Simone Biles, the gymnast who learned that stopping could be the hardest skill

Simone Biles

Photo: Ocoudis / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 14, 1997 Columbus
Occupation	Artistic Gymnast
Awards	Presidential Medal of Freedom · Associated Press Athlete of the Year · Time 100

For most of her career, the problem with Simone Biles was arithmetic. She kept attempting skills the scoring code had not yet priced, and judges kept having to decide what a thing no one else could do was worth. Five elements in the gymnastics Code of Points now carry her name, two on vault, one on beam and two on floor. And yet the moment that changed how the world talks about her was not a skill. It was a vault in Tokyo that went wrong in the air, after which she walked off the podium, spoke to her coaches and took herself out of an Olympic team final.

Some commentators called it quitting. It turned out to be the hinge of her career. Three years later she went back to the Olympics and came home with three more gold medals, making her the most decorated gymnast the sport has recorded. Now, with the Los Angeles Games two summers away, she is weighing a version of the same choice in slow motion: whether to go back one more time, or whether the stronger ending is the one she already has.

Biles was born in Columbus, Ohio, on March 14, 1997. Her biological mother, Shanon, was unable to care for her children, and in 2003 Simone and her younger sister, Adria, were adopted by their maternal grandfather, Ron Biles, and his wife, Nellie. The couple raised them in Spring, a suburb north of Houston, and Simone has always called them Mom and Dad. Through Nellie, who was born in Belize, she also holds Belizean citizenship.

She began training with Aimee Boorman at the age of eight, and Boorman stayed with her all the way to Rio. The progress came quickly. In 2013, in her first year as a senior, Biles won the world all-around title in Antwerp. She won it again in 2014 and in 2015, the year she turned professional and gave up a place on the gymnastics team at UCLA. Her family later built its own training base in Spring, the World Champions Centre, where she still works.

What separated her from the field was altitude. On floor she added a double layout with a half twist out, then a triple-twisting double tucked salto that no woman had competed before. On beam, a double-twisting double tucked dismount. On vault, eventually, the Yurchenko double pike, a skill so rarely attempted that her rivals mostly treat it as hers alone. Each one entered the rulebook under her surname.

At the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro she won gold in the team event, the all-around, vault and floor, plus a bronze on beam. The celebrity that followed was fast and loud. She published a memoir, Courage to Soar, written with Michelle Burford and later adapted as a television film, and she finished fourth on Dancing with the Stars in 2017 before returning to the gym.

The public version of that period left something out. In January 2018, Biles disclosed that she was one of the hundreds of athletes sexually abused by Larry Nassar, the former USA Gymnastics team physician, and she said the federation had helped to cover it up. She kept competing in a national-team leotard while making that accusation, a position few athletes have had to hold. In September 2021 she told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that she blamed Nassar and “the entire system” that enabled him. Three years earlier, she and other Nassar survivors had shared the Arthur Ashe Courage Award.

Competition, meanwhile, kept producing records. At the 2019 World Championships in Stuttgart she passed Vitaly Scherbo’s total and became the most decorated gymnast in world championship history. Then the pandemic moved the Tokyo Olympics back a year, and in the team final in July 2021 she lost her sense of where she was while twisting in the air, a condition gymnasts call the twisties. For an athlete whose skills leave almost no margin, that is a physical danger, and she treated it as one. She withdrew from the team final and from four individual finals, watched the United States take team silver, and came back a week later to win bronze on beam with a dismount that removed the twisting altogether.

The easy reading of Tokyo is that she protected her mental health and was right to. The harder, more interesting one is that she broke a rule of elite sport she had followed since childhood, that the athlete performs and the explanation comes later. The Netflix docuseries Simone Biles Rising, released in two parts in 2024, is built around that break. It shows therapy, fear and the practical question of whether her body could be trusted again. It plays as a record of how uncertain the comeback was, closer to a case file than a victory lap. The Presidential Medal of Freedom, which she received in 2022, arrived while that question was still open.

The answer came in 2023. She married Jonathan Owens, an NFL safety, that spring, returned to competition in the summer and, in October, went back to Antwerp, the city of her first world all-around title, and won it for a sixth time. The Yurchenko double pike became her second eponymous vault. Her world championship haul now stands at 30 medals, 23 of them gold.

Paris in 2024 finished the argument. She led the United States to team gold, won the all-around eight years after her first Olympic title, and won vault. On floor she took silver behind Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade, and the image from that podium, Biles and her teammate Jordan Chiles bowing to Andrade, travelled further than most of her routines. Her Olympic total reached 11 medals, seven of them gold, the most by any American gymnast and level with Věra Čáslavská behind only Larisa Latynina among women. She followed it with the Gold Over America Tour and, in 2025, a fourth Laureus World Sportswoman of the Year award, a year after Laureus had named her Comeback of the Year.

She has not competed since. In February 2026 Laureus named her an ambassador for its Sport for Good work, and at the Laureus awards in Madrid that spring she put her chances of competing at Los Angeles at “50-50”. Physically, she said, her coaches, Laurent and Cécile Landi, would get her in shape; the deciding factor was mental. At the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics she was in the stands as a spectator, and when the figure skater Ilia Malinin struggled she said she had gone into “protection mode”, having been through that pressure herself. In March, when Owens signed a one-year contract with the Indianapolis Colts, she moved with him to Indianapolis. She has also joined a campaign about inflammatory skin conditions after being diagnosed with seborrheic dermatitis and eczema.

The question of Los Angeles is not abstract. In an interview at the end of September she said the idea of a home Games was hard to resist: “a home Olympic Games, like, how could you not?” Several of her Paris teammates, including Suni Lee, Jordan Chiles and Jade Carey, are already pointing toward it. Against that sit the facts of age and family. She would be 31 at the opening ceremony, and she and Owens want children at some point; the effect of heavy training on her reproductive health, she said, is among the “major things that are on the table at my age”. A recent session in the gym with Adria, in which a double layout came back more easily than she expected, has only made the decision harder.

What makes the choice unusual is that nobody else is forcing it. The records are set, the skills are named, the comeback has been filmed. Biles has said she does not have to decide yet, and that if she returns it has to be for the right reasons rather than out of nostalgia. For an athlete whose most influential act was stopping at the right moment, the Los Angeles decision will be the same test run in reverse: whether she wants one more final badly enough to start.

Tags: sports, athletes, Simone Biles, Paris 2024 Olympics, artistic gymnastics, gymnasts

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