Simone Biles' gymnastics revolution

At 9 a.m. on a Wednesday in January, Simone Biles was dancing in the middle of World Champions Centre in Spring, Texas, but no music was playing. Clad in black spandex shorts and a hoodie — all Nike, her corporate sponsor — the three-time world gymnastics champion was going through the motions of her new floor routine, while Dominic Zito, the national team choreographer, stood on the sidelines watching her as she sashayed across the mat.

Zito hit play on his laptop, and Brazilian music blared from speakers. The selection was the first indication that the long-awaited Olympic year had finally arrived. Since she aged into the senior ranks in 2013, 19-year-old Biles has broken or tied every record in women's gymnastics and has been called the "most talented gymnast ever." In 2015, she became the first woman to win three consecutive world all-around titles. That was also the year she broke the record for most gold medals won by a female gymnast in a world championship competition. For Biles, going to the Olympics is not so much about winning as it is about not losing the gold.

Biles is frequently compared to the likes of Michael Jordan or Michael Phelps: all-time greats whose legacies transcend their individual sports. This is unusual for gymnastics, which is typically treated as separate from the rest of the sporting world, as an athletic sideshow with uniquely young and small athletes and nebulous rules and corrupt judging. But Biles' superiority is so plain to see that even the uninitiated can understand it.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Today, she and her coaches are trying to crack an impossible-seeming question: How do you end the floor routine of one of the greatest athletes of all time? What pose can possibly say all of that?

Most Olympic gymnast origin stories sound something like this: Little Sarah had so much energy, so she was enrolled in gymnastics class. Fast-forward 10 years and she's on the Olympic team.

Biles' background hews to this narrative — for the most part. As a youngster, she was extraordinarily rambunctious, climbing and jumping off everything. "I remember when she was in foster care, I would go in the house to visit them," her father, Ron Biles, told me at the family home, surrounded by their four friendly German shepherds. "You had to walk up three steps into the house and Simone would jump from the top of the steps into your arms."

At that point, Ron and his wife, Nellie, weren't yet Simone's parents. They were her grandparents; Simone's biological mother, Shanon, is Ron's daughter from his first marriage. Shanon's four children had been taken from her and placed in foster care because of her substance abuse problems — something the family rarely talked about publicly until Simone's career took off.

Ron first learned about the situation when a social worker reached out to him in August 1999. Simone was 3, and her younger sister, Adria, was just 13 months old. He told the social worker to send the kids from Columbus, Ohio, to his home in Texas. He then had to speak to Nellie about changing the composition of their family. He and Nellie had two high school–age boys of their own; Ron asked her if they could bring his grandchildren into their home. "I needed to pray about it," Nellie said, but she eventually agreed.

In March 2000, Ron flew up north to bring them down temporarily. It would take a few more years for their mother's parental rights to be terminated and for the four children to be permanently resettled in Texas; the older two were taken by Ron's older sister, while the younger ones went to Ron and Nellie. It wasn't until 2003 that Simone and Adria were formally adopted. Simone, by then, was 6 years old.

Since the adoption, the girls have had minimal contact with their biological mother. Simone admitted that it is strange for her to be asked about that period in her life. "It's just kind of thrown at me and it's weird to talk about because I don't know much about it," she said. "All I know is Texas."

Texas is where the life Biles remembers started. It's also where she was introduced to gymnastics, by chance, when she was 6. She went on a day-care field trip to a gym and came home with a note for her parents that said she was talented and suggested they enroll her in lessons. I have no doubt that those coaches noticed her innate gifts — fearlessness, coordination, strength — though Nellie surmised that the note was probably sent home with all of the kids who tried gymnastics that day.

Biles was soon thereafter pulled into the optional training program at Bannon's Gymnastix. "We said, 'This kid's got talent and we believe she's going to learn things really fast,'" said Aimee Boorman, Biles' longtime coach. But her ability to learn high-level skills quickly didn't translate immediately to strong competitive results. Biles, for all of her strengths, had some notable weaknesses. 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.

Biles' ambitions were quite modest at first. When she and her mom sat down in 2009, when she was 11 and at the top level in the Junior Olympic system, all she wanted to do was qualify for regionals. "That was her big goal," Nellie recalled. Biles made it to the regional championships, where she placed 14th in the all-around. She did very poorly on bars, but won floor and placed fourth on vault.

Biles' aspirations escalated incrementally. After making it to the final rung of the Junior Olympic program, she wanted to make the leap to elite, which is the level you watch at the Olympics. And once she was elite, she wanted to qualify to compete at the national championships. She was finally named to the U.S. junior national team when she was 15 and in the last few months of her junior eligibility.

