Women in Sports

Stephanie Apstein | Sports Illustrated

imone Biles stood alone and stared at the 25 meters separating herself from the vault table, from her greatest fears, from her legacy. She had just turned to her closest friend on the U.S. women’s Olympic gymnastics team, Jordan Chiles, and asked the question on everyone’s mind: What if it happens again?

Chiles gaped. Biles had been kidding around earlier, reminding her teammates—in case they’d forgotten—that the last time they were at the Olympic team final, her entire world had collapsed. But this quiet moment in Paris last July felt just a bit more serious. “I think maybe half her brain was joking,” Chiles says now. “But the other half was like, Uhhh …”

Her teammates and coaches wondered the same thing. So did journalists, broadcasters and fans. At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Biles contracted a case of the twisties—gymnastics vertigo—and lost her bearings in the air during her vault at the team final, then withdrew from event after event. 

Up Next – Simone Biles Is SI’s 2024 Sportsperson of the Year-00:15

Eventually she stripped the twisting dismount from her balance beam routine and took bronze. Then she quit gymnastics entirely. When she resumed competing two years later, every performance held drama. Once fans had asked themselves: What will the greatest gymnast of all time do next? Now they thought: Can she do this at all? 

No one was quite sure how Paris would unfold. On the day before the opening ceremony, the team took the floor for podium training—their first practice on the hard competition surface—and just about everyone stared at Biles. Volunteers filmed on their phones. Other gymnasts paused their routines. American fans woke up in the early morning hours to watch the livestream. On vault, Biles pulled off a flawless Yurchenko double pike, or Biles II—two flips with her legs perpendicular to her body, giving her no margin for error—drawing gasps from the crowd of journalists. “We’re all breathing a little bit better right now,” said coach Cécile Landi afterward. “I’m not going to lie.”

Three days later, Biles sealed the U.S.’s spot in the team event and qualified first in the all-around and on the vault, floor exercise and balance beam, despite aggravating a tear of her left calf. Her 59.566 was the second-best score of the Olympic cycle among gymnasts in the field, second only to her own performance at 2024 U.S. nationals. (She also owned the other eight spots in the top 10.)

And then came the team final, where the U.S. would start with the vault, the same event that had derailed her Olympics three years earlier. If it was going to happen again, this would be the moment.

You know what happened next, of course. Biles, 27, banished the twisties, and with them any question about her greatness. But you might not know what it took to get there. 

Simone Biles is Sports Illustrated’s 2024 Sportsperson of the Year because she won gold, and then another gold, and then another; because she changed the face of her sport and the conversations around athletes in general; because she continues to speak out about issues that matter to her. And perhaps most of all because after she wondered aloud to Chiles whether she was about to relive the darkest period of her career, she took a deep breath, she saluted the judges and she broke into a run. 

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As Tokyo neared, so did disaster. Biles could feel it. She just wasn’t sure what form it would take. 

She had never really experienced failure. She had never suffered a serious injury. She had never fallen short. She had not lost an individual all-around event since she was a 16-year-old beaming through her braces.

 Sometimes she wondered if her run of success was “almost too good to be true,” she says. She adds, “In the back of my head, I was always worried about that. Because who has a career like that?”

To that point, pretty much just Biles. She was making a case for greatest of all time even before she made her Olympic debut, at 19, in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. She led the U.S. to gold in the team final, then captured first in the individual all-around, the vault and the floor exercise, and third on the balance beam. 

She felt pressure even then—and shame when she stumbled in the beam final. She salvaged bronze, and she wanted to be proud of her recovery, but she knew she had disappointed others. Márta Károlyi, the national team coach at the time, greeted her afterward with a terse, “See, you can never lose a second of concentration.”

COVID-19 postponed the Tokyo Games by a year and gave Biles too much time to think. Something wasn’t right when she returned to the gym after lockdown, although she couldn’t identify quite what it was. “I’ve kind of given myself—I wouldn’t say mental blocks, but it’s definitely different,” she told SI in April 2021. She noticed that she would try a twisting skill but was unable to finish the twist. 

Chiles first grew concerned during the U.S. Olympic Trials that June. “Her face just didn’t look O.K. to me,” Chiles recalls. On the second night of competition, Biles fell on her beam routine and seemed disproportionately upset. “I kinda got in my head,” Biles admitted afterward. 

