Okay, let's unpack this. We are diving deep into
the career of an athlete whose name, I mean,
regardless of sport or gender, has become the
definitive shorthand for the greatest of all
time. Today, our focus is Simone Biles. And when
we talk about Simone Biles, you have to understand
that we are tracking a statistical anomaly. It's
wrapped up in this generational athletic genius.
Her numbers are just staggering. You're looking
at 30 world championship medals and 11 Olympic
medals. She is officially the most decorated
artistic gymnast, and that's male or female in
world championships history. That's the critical
distinction, isn't it? The one we need to make
right out of the gate. It really is. Her total
Olympic medal count, 11. that places her tied
with the Czech legend Vira Aslavska as the second
most decorated female Olympic gymnast, just behind
Larisa Latnina. Right. But the sheer volume and,
you know, the longevity of her dominance at the
world championships, that's a different story.
Completely different story. 23 of those 30 world
medals are gold. 23. That puts her in a category
of one. It fundamentally reshapes the global
record books. Absolutely. So our mission today
is to track this incredible arc, and we'll be
moving through what we see in the sources as,
well, two pretty definitive chapters of her life.
The first chapter is her initial, I'd say, world
-shaking athletic dominance. That's the era of
records, unprecedented difficulty. peaking initially
in Rio and then continuing all the way through
2019. And the second chapter, which is equally
important, is her world -changing personal advocacy.
This chapter is defined largely by her decisions
in Tokyo regarding mental health, her powerful
testimony about systemic abuse, and then her
triumphant return to the highest level in Paris.
Exactly. These two chapters, pure dominance and
then this profound vulnerability, are what collectively
redefine what strength and greatness look like
in elite sports. For you, the audience. and for,
you know, future generations of athletes. But
before we jump in, let's look at those foundational
numbers one more time. Yeah, let's do that. By
the time she finished her run in Paris in 2024,
she had surpassed Vitaly Shcherbo as the most
successful gymnast of all time at the Olympics
and World Championships combined. She just made
the impossible seem routine. She did. So let's
jump right into the beginning, the ascent, the
crucial years from her early life up through
that Rio quad. Right. Simone Ariane Biles was
born on March 14, 1997, in Columbus, Ohio. And
the sources make it really clear that her early
childhood was marked by a lot of challenge. A
great deal of challenge. She and her three siblings
moved in and out of the foster care system because
their birth mother, Shannon Biles, was struggling
with substance abuse and was just unable to provide
stable care. That instability is such a crucial
part of her story. And the pivotal change that
provided the stability required for such an elite
trajectory happened in 2003. That's right. Her
maternal grandfather, Ron Biles. and his second
wife, Nellie Cayetano Biles, took her and her
younger sister, Adria, into their home in Spring,
Texas. And they formally adopted the two girls.
They did. And that provided the solid, loving
foundation that would underpin everything that
came after. Ron and Nellie became her parents.
And the sources also highlight this wonderful
side note to the family history. Because Nellie
is from Belize, Simone actually holds dual U
.S. and Belizean citizenship. Which she's always
been quite open about. She considers Belize her
second home, which just speaks to that strong
family bond and the foundation they built in
Texas. That foundation was so vital because her
athletic trajectory accelerated fast. Incredibly
fast. She started training with Amy Borman at
age eight. And Borman recognized her talent immediately.
But it wasn't just, you know, raw talent. It
was her willingness to commit fully. And that
commitment really materialized in 2012 when she
made a pretty significant strategic decision.
A huge one. It signaled her intent for global
domination. She switched from attending public
school to being homeschooled. That shift, it
doesn't sound like a big deal on the surface,
but when you actually look at the training hours,
it was a massive professional sacrifice for a
teenager. It absolutely was. What exactly did
that scheduling change allow her to do? It was
purely about maximizing training volume and recovery
time. The sources show it allowed her to significantly
increase her training regimen from around 20
hours a week to an intense professional athlete
standard of 32 hours per week. Wow. Yeah. That
level of dedication, prioritizing the gym over
traditional schooling, it just shows the singular
focus she had on elite competition. She actually
completed her high school diploma in mid -2015.
