How we covered Simone’s calf tweak ✍️🤸🏿

Your Olympics essentials.

• What happened yesterday: USWNT won ! U.S. men’s basketball won ! Two U.S. fencers faced off in the individual foil final, and Lee Kiefer came out on top to repeat as Olympic champ! Torri Huske won gold in the women’s 100m butterfly! Check out all the day’s highlights .
• What’s happening today: More swimming finals ! Men’s gymnastics team final ! The U.S. women’s basketball team plays Japan! Follow all the day’s action .
• The latest medal count: Entering Monday, the U.S. held the lead in the medal count with 12 overall (three golds, six silvers, three bronze), although Australia, Japan and Republic of Korea lead the gold count with four each.

How we covered Simone’s injury.

Not too long after Simone Biles’ stellar balance beam routine during yesterday’s qualifying session, she tweaked her left calf during floor warmups and taped up her left ankle. She kept competing. She still blew everyone out of the water , even if she was walking gingerly. She seemed to be in good spirits as the session wore on, smiling and waving to her family and the crowd.

But how we went about reporting on this in the moment was a combination of a few things.

Report and publish only what you can see with your own eyes. Don’t speculate. I was sitting on our press row with my colleagues Nancy Armour and Tom Schad, who have a deep familiarity with the sport and the people involved, which was huge. Tom was plugged into the live stream to see what the camera was picking up. Nancy was plugged into the binoculars we had to see what she could see on the floor below us, including closely watching Biles interacting with her coaches on the competition floor and seeing what Biles’ parents were doing in their seats. (They didn’t leave until the session was over, which was a good sign.) The live stream was picking up some audio of Biles and we could hear bits and pieces, but it wasn’t clear enough to use in a story, so we held off. Nancy and Tom's experience covering this team and sport adds a layer of understanding to help parse all of this: We know she goofs around, so her crawling along the vault runway wasn’t necessarily an all-hands situation; we know the trust she has with her coaches Cecile and Laurent Landi, so if she was telling them she’s OK, she’s probably not trying to hide anything.

Evolve the language. Gymnastics isn’t like an American professional sport at which the team offers pretty immediate specific information on an injury. (Think NFL team announcing a linebacker is questionable to return with a right knee injury.) So we could see it was her left lower leg that was bothering her, as she was flexing it as if to test it, and her left ankle was heavily wrapped. We initially wrote that she appeared to tweak her left ankle. After the session was over one of her coaches, Cecile Landi, said after it was her calf, so we updated our stories, calling it a lower left leg tweak with specifics about it being her calf but that her left ankle was heavily taped.

Ask questions. Duh. This is, of course, essential to journalism. Tom went down to the mixed zone, the area in which athletes and coaches stop for interviews post-competition, for Cecile Landi’s interview scrum. (Biles and her teammates do not do interviews until after the team final, so that she didn’t stop to talk was no surprise; she did, however, smile at the assembled media as she walked by.) He texted me and Nancy quotes as Landi spoke so we could update our stories.

Talk it out. After Tom returned to our press seats and we got our stories updated and fleshed out, we had a confab. What else do we need to write, if anything? What are we missing, if anything? What’s next? So we discussed what we need to prepare for when the team final lineup is released and what would make sense to write based on what happens at the team final.

For me, the teamwork with Nancy and Tom made this stressful situation as smooth as possible, even as it felt chaotic as hell in the moment. We hope our coverage helped you understand what exactly unfolded and that it captured the scene and atmosphere of the session.

Other Day 3 highlights.

• The USWNT's future is now as the Big Three of Sophia Smith , Trinity Rodman and Mallory Swanson are producing big results at these Games so far.
• Is USA's Kevin Durant the greatest Olympic basketball player ever?
• Torri Huske , driven by Tokyo near miss, gets her golden moment in Paris.
• The Paris Olympics canceled another triathlon training session because Seine was too dirty after recent rain.
• A-list celebs were out in full force to watch Simone Biles and the U.S. women’s gymnastics team.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How we covered Simone’s calf tweak ✍️🤸🏿