On the flight to Tokyo, she thought, This isn’t going to go how I want it to. She endured a rocky qualifying session but finished first overall and qualified for every event final, and the U.S. placed second as a team.  

By the next day, Chiles recalls, “something just turned off.” Biles started snapping at teammates, a completely out-of-character response. That night, alone in her hotel room, she practiced flipping and twisting on her bed. I know how to do gymnastics, she tried to remind herself. 

So when she lost her air awareness and plummeted to the mat during the team final, everyone else was shocked. She fetched chalk and cheered as her teammates took silver without her. She withdrew from event after event, unable to tell up from down, sometimes unable to finish a practice because she was crying so hard. She was devastated that this was the moment her brain had chosen to break. It was not until later that she understood why.

For a long time, it looked like nothing bothered Biles. Under Károlyi and her husband Béla, who ran the U.S. national team for three decades, athletes followed strict rules that many have since said amounted to abuse. (Márta and Béla, who died in November, have always denied that they harmed the gymnasts.) As their program racked up medals, the Károlyis enforced an environment of isolation, dietary restriction and little tolerance for injuries or complaints. Gymnasts were discouraged from laughing. 

Biles posted photos of herself eating pepperoni pizza on Instagram. She snuck off at competitions and returned with cinnamon sugar pretzels. In Rio, the team was in the elevator leaving the Olympic Village and heading to team qualifiers when Márta went through the checklist: Do you have everything? Do you have your grips?

“No,” Biles deadpanned. “I forgot my grips to compete at the Olympics.”

“Simone is the only gymnast in history to feel confident enough to make a joke to Márta Károlyi when we’re on our way to compete at the Olympics,” says three-time Olympic gold medalist Aly Raisman.

Biles would commit small acts of rebellion, then dominate the competition. She believed she was managing the mistreatment. Even when she revealed that she was one of the more than 500 athletes who had survived sexual abuse at the hands of longtime national team doctor Larry Nassar, she felt she was controlling what came next. 

After Nassar was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in state prison for first-degree criminal sexual conduct, and 60 years in federal prison for possession of child pornography, Biles tweeted that it was “impossibly difficult to relive these experiences” and return to the Károlyi Ranch, the site of many of the assaults. Three days later, USA Gymnastics severed ties with the facility. That summer, Biles criticized two USAG officials, one for her silence on the Nassar case, another for a tweet she made against Nike and Colin Kaepernick; both women resigned within weeks. Biles took pride in using her voice. But everyone wanted to hear from her, and the pressure built. 

She combines the fame of a pop star with the demands of an athlete. Her life is soundtracked by the shrieks of little girls. At meets, the cheers begin during introductions and continue through the medal ceremony. She brings young fans in the stands to tears just by saying hello. 

After that, the cavernous Ariake Gymnastics Centre felt like a tomb. Spectators were barred from attending the Tokyo Olympics. Biles missed the fans. She missed her family more. Her parents, Nellie and Ron, had attended every meet of her life, usually in matching Team Biles gear. Her now husband, NFL safety Jonathan Owens, schedules offseason workouts so he can support her. Her younger sister Adria often screams so loudly that others turn to look. Before every meet, Biles finds them in the stands. 

In the lead-up to the Games, people—she declines to name them but says some still work at USAG—had referred to her as a guaranteed gold medal. They also expected her to shepherd the rest of the team to victory. She felt pressure to teach them how to be champions. 

“We don’t ask for that when we’re 6 years old and sign up for it,” she says. “I wanted to do my sport. I didn’t want people to criticize every little thing that I do. I didn’t want millions and millions of followers. I just wanted to do gymnastics.”

So there she was, alone in an empty gym, surrounded only by everyone else’s expectations. The weight knocked her over. 

After three years of therapy, she is confident enough now to explain it: “Mental trauma from past years that can’t be swept under the rug anymore, that just is overflowing at that point,” she says.

Biles had wanted to make the Tokyo Olympics about herself. But she is not fundamentally a selfish person. She throws birthday parties for teammates and makes sure friends get home safely at night. When a celebrity acknowledges her, she feels guilty for having taken that person’s time. She enjoys life as a football wife in part because on Sundays, everyone is looking at Owens. 

