Simone Biles

Simone Arianne Biles was born March 14, 1997 in Columbus, Ohio. She and her siblings were placed in foster care at age two due to their birth mother’s drug addiction, and were adopted by her maternal grandfather and his wife in Houston, Texas. She discovered gymnastics at age six on a daycare field trip when a coach watching her tumble in the parking lot suggested her parents look into a gym. By 16 she was a World all-around champion. By 19 she had four Olympic gold medals.

Her record is hard to overstate. Two Olympic all-around titles (2016, 2024). Six World all-around titles. 11 Olympic medals — the most by any U.S. gymnast in history. 30 World Championship medals, 23 of them gold — both records. Five eponymous gymnastics elements: two on floor exercise, two on vault including the Yurchenko double pike (the most difficult women’s vault in history), and one on balance beam. She is the only gymnast attempting most of these. She is 4'8" tall, which is part of the physics of how she does what she does.

At the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, opening her competition as the favorite to win at least four golds, she withdrew from the team final after losing her aerial awareness mid-vault — a phenomenon known among gymnasts as “the twisties.” She withdrew from most of the remaining individual events. She returned for the balance beam final and won bronze. The conversation that followed redrew how elite sport talked about mental health, and Biles spent the next two years out of competition, in therapy, working through the trauma of having her body stop responding to her mind in midair at the highest-pressure moment of her career.

She returned in 2023 at age 26 — old by gymnastics standards — and immediately won five medals at the World Championships in Antwerp, including her sixth all-around title. At the Paris 2024 Olympics she led the U.S. team to gold (“Golden Girls”), won her second Olympic all-around, defended her vault title, and took silver on floor exercise. She is married to NFL safety Jonathan Owens. She has openly contemplated competing at LA 2028, and the gymnastics world is openly waiting on the answer.