And even before Rio, she made another critical
choice about her future. She verbally committed
to UCLA back in 2014, intending to defer until
after the 2016 games. Right. But the financial
realities and just the trajectory of her dominance
meant that by July 2015, she announced she was
turning professional. Forfeiting her NCAA eligibility.
Exactly. It was just clear even then that her
path was going to be defined by global senior
competition, not college athletics. Which makes
sense. She was an elite gymnast by 14, officially
starting her elite career in 2011. And her senior
international debut. came quickly in 2013 at
the American Cup. Where she finished second behind
her teammate Kaitlyn Ohashi. But this period
holds another critical detail that I think often
gets overlooked in just the raw medal count.
What's that? The intense struggle she had with
performance anxiety. That feels like the first
real moment of that applied mental strength that,
you know, foreshadows Tokyo. What does the biographical
account tell us about this early psychological
hurdle? It was significant after a notably poor
performance at the U .S. Classic in July 2013,
where she fell multiple times. She and her coaches
made the proactive decision to consult a sports
psychologist. And she's been very open about
that. Incredibly open. She credits this early
intervention with helping her manage the intense
pressure, the anxiety, the confidence issues
she was facing. She says that work directly preceded
her monumental streak of dominance later that
same year. So the foundation for her global success
wasn't just physical. It was established by recognizing
a mental weakness and turning it into a strength.
Right. Through applied knowledge. That insight
is so vital for anyone who looks up to her. It
really is. It shows that even the greatest of
all time needs professional help to manage the
enormous mental load of elite competition. And
the results were, I mean, they were immediate
and historic. Later in 2013, at just 16 years
old, she goes to the World Championships in Antwerp
and becomes the national all -around champion
and then the world all -around champion. Instantly
placing her in the history books. Instantly.
First African -American woman and the seventh
American woman overall to win that most prestigious
of titles. And she didn't just win. She announced
her arrival with a level of technical capability
that just forced everyone to pay attention. For
sure. The sources detail that she was the first
American gymnast since Shannon Miller. back in
1991 to qualify for the all around and all four
event finals at a single world championships.
And she took home gold on floor, silver on vault
and bronze on beam. A stunning senior debut that
proved her all around mastery. And from 2014
to 2015, the accolades moved past promising and
went straight into unprecedented. In 2014, she
repeated as world all -around champion. This
made her only the second American woman after
Shannon Miller in the mid -90s to get back -to
-back titles. And the U .S. record books just
started to crumble. She surpassed Miller's total
of five to hold the American record for most
world championship gold medals. And that momentum
carried straight through to 2015. That year,
the discussion shifted from great American gymnast
to greatest ever. So at the Glasgow Worlds, what
was the definitive achievement there? The definitive
achievement was becoming the first woman ever
to win three consecutive world all -around titles.
Ever. No woman had ever demonstrated that level
of consistency and longevity at the top of the
all -around podium. She capped off that 2015
performance by reaching 14 total world championship
medals, the most for any American, and 10 total
gold medals, setting the record for any woman
in world championships history. To win 10 world
gold medals before your first Olympic Games is
just... It's staggering. That's unbelievable.
That dominance sets the perfect stage for the
Rio 2016 Summer Olympics, the games that cemented
her global superstardom. She was named to the
legendary team known affectionately as the Final
Five. The 2016 games were historic. She delivered
four gold medals, team, individual, all around.
Vault and floor exercise. And that individual
all -around victory was particularly dominant.
She had the highest scores on three of the four
events, vault, beam, and floor. And she and Allie
Raisman became the second pair of American gymnasts
to win gold and silver in the all -around. I
remember that balance beam final so vividly.
The sources specifically mention a small stumble
where she grabbed the beam with her hands. A
mandatory .5 deduction. Right. Yet, despite that
major error, a mistake that would doom almost
any other gymnast. She still walked away with
the bronze medal. And that fact speaks volumes
about the sheer chasm of technical difficulty
she maintained over her rivals. Her baseline
complexity was so high that she had a built -in
cushion that allowed her to absorb a major deduction
and still get on the podium. Her four -gold medal
set an American record for the most goals in
women's gymnastics at a single Games. And in
terms of historical comparison, she was now in
the most elite of clubs. She became only the
fourth female gymnast in history to that point
to win every major all -around title in an Olympic
cycle. The others are legends like Latinina,
Oslovska, and Torsheva. She had conquered every
significant title the sport offered. Every single
one. But following the glow of Rio, there was
this moment of unwanted controversy that also
became a moment of personal advocacy. which is
such a key through line in her life. That's right.
