Simone Biles

#1Simone Biles hit the vault table and flew.

#2This was the 2021 Olympic team final in Tokyo. She was supposed to twist two and a half times before landing.

#3Instead, somewhere in the air, she lost track of herself.

#4She managed one and a half twists and came down.

#5She was on her feet.

#6That was almost beside the point.

#7Biles knew immediately that this wasn't a normal mistake. Later, she remembered what was running through her head:

#8America is going to hate me. The world is going to hate me.

#9She called her mom, Nellie.

#10“I can't do this.”

#11Nellie told her not to do it if it wasn't safe.

#12So Biles withdrew from the rest of the team final.

#13Which was hard to make sense of, because if there was one person on Earth who wasn't supposed to get lost in the air, it was Simone Biles.

#14To understand why, you have to go back to a field trip she wasn't even supposed to take.

#15Biles was six when her daycare planned a trip to the Texas Oil Ranch.

#16Then the weather turned bad.

#17The outdoor trip was canceled, and the kids went to a gymnastics facility instead.

#18Biles watched the older kids flipping and jumping.

#19Then she started copying them.

#20The coaches noticed.

#21They sent a letter home suggesting that she take gymnastics classes.

#22That's how it started. Not with a family plan to raise an Olympic gymnast. Not with years of scouting.

#23With bad weather.

#24But gymnastics was about to become more than a sport Biles happened to be good at.

#25At that point in her life, even the question of where “home” was had been complicated.

#26Biles and her siblings spent time in foster care because their biological mother, Shanon, was struggling with alcohol and drugs.

#27When their maternal grandfather, Ron Biles, learned the children were in foster care, his response was simple: send them to me.

#28Ron and his wife, Nellie, took in Simone and her younger sister Adria and eventually adopted them.

#29It wasn't an easy decision for Nellie. She had already raised children. Starting over with two young girls was hard, and there were times when she struggled with it.

#30After the adoption, Ron and Nellie told the girls that if they wanted to, they could call them Mom and Dad.

#31Simone didn't do it right away.

#32She went upstairs by herself.

#33“Mom.” “Dad.”

#34She practiced the words.

#35Then she came downstairs and used them.

#36Ron would later describe gymnastics as something that helped Simone feel that she belonged.

#37And at the gym, coaches were starting to notice something else about her.

#38Something that would eventually make her almost impossible to beat.

#39Her first coach, Aimee Boorman, would later call young Biles an “air-sense savant.”

#40Air sense is basically the ability to know where your body is while you're flipping and twisting above the ground.

#41Biles had an absurd amount of it.

#42Once, another gymnast did a standing back tuck.

#43Biles said she could do it too.

#44Boorman didn't think she could yet.

#45Biles did it anyway.

#46But this wasn't a story about a child prodigy who was instantly perfect at everything.

#47Biles had enormous power. She could get into the air.

#48Controlling all that power was another problem.

#49Landings were difficult. She fell off the beam. Her small hands made bars harder.

#50At one early vault competition, she even received a score of 0.0.

#51So the skill she had to learn wasn't really how to fly.

#52She already knew how to do that.

#53She had to learn how to control the flight—and exactly where to come down.

#54Once she did, women's gymnastics started changing around her.

#55Biles kept adding difficulty.

#56She was small, explosively powerful, and unusually aware of her body in the air. That combination let her attempt skills other gymnasts weren't doing.

#57Eventually, the question stopped being whether Biles could catch up to the limits of women's gymnastics.

#58She was moving the limits.

#59Several skills across different events would end up carrying her name in the official code of points.

#60By the time the Rio Olympics were over, Biles wasn't just an elite gymnast.

#61She was the gymnast everyone expected to be extraordinary.

#62And that created a different problem.

#63The better she became, the harder it became to be the person who stopped.

#64After Rio, Biles revealed that she was one of the survivors sexually abused by former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar.

#65She later said she probably should have quit gymnastics long before Tokyo.

#66But she kept going.

#67Part of the reason, she explained, was that she didn't want Nassar to take away the thing she had been doing since she was six.

#68Then the Tokyo Olympics were postponed for a year because of the pandemic.

#69One more year.

#70Meanwhile, people kept describing Biles as the “glue” of the U.S. team.

#71It sounds like a compliment.

#72For Biles, it also carried a frightening implication.

#73If the glue comes apart, what happens to everyone else?

#74She felt that if she failed, the whole team could fail with her.

#75So the person who had spent years pushing through everything arrived in Tokyo carrying one more expectation:

#76Don't be the one who breaks.

#77Then her body broke the pattern first.

#78What happened to Biles in Tokyo is commonly called the twisties.

#79It isn't just getting nervous and messing up a skill.

#80A gymnast can suddenly lose the sense of where their body is, which direction they're facing, or how much they've rotated while they're in the air.

#81For most people, that sounds disorienting.

#82For an elite gymnast several feet above the ground, moving at high speed, it can be dangerous.

#83Miss the rotation badly enough and you may not land on your feet.

#84You can come down on your head or neck.

#85Biles was having trouble in practice too. She couldn't reliably finish rotations. At times, she came down on her back.

#86Then came the team final.

#87First event: vault.