According to Biles, her career really took off in 2012 because she increased her training time. Unlike many of her peers, Biles had been enrolled in public school and only trained five days a week for approximately four hours per session. Her 20 hours per week paled in comparison with other elites, who typically squeeze in two workouts on most days, for a total of 32 hours a week. But before starting high school, Biles made the call to homeschool so she could spend more time training. "My hours ramped up," she said matter-of-factly, dispelling the idea that any sort of miracle had taken place at the end of her junior career that led to her sudden rise. To Biles, it was simple math: More hours in the gym meant better outcomes in competition.

Biles' first foray into international competition came in March 2013, at the American Cup in Worcester, Massachusetts. I hadn't heard much about Biles before this. But after the vault, the first event, the focus in the arena shifted to her. She rocketed into the lead by performing the most difficult vault of the meet. Biles stayed in the lead until the balance beam, when she fell and Katelyn Ohashi edged ahead of her. After beam, Biles almost charged back into the lead, showing the powerful tumbling that would become her trademark. Ohashi, however, also hit floor and stayed in first. Biles finished in second.

Biles' placement in her first senior international meet, however, was not what impressed me. When she did her double-twisting double somersault on floor, she finished the twists and rotations so high above the mat that you started wondering if she could stash an extra twist in there. Biles made you think that the crazy skills gymnastics-happy kids dream up while playing "the Olympics" with dolls in their bedrooms — elements like triple-twisting double somersaults — are actually possible.

Something curious happened between 2013 and 2014: Biles went from being a contender for the title to being the inevitable winner. No other gymnast need apply for gold; the rest of the field had all but ceded the title to her. I was at the 2014 world championships in Nanning, China, and I watched Biles win the all-around in person. Nearly everyone I spoke to while I was there — from officials to judges to coaches, regardless of nationality — wanted to talk about the teenage Texan. They were flabbergasted by her abilities, by the seeming ease with which she performed the most difficult elements. What else can she do? Is there any way to stop her?

Short answer: No. Biles can't be beaten. She often has more than a full point advantage over her nearest competitors. That's because, since 2006, gymnasts receive two scores: one for how well they do their routine (a score out of 10) and another that determines how difficult the routine is by adding up the values of the skills. The two scores are then added together, so you end up with scores like 14.667 instead of 8.9 or 9.5 or 10.

Biles boasts the highest start values on three of the four events. On vault, she's usually up by half a point. Same for floor. And depending on the kind of day she has on beam — if she moves swiftly between elements, which boosts her bonus points — she can accumulate close to another half point.

But this start-value advantage she has over the best gymnasts in the world doesn't fully account for the point spread in her victories. After all, at the 2014 national championships, she fell and still won by four points. Ditto in 2015 where she fell again and won by almost five points, ahead of her close friend and national teammate Maggie Nichols, who went eight-for-eight at the competition.

What makes these victory margins possible is how cleanly she executes her routines (not counting the falls, of course). When she tumbles, she rotates easily, landing with her chest up and her arms overhead. On vault, she twists cleanly. She does her full-twisting double back dismount from the beam with her knees together instead of pulling them apart for ease as other former champions have, and even nails handstands on bars, her weakest apparatus. When you add her above-average difficulty to her tidy execution, you get the two-, three-, four-, even five-point margins she's been winning by since 2014.

One potential roadblock that everyone is keenly aware of is the so-called world champion jinx. There's enough anecdotal data to suggest that making the leap from world to Olympic champion is difficult; in fact, the last female gymnast to do so was Ukrainian Lilia Podkopayeva in 1996.

Biles, for her part, seems less worried, at least outwardly, about the media attention and pressure. In a conference call in March, she told reporters, "I've never been to the Olympics, so I don't know what to expect. It's better for me, just like my first worlds.... My third worlds, I knew what it was like, so I was like, 'Oh my goodness.' But this is my first Olympics, and not knowing what to expect is good for me." It's a neat little mental trick.

It seems to be working. At the Pacific Rim Gymnastics Championships, her 2016 debut, Biles was absolutely stellar. She showed an upgraded vault, which will probably assure her the vault gold in Rio. Her bar routine — once her worst event — was effortless; her beam sure-footed.

Then there was her floor, the samba-inspired routine she first learned back in January. It had all of her trademark moments: the stratospheric tumbling, the stuck landings, the playful Marilyn Monroe–style femininity when she mimes an "Oh!" with her hand over her mouth. The edges of the routine had been smoothed out. Biles hadn't quite yet reached Carnival-dancer levels of sultriness, but maybe you can only truly become one when you're dancing in Brazil.

Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in BuzzFeed. Reprinted with permission. Meyers' The End of the Perfect 10 was published by Touchstone in July.