‘Queen’ Biles redefines the limits of sport 1 Simone Biles
Even on a recent holiday in Belize, Simone Biles could not conceal her taste for the pyrotechnic. Off a rickety wooden diving platform beside the turquoise waters, she produced the same double twisting dismount that she has absorbed into her dazzling beam repertoire. “How is this even possible?” asked Aly Raisman, her US team-mate, via text. The question was largely rhetorical. To her peers as much as to her admirers around the world, Biles has ascended to a plane of such unfeasible brilliance that when Raisman took all-around silver behind her at the Rio Olympics, she spoke of feeling that she had won.
At 22, Biles is one of those vanishingly rare athletes who transcends not just her sport, but its scoring system. With Nadia Comaneci, there was a simple shorthand for her version of flawlessness: seven perfect 10s at the Montreal Games. At face value, Biles’s winning mark of 58.999 at this year’s world championships in Stuttgart lacks quite the same punch. Until one realises that it represents more than a two-point advantage over everyone else in the field. Put it another way: even the finest gymnasts can go through their entire careers chasing the ultimate distinction of having one signature move named after them in the code book. Biles already has four.
The Biles II is surely the most celebrated of that quartet, a triple-twist, double-back somersault that even most men are physically incapable of performing. When she unleashed it for her floor routine at this year’s US Nationals in Kansas City, it became an instant viral sensation, gathering almost five million Youtube views. Nastia Liukin, a former Olympic champion, conveyed the thoughts of many by announcing: “Simone has enough gold medals at home. Somebody give this girl a crown.”
Her opponents, never mind the audience, struggle to compute what they are seeing. “She is a once-in-a-lifetime athlete,” Becky Downie, Britain’s leading female gymnast says. “She has a power that’s unmatched. I don’t think you’ll ever see another person dominate the sport as she has.” Downie’s younger sister, Ellie, is pithier still about the effect of the Biles phenomenon. “If ever you’re in a competition with her, you know that you’re not going to win. Unless, perhaps, there are uneven bars.”
The bars represent the one piece of apparatus that Biles has yet to conquer fully, with the lightning-fast flight elements and turning handstands sometimes scrambling even her powers of perception. Everywhere else, though, she stands supreme, her 4ft 8in frame generating an explosiveness and virtuosity that no rival can hope to emulate. “Since the Athens Olympics, the judging system has changed, so that you can build difficulty past the magic 10,” explains Christine Still, the BBC’S long-time gymnastics commentator and a coach for over 45 years. “It is open-ended, and Simone is so much more dynamic than any other gymnast around. She can turn up to competitions with routines of such extremes that she is a mark or two ahead before she has stepped on to the floor.”
In the baldest terms, Biles’s tiny frame ensures that she has less to spin around for her extravagant tumbles. But her preeminence springs from far more than just her diminutive stature. In 1995, journalist Joan Ryan released the book Little Girls in
Pretty Boxes, lamenting the trend in both gymnastics and figure skating to present an aesthetic that had more in common with a children’s beauty pageant than elite sport. Biles, despite her height, offers scant resemblance to the images of frail, delicate waifs on which Ryan dwelt. The composition of her physique lends itself to displays of energy and intensity that shatter any preconceptions of a petite ballerina.
“I am astonished by how strong Simone is,” Still says. “She tumbles better than the majority of men. She also has a charisma that is all her own. The dismount is as powerful as the first move, and she just never seems to tire.”
Biles’s resilience is hard-wired not only into her body, but her character.
‘Every time I watch Simone, I have the same sense of thank you for letting us enjoy what you have mastered’
She was born the third of eight children in Columbus, Ohio, and as a baby was described by her maternal grandfather, Ron, as looking puny and malnourished. Her mother, Shannon, was a drug addict, arrested multiple times before Simone had even turned two. That summer, together with her younger sister, Adria, she was taken away by child protection services and put up for foster care, only for Ron, an air traffic controller, to intervene. He subsequently brought up the two girls with his wife, Nellie, in a suburb of Houston.
It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, until a court order in 2003 stripped Shannon of her rights and allowed Simone’s grandparents to press ahead with legal adoption. A hyperactive streak could be detected in Simone at an early stage, from her backflips around the living room, and a chance field trip to a local gymnastics centre helped cement her fate. Aimee Boorman, her first coach, selected her for the team without hesitation and before long she had settled under the mentorship of celebrated coaches Bela and Marta Karolyi, who remember her as “the bounciest kid we had ever met”. Paul Ziert, the publisher of International
Gymnast Magazine and once the coach to Bart Conner, now Comaneci’s husband, emphasises Biles’s single-mindedness in overcoming the hardships of her childhood. “That’s what makes her even more remarkable than her physical performances,” he says. “I don’t see Simone as someone who has carried that scar with her. There is just a real joy of doing gymnastics, being able to perform the way she does, and challenging herself.
“For anyone who has had serious
difficulties when growing up, she is an extraordinary role model. She has not only triumphed, but done so with such a vibrant personality.”
Adulthood, sadly, has not brought an end to her traumas. Last year, Biles disclosed that she had been among the dozens of young women sexually abused by Larry Nassar, who conducted his depravity under the guise of the US team doctor. “The more I try to shut off the voice in my head, the more it screams,” she said. “It is impossibly difficult to relive these experiences.” Off the mat, she has used her voice to singular effect, delivering a blazing rebuke to USA Gymnastics for the institutional code of silence that masked Nassar’s crimes. “It’s hard coming here for an organisation, having had them fail us so many times,” she reflected, tearfully. “You literally had one job and you couldn’t protect us.”
As she builds towards the Tokyo Olympics next summer, Biles can savour the fact that she has done nothing less than transform her sport. Quite apart from her ambassadorial attributes, she has changed the way that many of her contemporaries approach their craft. The Dutch, for example, recognised that their path to global medals lay not in taking on Biles at her own high-tariff game, but in paying far more attention to dance and choreography. The result? Their leading star, Sanne Wevers, seized the gold in Rio on the beam.
To some, Biles will never have the exquisite grace of Comaneci, but to Ziert, who saw both in the flesh, comparisons are invidious. “We have the ballerinas and we have the circus performers, and I think we should cherish both. Simone sometimes is criticised for not being as clean or as flexible as she could be. But that is to put her into a domain that she has overridden by her willingness to take huge risks.”
The psychological pressures Biles shoulders are so acute that she will, in all likelihood, make Tokyo her final Games. If that is so, there is an even greater imperative to relish every appearance. “Nobody who has watched her has left without a smile,” Ziert says. “Most people can’t count the twists and flips, but they come away feeling they have experienced something. It was the same with Nadia in ’76. In the same way, every time I watch Simone, I have the same sense of, ‘Thank you for letting us enjoy what you have mastered.’”