In September 2016, her medical information was
leaked following the fancy bear hack into the
World Anti -Doping Agency, WDA, and she was falsely
accused of doping. She handled that moment with
incredible honesty and transparency. She did.
She went on Twitter and publicly disclosed that
she has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,
ADHD, and had a therapeutic use exemption, a
TEU, to take medication Ritalin for it, a condition
she'd been diagnosed with as a child. Let's just
pause on this for a minute. For a young athlete
who has just achieved global fame facing a hack
that threatens to derail your reputation, that's
terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. But her response
turned this whole incident on its head. It really
did. By being immediately transparent, she controlled
the narrative. And she was widely applauded for
her openness, turning what the hackers intended
to be a scandal into this powerful moment of
advocacy for both mental health and the transparency
of the TUE process. This wasn't just defending
herself, it was normalizing a medical condition
for high -achieving athletes. Exactly. So following
the Games, she took a necessary hiatus in 2017
to recover and reset. Which is crucial after
the mental and physical stress of an Olympic
quad. She also released her autobiography, Courage
to Soar, and started managing her professional
life differently, including a coaching change.
Right after her longtime coach, Amy Borman, relocated
to Florida. So she returned to conditioning in
August 2017, and later that year hired the French
coaching duo Laurent Lundy and Cécile Conquetot
-Lundy. And that partnership proved instrumental
not just in maintaining her dominance, but in
dramatically increasing her difficulty. A strategy
that would define her post -Rio career and lead
to the creation of skills that were, well, technically
impossible for her contemporaries. That brings
us squarely into the second chapter of her athletic
dominance, covering the 2018 -2019 period, the
era of total, quantifiable supremacy and profound
public reckoning. And when she returned to competition
in 2018, she didn't just ease back in. She immediately
dominated the U .S. Classic, setting a new high
all -around score for the 2017 -2020 Code of
Points. Crucially, she did this even with a fall
on bars and an out -of -bounds penalty on floor.
Which just proved that her base difficulty had
accelerated past everyone else, even when she
wasn't perfect. And that dominance continued
at the 2018 U .S. National Championships. She
achieved something truly historic there. She
won gold in every... single event over the two
days of competition. The all -around vault, beam,
floor, and uneven bars. A clean sweep. The sources
confirm it was the first time a woman had done
that since Dominique Dawes in 1994, securing
Biles' record fifth national all -around title.
And the margin of victory was insane. The gap
she maintained was staggering 6 .55 points ahead
of the second place finisher. This wasn't competition.
This was a demonstration. Yet even in the middle,
Of this total dominance, she faced significant
physical and emotional trials leading into the
2018 World Championships in Doha. This is a story
of almost unbelievable grit. Yeah. She was rushed
to the emergency room the night before qualifications,
severe stomach pains, which doctors identified
as a kidney stone. And she still competed. After
confirming it wasn't appendicitis and getting
some pain management, she checked herself out
and competed the next day. Kidney stone and all.
I have to ask, what do you think the long -term
emotional cost was for competing under that kind
of duress? Is that a moment of inspiring grit?
Or is it a moment where the overwhelming pressure
forces an athlete to perform when they should
be resting? I think it's likely both. And it
just speaks to the immense internal and external
pressure she faced. But she delivered. She qualified
first in the all -round and for most event finals.
And in the team final. She competed on all four
events, leading the U .S. team to gold by a record
margin. A record margin of 8 .766 points ahead
of the silver medal Russian team. That shattered
previous records. But the defining moment of
that year, the moment that technical analysts
still talk about, was the individual all -around
final in Doha. Right. She won her fourth world
all -around title, surpassing Svetlana Korkina's
previous record of three. And she did it despite
falling on both the vault and the balance beam.
I know. How is that possible? Exactly. How is
that possible? This is the definitive technical
insight that you, the listener, need to understand.
