No Dream Too High: Simone Biles
By Regina McWhorter
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Last updated over 1 year ago
10 Questions
October 2013
The floor routine was all that stood between Simone Biles and her first all-around world championship. Biles smiled from ear to ear, revealing her braces. She was sixteen years old. She sprinted across the mat, effortlessly completing two somersaults and two twists in one leap, a double-double in gymnastics terms. She danced her way to another corner, tilted her chin up, and launched into something no one had ever seen before this event. Biles soared through the air, flipped twice, and landed on her feet, face-forward. The announcers on NBC described it as “a double layout with a half” twist. The crowd knew it as something else: The Biles, a maneuver so exceptional that it was named after her. It was her first major international competition, and Biles had crushed the rest of the field, largely because of a move she had created.
A diagram showing Simone Biles' one-of-a-kind floor routine maneuver, "The Biles."
The 2013 world championships marked Simone Biles’s arrival on the elite gymnastics scene. Four years later, her accolades include three all-around world championships, and four gold medals and one bronze at the 2016 Olympics. As Olympics teammate Aly Raisman told the New Yorker, “Simone’s just in her own league. Whoever gets second place, that’s the winner.” Biles is a once-in-a-generation athlete with limitless talent and a strong dedication to her sport. She is a gymnast like no other.
Beginnings
Were it not for some bad weather, Simone Biles might never have become a gymnast at all. When she was six years old, her daycare redirected an outdoor field trip to a gymnastics studio because of rain. Biles told ESPN that at the time she was a “very crazy, very hyper and energetic” girl capable of mimicking the more difficult moves of some of the older girls at the studio. This attracted the attention of the coaches in attendance. Soon after, she enrolled at Bannon’s Gymnastix in Houston.
Like anyone starting out at a new sport, Biles struggled with the fundamentals. In a profile of Biles for Buzzfeed, Dvora Meyers wrote, “She isn’t naturally flexible and couldn’t find the right shapes on her leaps and jumps. She also didn’t know how to control her immense power, often bounding up and back several feet after landing tumbling passes. And on bars — the most technical event in the women’s repertoire — she lacked finesse.” By the time Biles was 16, though, she was a blossoming star.
During the years Biles was developing into an elite athlete, the sport of gymnastics was also changing. In the past, gymnastics was more about finesse than power, and the various competitions within it were graded on a 10-point scale. Many times, the winner of an event would score a perfect 10. That changed in 2006, when the points system split into two: an execution score and a difficulty score. The execution score is still out of 10 points and is awarded based on how well a gymnast performs a routine. The difficulty score awards additional points based on the rigor of the skills attempted during the routine.
A table comparing vault scores in the 2016 Olympic Women's Gymnastics All-Around Final.
The difficulty score aided Biles because the routines she performs are more challenging than what other gymnasts attempt. For example, prior to her floor routine at the all-around world championships in 2013, she was actually in second place, behind another American competitor, Kyla Ross. Biles’s floor program was more difficult than Ross’s, though. When Biles finished it with no errors she easily won the title.
Part of Biles’s natural talent also stems from her height or lack thereof. In some sports, height is an advantage, but gymnasts benefit from being shorter. From 2000-2012, the four all-around gold medal winners at the Olympics were between 5-foot and 5-foot-3. While that might seem short for most athletes, Biles stands at just 4 feet 8 inches. Her height bothered her as a child. As she told Women’s Health, “it was kind of a struggle being small since everyone would make fun of you,” but she’s glad she can show others that they can be “short or tall” and become the best.
A chart comparing the average height of professional athletes across several sports.
Getting Serious
On her way to becoming a world champion, Biles faced tough decisions. In eighth grade, she was training 20 hours a week, far less than other elite gymnasts. If she wanted to be an Olympian, she would have to commit more time to training. For Biles, that meant shifting to homeschooling and taking on more practices. Traveling to competitions would be all business. A Texas Monthly story about Biles noted that when they travel “gymnasts are sequestered—they stay in a different hotel from the one in which their families stay—to reduce distractions. If they’re allowed out at all, it’s for carefully supervised visits to a tourist site or megamall.” Still, Biles decided to make the switch. Afterwards, as she told Buzzfeed, “My hours ramped up and we did beam and bars twice a day, which usually I had only done once a day.”
