLA’s meet
The two-time Olympian performed a double twisting Yurchenko to propel the Bruins to a win
Given its complex technique and the power necessary to execute it, the move often presents difficulty in sticking the landing, meaning scoring a 10 is an incredibly rare feat.
Chiles finished the meet with an overall score of 39.675, as the Bruins beat Nebraska 197.325-195.25.
‘I’m just proud that we were able to turn around from last week and really [show] what we really do in practice,’ said Chiles, via the Los Angeles Times.
In 2025, Chiles led the Bruins to the program’s first Big Ten title and a National Runner-Up finish behind the Oklahoma Sooners.
Now in her final season with UCLA as a senior, the two-time Olympian is eyeing clinching the National Championship title for good.
Given the difference in scoring between the NCAA and elite gymnastics such as the Olympics, a perfect 10 is something even Chiles’s Team USA teammate Simone Biles doesn’t have.
Since 2006, international gymnastics uses an open-ended system, meaning that perfect 10s are virtually impossible. Therefore, neither Biles nor Chiles have ever recorded one at Olympic level.
Meanwhile, Chiles’s perfect 10 on Saturday came at collegiate level, where the NCAA looks for perfection in execution. That means a stuck landing and perfect form can result in a 10.0.
The 24-year-old celebrates with UCLA gymnastic assistant coach Mark Freeman
Chiles, pictured alongside Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade (center) and Simone Biles (left), was awarded a bronze medal in the 2024 Olympics only to later be stripped of it
The career achievement of a perfect 10 comes just under 18 months after Chiles suffered heartbreak from the Olympic row that broke out in Paris.
The Team USA gymnastics star was stripped of her individual bronze in the floor exercise at last summer’s Games following a dispute involving Romania’s Ana Barbosu.
After initially coming in fifth place, a United States appeal raised Chiles’ marks by one-tenth to move her up to third behind Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade and teammate Simone Biles.
Yet that changed when the Romanian athletic commission later filed an appeal of their own to the International Olympic Committee over the scores that dropped Barbosu from the medal stand.
Days after the event, the IOC concluded that the original United States challenge of the scores was filed four seconds too late and was therefore invalid, meaning Chiles was ordered to return the medal after it was reallocated to the Romanian athlete.
Reflecting on the incident last November, Chiles was asked if she felt she had ‘experienced racism’ in relation to the decision to strip her of the medal -before discussing, what she perceived to be, opposition to an ‘all-Black podium’.
During an appearance on the ‘Baby, this is Keke Palmer’ podcast, Chiles said: ‘At first, I didn’t think of it in that way until I started almost literally getting racist comments and saying this and saying that and basically telling like people were telling me to kill myself and it got to a really, really tough point.
Chiles competed on the most recent season of ABC show Dancing With The Stars
Romania’s Ana Barbosu reclaimed the medal on an appeal in the days after the event
‘I had to get off of social media for a while. Because it was, you know, it was really hard to even see that, as an athlete, like, let alone an athlete, I’m up, there, yes, it’s an ‘all-Black’ podium, which is very rare, it’s obviously something that people don’t like.
‘As being a woman of color, I started seeing it more. They didn’t want to see that, they didn’t want to see three beautiful Black women standing on that podium. They didn’t want to see the fact that we were just dominating. And I really took that to heart.’
Yet, despite the controversy surrounding her last appearance on the Olympic stage, Chiles has not ruled out a return when the games return to home soil in 2028.
‘(The 2028 Olympics) is always going to be in my mind,’ she said of the LA Olympics in two years’ time during UCLA’s media week availability.