The difficulty gap. Her routines were built with
such high difficulty values or D scores that
even with mandatory deductions from two major
falls, her starting score was so high that her
total still eclipsed the highest possible clean
scores of her competitors. So the 1 .7 point
victory margin, despite two falls, perfectly
illustrates that. It perfectly illustrates that
she was fundamentally competing against a different
and far more demanding code of points that she
alone was capable of mastering. She forced the
sport to rewrite its own rulebook. which we'll
get to. But the records just kept tumbling in
2018. They did. She won the vault gold, her first
career world vault title. And by doing that,
she broke Vitaly Shcherbo's record for most world
gold medals, reaching 13. And critically, she
won silver on the uneven bars. An event often
considered her relative weakness. That silver
made her the 10th female gymnast overall and
the first American woman to win a world championship
medal on every single apparatus. All around vault.
bars, beam, and floor. She had truly mastered
the entirety of the sport. Before we move into
the technical revolution of 2019, it is just
impossible to discuss this period without dedicating
significant time to the painful necessity of
her public advocacy around the Nassar abuse.
That's right. In January 2018, Biles made the
public statement revealing that former USA Gymnastics
physician Larry Nassar had sexually assaulted
her. This was a massive, emotionally taxing decision.
It came months after she had shared that she
wasn't emotionally ready to face Nassar at his
initial sentencing hearings. And she quickly
became a leading unifying voice for the hundreds
of survivors. A really powerful symbolic gesture
happened at the 2018 National Championships,
which she dedicated to them. That was the teal
leotard moment. Right. She wore a teal leotard,
a color she helped design to honor the survivors
of Nassar's abuse as this public statement of
unity and resilience. It signaled that she was
competing for something much larger than herself.
And this advocacy didn't stop at symbolic gestures.
It culminated in one of the the most devastating
and, frankly, vital pieces of testimony in recent
sports history in 2021. That was her testimony
to the U .S. Senate Judiciary Committee alongside
Michaela Maroney, Maggie Nichols, and Ali Raisman.
Her testimony was just damning and so clear.
It was. She stated explicitly that she blamed
the entire system. specifically USA Gymnastics
and the United States Olympic and Paralympic
Committee, for enabling and perpetuating the
crimes by failing to act on clear warnings. That
public act of bravery, of demanding accountability,
it elevated her role far beyond sport. She became
a force for institutional change. It absolutely
puts her accomplishments into context. She achieved
her greatest professional dominance during a
period of immense personal and political trauma,
constantly fighting for change while simultaneously
pushing the boundaries of human performance.
So now let's pivot back to that technical superiority
that allowed her to win while dealing with all
of this. This is the period, 2019, where she
officially revolutionized the code of points
through the introduction of the Biles elements.
This is a deep dive into the rules, so let's
get technical for a second. Let's do it. When
an athlete performs a brand new, never -before
-seen skill successfully in a major international
competition, it gets named after them and assigned
a difficulty score, or D -score. Biles currently
has five eponymous skills across three different
apparatuses. And we already have the Biles vault
from 2018. Right, a Yurchenko half -on, followed
by a straight front salto with a double twist
-off. That was originally a 6 .4 difficulty value,
making it tied with the Protonova as the most
difficult women's vault ever. ever competed at
that time. But 2019 is where she truly broke
the difficulty scale. At the National Championships,
she debuted two new skills that would be officially
named after her later that year at the Worlds.
Let's start with the balance beam. It's already
the apparatus of risk and precision. What did
she introduce there? On the balance beam, she
introduced the Biles dismount, a double -twisting,
double -tucked salto dismount. This was assigned
a difficulty rating of H, which translates to
0 .8 difficulty points. A huge strategic move.
A critical one. Her coach, Cecile Conkaito -Londi,
helped her rework her beam performance, removing
inconsistent lower value skills and replacing
them with this upgraded high risk, high reward
dismount. And then there's the famous one on
floor exercise, the Biles 2. The one that makes
everyone just gasp. The Biles 2 on floor is the
triple twisting double tucked salto backwards,
often called the triple double. This skill was
assigned the letter J, which is one point so
full difficulty points. And this is where we
need to emphasize the magnitude. Why is a J rating
so significant for our listener who may not be
a gymnastics scoring expert? A J rating means
an element is valued at 1 .0 points. This holds
a unique distinction. It is the highest difficulty
rating across all disciplines for both men and
women in artistic gymnastics. The highest for
the entire sport. For the entire sport. A 1 .0
difficulty element fundamentally warps the scoring
strategy. It's almost unheard of. To beat her.
competitors wouldn't just need a clean routine.