In Tokyo, she tried to notice how many fellow Olympians thanked her for being brave enough to step aside, how many of her friends told her they’d never been prouder of her. But the haters were louder. 

She scrolled through videos of pundits calling her a national embarrassment. The noise drowned out her own thoughts. Wow, she remembers thinking as she left the floor. Thank God I made that decision. She knew she had saved her health and her teammates’ silver. Then she checked her phone. “Everyone’s like, ‘You’re a quitter!’ ‘You suck!’ ‘You’re a disgrace!’ ” she recalls now. “I felt strong. And then I was like, Maybe I’m weak. Maybe I should have tried. Maybe I should have—but then I was like, No, I just could not have. There’s no way.”

Adria, 25, still gets heated thinking about the idea that Simone withdrew solely because she felt stressed. The crossed wires in her brain produced a physical inability, Adria explains. It’s like the yips in golf—if yanking a putt could cause you to break your neck. “It wasn’t like a panic attack,” Adria says. “She’s trying one of the most difficult things in the world and she almost died!”

Biles had revolutionized the sport; she now has five skills that are named after her. Now she could do none of them.

But she held out hope that she could compete in the balance beam final. She pared her dismount down to a double pike, a flip so simple she hadn’t done it since she was 15 and took bronze. She called it the most meaningful medal of her career. 

When she got home and returned to the gym, she says, “I remember feeling broken a little bit. Because it’s what I love to do, and now I’m so terrified. So it didn’t really make sense, and I was kind of stumped. Like, why am I here? Do I want to be here? Is this what I want to do?”

Biles had done everything in gymnastics except find meaning in it. Now she had to try.

She spent more than six weeks in the fall of 2021 on the road headlining her post-Olympic event—the Gold Over America Tour, or GOAT—performing only skills she could land easily. After the tour, she tentatively returned to World Champions Centre, the gym her parents own near their home outside Houston. Now she has a hard time untangling those early days. “A lot of that is like trauma blocking,” she says. “You don’t really remember it.”

She does recall switching on her Tokyo teammates’ college meets—Chiles at UCLA, Jade Carey at Oregon State, Suni Lee at Auburn, Grace McCallum at Utah—and having to fight waves of nausea. So at first Biles returned to the gym not because she wanted to be able to do gymnastics again but because she wanted to be able to watch it.

She tried not to get ahead of herself. She just wanted to feel safe in what used to be her safe place. 

“The end goal wasn’t even the Olympics,” she says. “It was, like, be happy doing gymnastics again. Feel like you’re not gonna die.”

“I remember feeling broken a little bit. Because it’s what I love to do and now I’m so terrified.”Simone Biles

She had stashed her Tokyo gear in a little-used guest room in her home, in what she now calls the forbidden Olympics closet. Sometimes she would pull out the leotards and Team USA pins and masks, and weep. But she always waited until Owens was out of the house.

“I never wanted to see him see me at my weakest point,” she says. “He put in so much effort and he showed so much support and love. I didn’t want him to think it wasn’t working.”

She had dabbled in therapy before, but she was familiar with an athlete’s injury program: Treat a problem until it improves, then stop. Now she prioritized that work, with the understanding that she might do it for the rest of her life. 

And she messed around in the gym. She bounced on the trampoline. She worked on skills you might see at a grade-schooler’s birthday party. She tried to stay in shape. She got lost in the air on consecutive days. She felt cured. She disappeared for weeks at a time. She practiced twice per day. She felt everyone else’s eyes on her as she sobbed, terrified. She did not know if any of this would work. 

Every time, she would say she was going to quit. And every time, she would come back. 

She was not yet cured when she first told her coaches, Cécile Landi and her husband, Laurent, that she wanted to shoot for Paris, less than two years away. 

Their answer came fast: “No.”

Biles was astonished. “I think they were just worried,” she says. “Mentally, could I do it, and if I don’t do it, would that break me?”

Eventually they all agreed that she would try to rediscover her love for the sport before she aimed at any particular competition. The coaches were in charge of setting her schedule. She would just worry about her gymnastics. She never came out and told her mom what she had in mind, although Nellie could tell. And she did not approve. 

