Simone Biles

Lore & Background

Biles is the originator of the most difficult skill on women's vault, balance beam, and floor exercise; so far, she is the only gymnast to attempt them. She has five skills named after her in the Code of Points (one on vault, one on balance beam, and three on floor exercise).

Reader's Guide

Biles is a two-time Olympic all-around champion (2016, 2024), two-time Olympic vault champion (2016, 2024), 2016 Olympic floor champion and 2024 floor silver medalist, and two-time Olympic bronze medalist on balance beam (2016, 2020). She led the U.S. to team gold in 2016 (Final Five) and 2024 (Golden Girls), and won team silver in 2020 (Fighting Four). At the World Championships, she is a six-time all-around champion, six-time floor champion, four-time balance beam champion, two-time vault champion, and member of five gold-medal-winning U.S. teams. Domestically, she has won a record nine U.S. national all-around titles.

Did You Know?

• She is the sixth woman to win an individual all-around title at both the Olympics and the World Championships.
• Biles is the only woman to win all five gold medals in a single U.S. championships twice (2018, 2024).
• She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Joe Biden in 2022.

A Record That Redefined the Sport

Few athletes in any discipline have accumulated accolades the way Simone Biles has. Her eleven Olympic medals and thirty World Championship medals place her as the most decorated gymnast the sport has ever produced. At the Games, she claimed individual all-around gold in both 2016 and 2024, repeated as vault champion in those same years, added a floor-exercise gold in Rio and a silver in Paris, and collected balance-beam bronze in 2016 and 2020. She anchored the gold-medal U.S. squads known as the Final Five and the Golden Girls. On the World Championship stage, her thirty medals include twenty-three golds, with six all-around titles, six floor-exercise crowns, four beam titles, and two vault championships—each a record total. Domestically, she has captured nine U.S. national all-around titles and is the only woman to sweep all five event golds at a single national championships on two separate occasions, in 2018 and 2024. Her Olympic medal count also makes her the most decorated American gymnast ever and ties her with Věra Čáslavská as the second-most decorated female Olympic gymnast behind Larisa Latynina.

The Twisties and the Triumph of Returning

The 2020 Tokyo Games remain one of the most emotionally charged chapters in modern gymnastics. Entering the competition as the overwhelming favorite to capture at least four of six available golds, Biles withdrew from most events after the qualification round, citing what she described as 'the twisties'—a temporary loss of proprioception that made twisting elements feel disorienting and unsafe. Despite that difficult decision, she still contributed to a silver medal with the U.S. team, which earned the nickname the Fighting Four. Her willingness to step back and later return reshaped conversations about athlete mental health across all of sport. The narrative of recovery reached its apex in 2024, when she reclaimed the individual all-around and vault golds in Paris, helped the Golden Girls to team gold, and took a floor-exercise silver. That same year, the Laureus Academy named her Comeback of the Year. In 2022, President Joe Biden recognized her broader contributions by presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 2023 she broke a ninety-year-old record by claiming her eighth U.S. national title, surpassing a mark set by Alfred Jochim.

Skills That Have No Predecessor

Biles has not only dominated the scoring tables; she has fundamentally expanded what is physically possible on the apparatus. She is the originator of the most difficult recognized skill on women's vault, balance beam, and floor exercise, and as of the available record she remains the sole gymnast to have attempted all three. Her versatility is equally historic: she is the sixth woman ever to claim an individual all-around title at both the Olympics and the World Championships, and the first since Lilia Podkopayeva in 1996 to hold those two crowns simultaneously. She became the tenth woman—and the first American woman—to collect a World Championship medal on every event, and the first since Daniela Silivaș in 1988 to medal on all five events at a single Olympic or World Championship competition. Her sustained excellence has been recognized repeatedly beyond gymnastics: the Laureus World Sports Awards have named her World Sportswoman of the Year four times (2017, 2019, 2020, 2025), a testament to a career that spans more than a decade at the absolute peak of the sport.

From Foster Care to the World Stage

Simone Biles's path to greatness began far from the spotlight. Born in Columbus, Ohio, in March 1997, she was the third of four siblings whose birth mother, Shanon Biles, was unable to provide care. All four children cycled through foster care until 2000, when their maternal grandfather Ron Biles and his second wife, Nellie Cayetano Biles, in Spring, Texas, took them in temporarily. In 2003, the couple formally adopted Simone and her younger sister Adria, while an aunt, Harriet, adopted the two older children. Simone holds Belizean citizenship through her adoptive mother and regards Belize as a second home; the family practices Catholicism. She attended Benfer Elementary in Harris County before switching to home schooling in 2012 so she could nearly double her weekly training hours from twenty to thirty-two. She earned her high-school diploma in mid-2015. Although she had verbally committed to UCLA in 2014 and signed a National Letter of Intent that November, she announced in July 2015 that she would turn professional and forfeit her NCAA eligibility. Her first brush with gymnastics came at age six during a day-care field trip, and by eight she was training under coach Aimee Boorman.