They would literally need to perform skills that
don't yet exist or are significantly lower value.
She didn't just set a new record for women. She
set a new difficulty ceiling for the entire sport
globally. Precisely. So she goes into the 2019
World Championships in Stuttgart as the undisputed
technical monarch. And her goal was simply to
cement... the statistical reality. And she did.
Team USA won its fifth consecutive team title.
Her performance in Stuttgart was almost flawless,
culminating in her fifth world all -around title.
She won by an astronomical record -setting margin
of 2 .1 points. 2 .1 points. That difficulty
gap again, just insurmountable. She consistently
posted the highest scores of the day on three
of the four events, Vault, Beam, and Floor. The
individual medal haul was just as historic. By
winning gold on Volt, she tied Sherbo's record
for most world championships medals at 23. And
then the following day, by winning balance beam
gold, she secured her 24th world championships
medal, officially becoming the sole record holder
for most world championship medals won by any
gymnast male or female surpassing Vitaly Sherbo's
total. It was a monumental haul. She finished
the Stuttgart Worlds with five gold medals. Tying
the record for most golds won at a single world
championships, matching legends Larissa Latinina
and Boris Shoklin, who did that way back in 1958.
Wow. And her fifth gold medal on floor exercise
secured the most titles on one apparatus in world
championships history. That was the perfect climax
to her first decade of unparalleled dominance.
That incredible run sets the stage for the defining
moment of her career. And maybe the defining
moment of the decade in women's sports. The period
from 2020 through the 2024 Paris Olympics. A
period defined by mental strength, vulnerability,
and the ultimate comeback. Of course, 2020 was
derailed by the pandemic. But in 2021, anticipation
for the Tokyo Olympics was at a fever pitch.
She was the heavy favorite. Not just to win,
but to sweep. She qualified first in the all
-around and, remarkably, for all four individual
finals, the only athlete to do so. But the sources
indicate the mental pressure was already massive.
She was already talking about the strain. She
was. Following qualifications she posted on Instagram,
saying she felt the weight of the world on her
shoulders, the expectation was suffocating. Then
came the crisis point during the team final.
On her first rotation, the Aminar Vault. She
balked midair, only performing 1 .5 twists instead
of the expected 2 .5, resulting in a low score.
And that was the moment she pivoted away from
athletic performance and towards self -preservation.
She subsequently withdrew from the rest of the
team competition, citing mental health issues
and explaining she was experiencing the twisties.
It was a brave and conscious choice. She directly
cited Naomi Osaka's prior withdrawals from high
profile competitions as an inspiration, showing
a clear generational shift in how elite athletes
were starting to address the crushing mental
toll of competition. And the remaining U .S.
team, quickly nicknamed the Fighting Four, went
on to win a well -deserved silver medal. They
did. So let's break down the twisties. For the
listener who hasn't experienced this in gymnastics,
what exactly is it and why is it such a safety
risk? The twisties are a temporary, debilitating
neurological condition. It's a sudden, complete
loss of proprioception, the awareness of where
your body is in space, specifically during complex
twisting maneuvers. Your brain essentially disconnects
from the physical reality of the rotation. And
when you're performing a triple -double on the
floor or a complex dismount from the beam, losing
that awareness is devastating. It's life -threatening.
If you lose control mid -air, you can land on
your head, neck, or spine. And Biles explained
that while she'd had the twisties before, in
Tokyo, they had spread to apparatuses where she'd
never had issues, specifically bars and beam.
So her physical safety was genuinely at risk
if she continued. Genuinely. The subsequent days
saw her withdraw from the individual all -around
vault, uneven bars, and floor finals. And the
public reaction was mixed, to say the least.
It was polarized. It was. The backlash was immediate
and harsh from some corners. She was criticized,
called selfish or a quitter by some international
media and commentators. Sadly, even Russian state
-owned media tried to resurrect the false doping
scandal, slandering her due to her TUE for ADHD
medication. But the larger, more powerful reaction
was one of widespread international praise. It
was. Her decision sparked a necessary and overdue
global conversation about mental health in elite
sports. It was a radical act of self -care performed
on the world stage. It forced high achievers
everywhere across all fields to question the
narrative that strength means silently pushing
past psychological exhaustion. And after withdrawing
from most events, she made a symbolic return
for the balance beam final. She scaled back her
routine, opting for an easier double pike dismount
instead of the Biles dismount, and she won the
bronze medal. That bronze medal, which tied her
with Larissa Latina for most combined world and
Olympic medals at 32, holds immense significance.
