🇺🇸Simone
Biles

In gymnastics, the highest honour a competitor can receive is to have a skill named after them in the Code of Points — the international rulebook governing the sport. To earn that honour you must perform the skill in official competition, have it ratified by the governing body, and survive with your skill linked to your name for as long as the code exists. Simone Biles has four skills named after her, one of which — the Biles II on floor exercise, a double-twisting double-tucked pass — was rated by the FIG at a difficulty value no other woman in the world had been able to execute in competition at the time of its introduction. The skill was so demanding that many gymnastics experts questioned whether its inclusion in a competitive routine was responsible. Biles competed it anyway. She also invented three other signature elements. She is, by most objective measures — medals won, skills named, difficulty performed — the greatest gymnast in the history of the sport.

Simone Arianne Biles was born on March 14, 1997, in Columbus, Ohio. Her early childhood was marked by severe instability: her mother struggled with addiction, and Simone and her younger sister Adria were placed in foster care at ages three and four. Their maternal grandfather, Ron Biles, and his wife Nellie eventually adopted Simone and Adria. Simone began gymnastics almost by accident: at age six, on a daycare field trip, she began imitating the gymnasts she saw and a coach noticed her. Within a year she was on a training programme. By thirteen she was considered the most gifted female gymnast in the United States. By seventeen she was the world champion.

Her senior career began in 2013, and its progress has been so uninterrupted by defeat that the statistical record reads almost like a fabrication. She won the World All-Around championship every year she competed in it from 2013 through 2019. At the 2016 Rio Olympics, her first Games, she won four gold medals and a bronze, becoming the first woman to win four gymnastics golds at a single Olympics in 72 years. Her scores consistently exceeded those of her competitors by margins that coaching staff in other programmes publicly described as demoralising — not because their athletes were underperforming, but because what Biles was doing was in a different category of the sport.

The Tokyo 2020 Olympics — held in 2021 — produced the moment that defined Biles’s legacy in the widest cultural sense. Leading the US team in the team final, she withdrew mid-competition citing what she described as “the twisties” — a dangerous disorientation of spatial awareness during aerial skills that, in gymnastics, can cause athletes to lose track of where they are in the air. It is not merely a mental block; it is a specific neurological disruption that makes the execution of high-difficulty skills genuinely life-threatening. She withdrew from four of her five individual events, winning silver on beam after returning. The gymnastics community, which understood what the twisties meant and what it cost her to leave, was almost uniformly supportive.

She returned to competition in 2023, winning the World All-Around title for the sixth time, and performed skills at the 2023 World Championships that the FIG had previously declined to rate at their appropriate difficulty value on grounds of safety. Her performance at the 2024 Paris Olympics added three more gold medals, raising her career total to seven. She remains, as of 2026, actively competing and setting records.

What makes Biles extraordinary is not merely her talent but the combination of raw athletic gifts — explosive power, a spatial awareness coaches describe as the finest they have ever seen, and a kinesthetic intelligence allowing her to modify skills mid-air in ways other gymnasts cannot — with an intellectual approach that has treated the Code of Points not as a limit to work within but as a challenge to push past. She did not become the greatest gymnast in history by executing existing skills better than anyone else. She became it by inventing skills that no one else could follow her into, and then competing them, routinely, under Olympic pressure, in front of the world.