A few years later, she faced a similar choice when UCLA offered her a full athletic scholarship. To accept the scholarship and attend college with her peers, Biles would have to give up the opportunity for endorsement deals. The NCAA doesn’t allow student-athletes to make money off their names while they’re in college. Biles once again decided to stick to professional gymnastics. As a professional, she could earn money and continue to face the world’s top competition. Explaining her decision to Buzzfeed, Biles said, “I can always still go to college, but the window of opportunity of going professional is very [small] so I had to make a decision.”
The Challenges of Fame
The first black gymnasts to win any medals during an Olympics competition were Dominique Dawes and Betty Okino in 1992. No black athlete won an individual gold medal at an Olympic gymnastics event until Gabby Douglas in 2012. Douglas, Dawes, and Okino were all subjected to racially-charged criticisms. Since she became a national figure, Biles has had to deal with similar issues. After she won the world championships in 2013, an Italian participant named Carlotta Ferlitto responded with negative comments. She said, “next time we should paint our skin black, so we could win, too.” Instead of denouncing Ferlitto’s remarks, an Italian spokesperson added, “the current trend in gymnastics …is going toward a technique that opens up new chances to athletes of color, well known for power, while penalizing the elegance typical of Eastern Europeans.”
In October 2016, Biles appeared in a music video for the song “Overnight” with recording artist Jake Miller. In the video, Biles is portrayed as Miller’s girlfriend. This led to negative comments about interracial relationships (Miller is white). It also led to outright racism directed at Biles. In response, she tweeted, “everyone forgets that I have feelings.”
During the 2016 Olympics, Biles also faced intense media scrutiny about her family. She doesn’t have a relationship with her biological father, and only occasionally speaks to her biological mother. She was briefly in foster care as a toddler. At age 5, she was adopted by her grandparents, Ron and Nellie Biles, whom she refers to as her parents. She didn’t give her upbringing much thought until it became a topic of conversation at the Olympics. Biles told Buzzfeed that the interest in her family is “just kind of thrown at me and it’s weird to talk about.” Ultimately, she said in an interview with Us Weekly, “My parents are my parents, and that's it.”
Racism and gossip have taken an emotional toll on Biles. Gymnastics can be mentally challenging. Training with tough coaches like Martha Karolyi, who oversees the U.S. women’s team, makes it even tougher. According to Texas Monthly, Biles started working with a sports psychologist named Robert Andrews to help in that area. She was afraid that something was “wrong” with her if she needed to talk to Andrews. He did his best to convince her that wasn’t true, and that other top athletes also spoke to him about their anxieties. At first, not much changed. Biles hit a mental wall at the 2013 Secret U.S. Classic. It was her worst performance as a pro. As Buzzfeed describes it, “She fell from the uneven bars, bobbled on the beam, and almost fell off. Next came floor, typically her best piece, where she fell to her knees after a full-twisting double back somersault.” Biles’s longtime personal coach, Aimee Boorman, removed her from the rest of the competition for her own safety. “She could have done something that could’ve ended her career right then and there if I let her compete. I could tell that her mind wasn’t where it needed to be,” Boorman told Buzzfeed.
After that competition, Biles invested more time with Andrews. She also had some productive heart-to-hearts with Boorman and Karolyi. Her anxieties lessened. Now, she can often be seen laughing during events, while teammates and opponents are understandably more nervous. “I think I was just trying to live up to everyone’s expectations that I kind of got lost in competing. I was just so stressed. I didn’t know how to deal with a lot of it,” Biles told Buzzfeed in the lead-up to the 2016 Olympics.
Not Done Yet
Biles is an exceptional athlete. Yet, her commitment to honing that athleticism in the gym and her willingness to make tough choices are what truly set her apart. Along the way, she has gracefully leapt over many hurdles. She has confronted racism and bullying. She has learned to accept the mental challenges that come with competing on the world’s biggest stages. Few athletes have been able to stay so resolute.
Simone Biles isn’t done either. She plans to continue participating in domestic and international gymnastics events. She has even hinted at a desire to make another Olympics run at the 2020 games in Tokyo, when she’ll be 23. Regardless of whether she competes at the next Olympics, Simone Biles already exemplifies what it means to be an Olympic champion. In a sport where perfect-10 scores no longer exist, she’s as close as they come to the perfect gymnast.