She later said this was her most meaningful medal,
symbolizing perseverance and the prioritization
of mental health over technical perfection. And
the sources provide a layer of context that makes
that return even more extraordinary. Yes. She
revealed that her aunt had died unexpectedly
just two days before that final beam performance.
Unbelievable. She took another hiatus in 2022,
but the comeback began in earnest in August 2023
at the U .S. Classic. And immediately it was
clear she was back to setting records, finishing
five points ahead of the runner -up. The 2023
return was characterized by extreme, almost reckless
difficulty, showing she hadn't lost her ambition.
Not at all. She performed the Yurchenko double
pike vault, her eponymous Biles the Seffent vault
-in competition, a vault she had only attempted
in the 2021 games before the twisties hit. We
need to give this vault a moment. Why is the
Yurchenko double pike so groundbreaking? It is
the pinnacle of women's vaulting. It requires
the gymnast to block off the vault table and
perform a double tucked backwards salto. It has
a preliminary dice score of 6 .6, recognizing
it as the highest valued vault in women's gymnastics
history. And only she has competed. Only a handful
of men perform it, and she is the only woman
to have successfully landed and competed it.
It is a technical feat that physically and mentally
demands total trust in your body's ability to
rotate perfectly. Her dominance in 2023 was absolute.
At the U .S. National Championships, she won
her eighth national all -around title. Which
broke a 90 -year -old U .S. gymnastics title
record previously held by Alfred Juckum, whose
last title was in 1933. 90 years. And she became
the oldest woman to win the title at 26 years
and 100. And this incredible momentum carried
her straight to the 2023 World Championships
in Antwerp, the site of her first world title
10 years prior. And she qualified for all five
individual finals, the only gymnast to do so.
In the team competition, she led the U .S. women
to an unprecedented seventh consecutive team
gold medal. The record just kept piling up. She
clinched her sixth world all -around gold, tying
the legendary male gymnast Kushe Uchimura. In
doing so, she officially surpassed Vitaly Shcherbo
as the most successful gymnast of all time when
combining Olympics and World Championships results.
And she also continued to set apparatus records.
Winning an unprecedented sixth gold medal on
floor exercise, the most titles on one apparatus
in World Championships history. Even with a fall
on her Yurchenko double pike in the vault final,
she still secured a silver medal. Her floor for
a medal is just that high. Finally, we reach
the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Her third Olympic
Games, a truly rare achievement for an American
female artistic gymnast. The team, nicknamed
the Golden Girls, successfully won the team gold
medal. And her individual campaign was another
piece of history. She won her second Olympic
AA title. Becoming the third woman to do so,
and the first to achieve it non -consecutively.
demonstrating remarkable longevity and resilience
through the hiatuses and the mental health break.
She then won her second Olympic vault title,
becoming the second woman after Heslovska to
do that. And yes, she successfully performed
her ultra -difficult Biles II, the Yurchenko
double pike, during that final. But the 2024
Games also showed the immense pressure she still
faces, where small errors carry massive consequences.
In the balance beam final, she fell off the apparatus
and incurred a three -tenth neutral deduction
for not saluting the judges properly. She finished
fifth. That fifth place finish was significant
because it was the first time in nine major beam
finals at the Olympics or Worlds that she had
failed to medal on the apparatus. Right. And
then in the floor exercise final, she won silver,
ending her streak of 10 consecutive international
gold medals on floor due to out -of -bounds deductions.
These small misses, the beam fall, the floor
deductions, they don't detract from her greatness.
No, they contextualize the immense difficulty
she performs under pressure. Even with these
rare errors, she ended the games with 11 Olympic
medals in total, making her the most decorated
U .S. gymnast. Her consistency is a marvel. It's
a career that necessitates a complete discussion
of her accolades, influence, and enduring legacy
because it goes so far beyond the score sheets
and the medals. It certainly does. And we have
to start with the recognition she received outside
the arena. In July 2022, she was presented with
the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President
Joe Biden. The nation's highest civilian honor.