“We didn’t want her to! Are you kidding me?” Nellie says with a hard-earned laugh. “I’m like, Girl! Don’t put me through this again! I wanted her to move on with her life.”

She never told her daughter how hard it had been for the people close to her, she says. While Simone was headlining her tour, her coaches and family stayed in Houston, tried to get back to their lives … and realized they couldn’t. They had been in triage mode during the Tokyo Games; it was not until everything slowed down that they allowed themselves to mourn. They took turns blaming themselves. Even now, Cécile feels sick when she watches footage from Tokyo. Looking back on it, Nellie wishes that when she was finding Simone a therapist, she had found one for herself, too. She thinks her daughter probably still doesn’t understand what those months were like. 

“No, no, absolutely not, absolutely not,” Nellie says softly. “Because I never discussed my feelings . I don’t think she knew how hard it was for the coaches.”

She did not try to dissuade her daughter. But when she saw the leotards for the 2023 U.S. Classic, Simone’s first competition since Tokyo, Nellie bawled. We’re gonna go through this again, she thought.

Meanwhile, Simone was having her own second thoughts. When Laurent told her in July that he had signed her up for the U.S. Classic, in August, she panicked. She began falling on her routines. 

“He’s like, ‘Well, that’s your anxiety,’ ” she recalls. “ ‘Because two weeks ago, you could do everything.’ ”

She was attempting among the most dramatic comebacks in sports history. The trick was not to think of it that way. 

“The hardest part of coming back,” she says, “was learning to trust myself again.”

She had invented so many skills. Now she had to hone the one that mattered most. 

“You do feel forced ,” she says now. “You do feel like you have to accomplish something, and that has weight that you carry, and nobody realizes that. It’s hard and it’s not always fun. So we have to really remember why we’re doing it, who we’re doing it for, and if this is really an enjoyable experience that we can look back on in a couple years . There’s a lot to take in consideration, especially that we’re so much older. You can just, like, have a great life, go get a job and move on.”

Adria was relieved to hear her sister talk about her new motivation. In the past, Adria felt like Simone was doing it for the fans. “She was always trying to please other people,” Adria says. “And a lot of the people she was trying to please betrayed her.”

Indeed, when Biles made that return, 733 days after her Tokyo bronze, at the U.S. Classic, she expressed astonishment—not that she had seemingly overcome the twisties but that the fans had embraced her. 

“They still have so much belief in me,” she marveled a few minutes after obliterating the field. “They still love me.”

She won the U.S. championships, too, and the world championships trials. At the 2023 worlds, in Antwerp, Belgium, she became the first woman to land the Yurchenko double pike in international competition; it became the fifth skill named after her. Her sixth world championship all-around gold and three more in event finals gave her 30 world medals, the most in history. The next summer, she mowed down her opponents at the U.S. Classic and the U.S. championships. 

When she won the Olympic trials, guaranteeing her a spot on the Paris team, she became at 27 the oldest woman to compete for the U.S. in gymnastics at the Games in 72 years. After so many months of focusing only on the goal directly in front of her, she was ready to admit she wanted two things: gold in the team final and gold in the individual all-around. 

Within a few minutes of her Olympic return in Paris, both looked out of reach. During warmups for the floor exercise, Biles felt a tug in her lower leg, where she had torn her calf in June. 

“My calf or something just pulled,” Biles told Cécile. “Like, all the way.” The coach tried to appear calm, but she was panicking. “At the moment she came to tell me that,” she says now, “I went back to Tokyo.”

So did Biles. Not again, she thought. She opted to have her calf taped and return to competition, despite pain that would have her crawling, then hopping, down the vault runway. As Tom Cruise, Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande looked on, Biles dominated the rest of the event. Afterward, Raisman asked her how on earth she had done it. “I just can’t have people calling me a quitter again,” Biles said.

She still cared what people thought. But instead of letting them define her, she wanted to define herself for them.

Over the next two days, her calf improved. The morning of team finals, she told her therapist that she felt calm and ready. She visualized herself nailing her routines. She FaceTimed with Owens, who had just arrived in Paris after receiving the Bears’ permission to miss a few days of training camp. She teased teammates: “Remember what happened the last time we were at team finals?” She was fine. 