#88She launched for two and a half twists.

#89Her air sense disappeared.

#90One and a half.

#91She landed, walked away, and withdrew from most of her remaining Olympic events.

#92Almost immediately, another word started following her around.

#93“Quitter.”

#94But then something strange happened for someone who had supposedly abandoned her team.

#95Biles stayed.

#96Biles could have disappeared from the arena.

#97She didn't.

#98When Sunisa Lee competed in the all-around final—the event Biles would normally have been expected to contend for—Biles was there, cheering loudly.

#99She stayed through the medals.

#100Lee, Jordan Chiles, and Grace McCallum supported her decision.

#101Biles eventually returned for one more event: beam.

#102But she didn't pretend everything was fixed.

#103She changed her dismount, reducing the twisting risk and using a simpler double pike she had barely used since childhood.

#104She won bronze.

#105That could have been the neat ending.

#106Champion faces fear. Champion returns. Champion wins medal.

#107Except Biles still had the twisties.

#108Tokyo ended.

#109The problem didn't.

#110Her air sense didn't simply switch back on once the Olympics were over.

#111It would return.

#112Then disappear again.

#113That went on for roughly a year and a half.

#114Biles later called what happened in Tokyo a “mental injury.”

#115That choice of words mattered.

#116An injury isn't something you fix by being told to toughen up. You treat it. You recover. You rebuild.

#117Biles continued therapy.

#118And her life outside gymnastics got bigger too. Her relationship with Jonathan Owens continued, and the two eventually married.

#119For most of her life, gymnastics had been the place where Biles found belonging.

#120Then she became so good at it that, to the rest of the world, “Simone Biles” and “gymnastics” could start to feel like the same thing.

#121Tokyo forced some distance between them.

#122Could she still be Simone Biles if she wasn't doing gymnastics?

#123For a while, she didn't need an Olympic answer.

#124She just started showing up at the gym again.

#125At first, Biles would go to the gym and work out.

#126Her coach Laurent Landi gradually started giving her routines.

#127Biles was basically thinking: Wait, aren't I just here to get in shape?

#128The training kept building.

#129In 2023, she and Cecile Landi even talked about a possible return over margaritas at a Mexican restaurant.

#130Eventually Laurent told her they were doing Classics.

#131Biles went along with it.

#132Still, talking about competing and actually becoming a competitive gymnast again weren't quite the same thing.

#133Then her competition leotard arrived.

#134That made it real.

#135When Biles finally competed again, 732 days had passed since her last meet.

#136Her coaches weren't trying to drag the old Simone Biles back into existence. Cecile said they built routines within a range Biles could handle mentally and physically.

#137And Biles didn't just come back.

#138She won her first meet by roughly five points.

#139But the margin wasn't the interesting part.

#140There was one vault waiting for her that connected almost everything that had happened.

#141The Yurchenko double pike is one of those skills that looks unreasonable even after you know it's possible.

#142Biles launches from the vault and completes two backward flips in a piked position before landing.

#143She had performed it before Tokyo.

#144But for a skill to officially receive a gymnast's name, it has to be successfully performed in international competition.

#145Tokyo had been the obvious chance.

#146Then the twisties kept Biles out of the Olympic vault final.

#147Two years later, at the 2023 World Championships, she tried again.

#148She ran.

#149Hit the vault.

#150Flew backward.

#151Two flips.

#152Landing.

#153The skill officially became Biles II.

#154It was another named skill, sure.

#155But after Tokyo, it was something more interesting than a line in a record book.

#156The gymnast who had lost her position in the air was doing one of the hardest vaults in the world again.

#157There was still one place she hadn't returned to.

#158The Olympics.

#159And when she got there, the schedule handed her an almost perfect replay.

#160Biles arrived at the Paris Olympics at 27 years old.

#161On the morning of the women's team final, she had something on her schedule before the competition.

#162A therapy session.

#163At 7 a.m.

#164Before Tokyo, Biles had been used to managing physical injuries while pushing her mental health aside.

#165Paris looked different.

#166She checked in with her mind before asking her body to fly.

#167Then she walked into the arena.

#168The U.S. team's first event was vault.

#169Again.

#170Three years earlier, in an Olympic team final, the first event had been vault.

#171That was where two and a half twists became one and a half.

#172That was where she had gotten lost.

#173Now Biles stood at the start of the runway again.

#174Jordan Chiles—who had been there in Tokyo too—was nearby.

#175Biles started running.

#176She hit the table.

#177She flew.

#178And this time, she knew where she was.

#179Biles landed the vault.

#180Her first feeling wasn't some huge rush about winning Olympic gold.

#181It was relief.

#182No flashbacks.

#183Jordan Chiles understood exactly what that meant.

#184“Hallelujah. No flashbacks.”

#185The United States went on to win team gold. Biles later added gold in the all-around and vault, plus silver on floor.

#186But Biles has said she doesn't want Tokyo erased from her story.

#187Tokyo changed how she understood herself, what she valued, and how she took care of herself physically and mentally.

#188After Tokyo, plenty of other people had tried to write an ending for her.

#189Quitter.

#190Done.

#191Couldn't handle it.

#192Biles eventually put it differently.

#193“I get to write my own ending.”