Simone Biles

Simone Biles: The Gymnast Who Outgrew the Scoring System

In elite gymnastics the winning margin is usually a few tenths of a point. Simone Biles routinely finished whole points clear of the field — a gap so large that judges and rivals were effectively competing in a different event. She owns forty-one World Championship and Olympic medals, more than any gymnast in history, and five skills carry her name, including one on every apparatus. No other woman has managed that last distinction even once.

Spring, Texas

She was born Simone Arianne Biles on 14 March 1997 in Columbus, Ohio. Her mother could not care for her children, and all four siblings spent time in foster care; Simone was removed from her mother's household at two. In 2000 her maternal grandfather Ron Biles, an Air Force veteran and former air traffic controller, and his wife Nellie, a trained nurse, took the children into their home in Spring, Texas. In 2003 they formally adopted Simone and her younger sister Adria. Nellie became, in every sense that counts, her mother, and later ran the annual goal-setting sessions in which Simone wrote down what she intended to do.

She was diagnosed with ADHD young and prescribed medication for it, a fact she disclosed publicly in 2016 and has since discussed without embarrassment, comparing it to asthma: something you are born with and have to accept.

A Daycare Field Trip

The origin story is almost too neat. At six, on a daycare outing to a gymnasium, she watched older girls train and started copying them. The coaches noticed the strength and sent a letter home recommending she enrol. She began at Bannon's Gymnastix and, from the age of eight, trained under Aimee Boorman, who would coach her for the next decade.

At fourteen she left school for homeschooling, raising her training from twenty hours a week to more than thirty. She made her elite debut on 1 July 2011 at the American Classic in Houston. She skipped the proms.

The 2013 Correction

The turning point was a failure. At the 2013 US Classic she fell on beam and on floor and was pulled from vault before she could compete, and did not make the national team. What followed was the most consequential decision of her career: she began working with a sports psychologist and reframed the sport around performing rather than pleasing.

Three weeks later she won the US national championship. Two months after that she won her first world all-around title in Antwerp. She has not lost an all-around competition since.

Skills With Her Name On Them

Five elements in the Code of Points are called Biles. On floor there is the double layout with a half twist — which she developed, characteristically, to reduce the load on a partially torn calf — and the triple-twisting double tuck. On beam there is a double-twisting double tucked dismount. On vault there are two, including the Yurchenko double pike, which she became the first woman ever to land in competition in May 2021 and which carries a 6.4 difficulty value.

Rio, and What Came After

At the 2016 Olympics in Rio she won four golds — team, all-around, vault and floor — plus a bronze on beam, an American record for gymnastics golds at a single Games. She carried the flag at the closing ceremony.

On 18 January 2018 she disclosed that Larry Nassar, the USA Gymnastics team doctor, had sexually abused her, and that the organisation had helped conceal his crimes. In September 2021 she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and told it she blamed "the entire system." In 2022 she joined more than ninety other survivors in a claim against the FBI for its handling of the allegations. At the 2019 World Championships in Stuttgart she won five golds and passed Svetlana Khorkina to become the most decorated female gymnast in the competition's history.

Tokyo

During warm-ups at the Tokyo team final, held in 2021, Biles lost what gymnasts call air awareness — the twisties, a temporary failure of proprioception during twisting elements, in which the body stops knowing where it is in space. Attempting a full-difficulty vault in that state is a plausible way to break your neck. She withdrew after one vault, then from the all-around, vault, bars and floor finals. She came back for the beam final and won bronze.

A portion of the public called her a quitter. Her own explanation was blunt: "I say put mental health first. Because if you don't, then you're not going to enjoy your sport and you're not going to succeed as much as you want to."

Paris

She returned at the 2024 Olympics, at twenty-seven, and won gold in the team event, the all-around and the vault, with silver on floor. It was her second Olympic all-around title, eight years after the first — the only non-consecutive one in the modern era. It also brought her Olympic total to eleven medals, seven of them gold. She had already, in 2023, taken a sixth world all-around title and broken a ninety-year-old record with an eighth US national all-around crown.

Why Simone Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on physical craft, and the craft is worth naming: "she's talented" explains nothing.

Biles is 4 feet 8 inches tall, and her advantage is amplitude: she gets higher off the floor and the vault table than anyone in the sport. Height buys air time, air time buys rotation, and rotation is the currency of difficulty. That is why she can complete a triple-twisting double tuck at all. The second component is landing security — arriving from that height with the feet stopped — which converts difficulty into score rather than injury.

The third component is genuinely cognitive, and the Tokyo episode proved it by removing it. Air awareness is a real perceptual faculty: continuous knowledge of the body's orientation while rotating on two axes, updated fast enough to steer a landing. Biles has it to an exceptional degree, and in 2021 it briefly failed. The twisties are the best demonstration that elite gymnastics is not simply muscle and courage — that something is computed in the air, and when the computation stops the athlete is in mortal danger.

The counter-case: this is not intellect, and nobody should pretend otherwise. Biles has produced no theory, no body of work. Her sport is judged: her dominance is partly a fact about a scoring code that rewards what she does best. And her most admired single act — the Tokyo withdrawal — was judgement and self-knowledge rather than physical genius, which is why it moved people. Call the gift bodily and perceptual, and it loses nothing.

Legacy

She married the American football player Jonathan Owens in 2023. She trains at the World Champions Centre, the gym her parents built. Her autobiography, *Courage to Soar*, reached number one on the *New York Times* young adult list in 2016.

In July 2022, at twenty-five, she became the youngest person ever to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She has taken the Laureus World Sportswoman of the Year award four times and, with her fellow survivors, the Arthur Ashe Courage Award in 2018. The eponymous skills will outlast all of it: as long as women's gymnastics has a Code of Points, someone will be attempting a Biles.

Achievements

• World all-around champion at age 16 (2013)
• Most decorated gymnast in history
• Multiple Olympic gold medals
• Several signature skills named after her