Still, as she prepared to begin on the vault, she felt her heart rate quicken. What if it happens again? Chiles raced to reassure her. “It’s not going to happen again,” she said. “You’re fine.”

Biles knew that, of course. “It was just the little voice in my head,” she says now. “I knew I had worked way too hard, way too much in therapy, figured out all that stuff.” The weight was no lighter. But she was stronger. 

“You kind of have to go up there and tell yourself, I’m a boss ass b—-.”Simone Biles

She raced down the runway, flung herself onto the springboard and flipped and twisted through the air. She burst into a grin as she landed. Their gold medal would not be official for nearly two hours, but she knew right away. 

Two days later, in the individual all-around, Biles finally faced an opponent other than herself. Rebeca Andrade of Brazil had won gold in the vault in Tokyo in Biles’s absence, and she’d done it again in 2023 in Antwerp in Biles’s presence. Biles has always succeeded because she can do skills so difficult that no other gymnast comes close, giving her extra margin for error on execution. But Andrade comes closer than anyone else. 

Both gymnasts began on vault, where Biles pushed herself to do her Yurchenko double pike—the hardest vault ever performed by a woman, the one that has terrified her every single time she has attempted it. 

It gave Biles a cushion, and she would need it: She rushed through a skill on the high bar, which affected her timing as she transitioned to the low bar; she had to bend her legs to keep from scraping the ground. She finished the rotation in third place, after Andrade and Kaylia Nemour of Algeria. Furious with herself, Biles paced the floor and made eye contact with Owens, who gave her a thumbs up. Biles forced herself to stay calm. Up next was beam, the most mentally demanding event. She had to decide to succeed. 

“You kind of have to go up there and tell yourself, I’m a boss ass b—-,” she says. 

She nailed her routine, catapulting herself back into first, where she would remain. Before her floor routine, Laurent reminded her to stay focused and have fun. “Show them who’s the best,” he said. She knew as she finished that she had done enough. Her smile could have lit the Eiffel Tower. 

Three days later, she won gold on the vault. Then she finished fifth on the beam and took silver, to Andrade, on the floor exercise. While warming up for that event, Biles flew out of bounds on her triple-twisting double somersault. She wondered: Did I just get lost in the air?

This time, instead of letting the twisties scare her, she laughed at them. This would be the cherry on top! she thought. Oh well! 

As it turned out, she had not overcooked her triple double because she’d gotten lost in the air. She was simply too powerful. The silver was her 11th Olympic medal, tying her for second all-time among female gymnasts. That plus her 30 world championship medals makes her the most decorated gymnast ever.

Three months later, days after finishing the 2024 Gold Over America Tour, Biles has transitioned fully to football wife. She is coordinating which friends will attend Bears games with her and trying to choose a heavy winter coat to buy.

She is also fighting a cold. This happens every time she takes a break from gymnastics. “It’s like I’m allergic to the outside world,” she laments. “Like I’m allergic to not flipping.”

For a while, at least, her body will have to get used to sitting still. She does not know whether this break will be permanent, and she is years away from having to decide; after all, she trained less than two years for Paris. And as with any athlete, there are financial incentives for continuing. But Biles does not sound like someone who plans to compete in Los Angeles in 2028. 

If Tokyo was about proving something to the world and Paris was about proving something to herself, what would L.A. have to be about for her to return?

“Life and death,” she says. “Because I’ve accomplished so much, there’s almost nothing left to do, rather than to just be snobby and to try again and for what? I’m at a point in my career where I’m humble enough to know when to be done. 

“If you go back, you’ll be greedy. Those are the consequences. But that’s also your decision to decide. What sacrifices would be made if I go back now? When you’re younger, it’s like, prom, college. Now it’s like, starting a family, being away from my husband. What’s really worth it?” She doesn’t know the answer. 

She is not ready to grapple with her legacy, either. “I don’t think the reality has set in of what I’ve exactly done in the sport,” she says. “I can see it, and I hear it from people, and I see a glimpse of it, but the full magnitude I don’t think I’ve realized just yet. I don’t think I’ll realize ’til maybe I retire and look back in a couple years like, Damn, she was good. Because I can see that, but I do it every day. So for me, it’s normal.”

“I’m at a point in my career where I’m humble enough to know when to be done.”Simone Biles

Many great athletes win medals. Fewer redraw the face of a sport. 