And crucially, she is the youngest person ever
to receive it, highlighting her immediate and
profound impact on American culture and advocacy.
She is a true awards magnet. four -time Laureus
World Sportswoman of the Year, winning in 2017,
2019, 2020, and then again recently in 2025.
The Laureus organization also named her Comeback
of the Year in 2024, acknowledging how difficult
it was to return to the pinnacle of her sport
after Tokyo. She's also won the Best Female Athlete
ESPY Award twice and Best Comeback Athlete ESPY
in 2024. The Associated Press named her Female
Athlete of the Year three times. And speaking
of honors that transcend gymnastics, she and
Olympic swimmer Katie Ledecky were the first
Olympians named as sponsors of a U .S. Navy aircraft
carrier, the USS Enterprise. That just underscores
that her influence is recognized at the highest
levels of civic and military honor. It does.
So let's revisit the Biles difficulty scale now
and look at the cumulative effect of her eponymous
skills, because this is her concrete lasting
impact on the sport's rules and future. The breadth
of her technical contribution is unmatched. You've
got the Biles eye vault and the Biles the second
vault, officially the most difficult vault in
the women's code of points. On balance beam,
the Biles dismount. And on floor, the Biles the
first and most famously. the Biles too, Sue.
We have to reiterate that the Biles, the second
on floor, the triple -double, holds the unique
status of being the only J -rated element in
artistic gymnastics across all disciplines for
both men and women. That is the definition of
creating a new difficulty plateau. And her ambition
continued right up to Paris. It did. In 2024,
she attempted to submit a new skill on uneven
bars a whiler kip with a 1 .5 pirouette. Although
she didn't compete in Paris, had she done it
successfully, she would have become the only
female gymnast to have a skill named on every
single apparatus. That drive. just encapsulates
her relentless pursuit of technical excellence.
Finally, let's touch briefly on her personal
life and her openness, because her transparency
is an extension of her legacy of influence and
self -determination. In 2023, she married professional
football player Jonathan Owens, a relationship
that provided a great deal of emotional support
during her most challenging years. And she has
been remarkably transparent, not just about her
clinical diagnosis like ADHD and the TUE for
Ritalin, but also about personal choices regarding
her. Right. The sources note she has openly discussed
details of a breast augmentation she underwent
in 2025, as well as a lower blepharoplasty and
earlobe surgery. That level of transparency is
unusual for a public figure of her stature. Why
do you think that openness is so important to
her overall legacy? I think her willingness to
share these facets of her life, the medical,
the personal, the surgical, contributes to the
idea that athletes can be complex, ambitious,
and open about their challenges and choices,
free from the pressure of maintaining a perfect
public facade. It's another way she applies agency
and control over her own narrative. A powerful
lesson for you, the high achiever, dealing with
public scrutiny. So what does this all mean?
When we look back at the definitive biographical
account of Simone Biles, it's a study in extremes.
absolute perfection, record -breaking difficulty,
and applied Critical mental resilience. A resilience
which she learned to harness very early in her
career. Her total medal count at the World Championships
and Olympics combined, making her the most successful
gymnast in history, is only half the story. Right.
Her career is also a monumental case study in
knowledge application. The way she used sports
psychology in 2013 to kickstart her career, the
way she consciously chose to listen to her body
and mind in 2021 in Tokyo, and the calculated
way she increased her difficulty through eponymous
skills. It's true. The medals, the six world
all -around titles, the non -consecutive Olympic
AA golds, and the highest difficulty ratings
all prove she mastered the sport itself. But
the vulnerability she showed in Tokyo changed
the conversation around mental health for high
achievers everywhere. Making her not just the
greatest gymnast, but a transformative cultural
figure. So here is the provocative thought for
you to carry forward after this deep dive. Simone
Biles' career is defined not just by the medals
she won in Rio and Paris, but by the medals she
consciously walked away from in Tokyo. How has
her decision to prioritize mental health over
performance, despite facing immense public and
personal pressure, fundamentally altered how
we measure strength and success in the world
of elite sports? And what enduring lessons does
this vulnerability offer the next generation
of high achievers when they're facing that impossible
choice between external perfection and internal
well -being? Think about that next time you face
a difficult decision under intense pressure.