When Biles was a child, she believed her ceiling as a Black gymnast was a college scholarship. When Gabby Douglas won Olympic gold in 2012, Biles reimagined what was possible. This year, seven of the 15 women at the U.S. Olympic Trials were Black. 

She has also helped redefine gymnastics as a sport that’s not just for teenagers. Before Tokyo, the oldest all-around gold medalist in the past 50 years was 20-year-old Simona Amânar of Romania, in 2000. But for the first time since 1952, the U.S. women’s gymnastics team featured four returning Olympians: Biles, Carey, 24; Chiles, 23; and Lee, 21. The team’s average age of 22.47 was the highest in U.S. history by more than a year. 

“COVID made me realize that gymnastics is, in a weird way, easier older, because your body doesn’t change that much,” says Cécile. “The ones who struggled were the 14- to 18-year-olds, because the body changed. you still have the motivation and the right training, you can last.” That understanding has changed the way she coaches, she says, with an eye toward longevity.

And Biles’s greatest legacy might extend beyond gymnastics. 

“After Tokyo, I said to , ‘There has to be so many people around the world that were suffering in silence and struggling with their mental health. You have no idea how many of those people you helped,’ ” says Raisman. “She helps people feel less alone.”

Biles isn’t sure what life might look like after she retires. She wants to continue her work with Friends of the Children, a nonprofit that matches children in foster care with long-term mentors. (Biles’s parents adopted her and Adria from foster care.) She wants to take a more active role in designing a 2025 collection with Athleta. She and Owens are building a house outside Houston. 

She is also growing more comfortable showing all sides of herself. In Paris, she teased her teammates during press conferences, and she jokingly begged Andrade to take it easy on her. Biles also collaborated on a Netflix docuseries, Simone Biles Rising, that was released last summer and fall. At one point, the cameras linger on an extended scene in the couple’s hotel room before the first day of the U.S. Olympic Trials in which Biles, visibly anxious, picks minor fights with Owens. “I’m being mean to him,” she acknowledges a few minutes later. “My mom says I’m mean on meet days.” She even gives the crew a tour of her forbidden Olympics closet. 

Biles saw the episodes before they aired. She never asked for a single scene to be removed. “I think she sees the value in just being honest and true,” says Katie Walsh, who directed the project and produced the 2021 digital series Simone vs. Herself. “I think that’s why she is such an appealing person, and why people have really connected with her. Because you can’t relate to her gymnastics. You’re never going to know what that feels like. But you can relate to being a little stressed and impatient before a big moment.”

At the Philadelphia stop on Biles’s post-Olympic tour in October, it is clear how many people see elements of themselves in her. Maddie and Katie, a pair of 13-year-olds from the neighboring suburbs, discuss what they have learned from Biles. Neither mentions gymnastics. “There’s a lot of mean people,” says Maddie. “She realizes that if you respond to them with anger, then they’re just gonna keep doing it. You’ve just gotta ignore them, and one day you’re gonna wake up and they’re gonna be praising you.”

Biles knows her audience: A Taylor Swift–heavy playlist gives way to a Barbie homage, and at one point, the gymnasts—among them Carey, Chiles and Joscelyn Roberson, an Olympic team alternate for Paris—act out a scene aboard a plane, complete with announcements from “Your captain, Simone.” The show ends with a series of short interviews with the gymnasts and a photo montage of them flipping and twisting as children. 

But the most meaningful portion comes before any of that. “We have this moment in our introduction where they call out Simone’s name, and the way these little kids pour out all of their energy—I don’t think I’ll ever forget it,” Roberson says. “And they did that at 32 different stops.”

The tour offered a public celebration of all Biles has done. She had already taken stock privately. After Paris, she spent a few days in Houston, then flew to Chicago. It was there that she began to understand what she had accomplished. She let out her three dogs—bulldog Zeus and French bulldogs Lilo and Rambo—and sat for nearly two hours watching them race around and bark and play fight. Amid the chaos, she finally felt peace. Wow, she thought. I did that.

“It’s crazy,” she says now, “That I have the privilege and I have the mental strength to accomplish my wildest dreams.”

She does not know what will come next. All she knows is that she will run toward it.