The Olympic gymnast Simone Biles Eight years after the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, Biles has been crowned the best gymnast in the world, winning the gold medal at the Paris Olympics. Biles is a mass phenomenon, something that still overwhelms her, as she reveals in her documentary ‘Simone Biles flies again’, released a few days ago on Netflix. The 26-year-old gymnast takes a look at her life, which is anything but easy. She and her sister Adria They ended up in a foster home at the age of three because of their mother’s addictions, who neglected them.
In the documentary she shows images of that difficult stage of her life that she does not forget, on the contrary, she feels privileged because she was lucky that her maternal grandfather Ron Biles And his wife Nellie Bilesmanaged to adopt them and raise them. She does not call them grandparents but parents because they are legally and without them she would not be what she is today. Now she is the one who gives herself to the NGO Friends of the Children, which seeks foster families for children in foster care.
She has a very special bond with her mother. In the documentary, we see that she is the first one she called when she decided to leave the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 due to mental health problems. She is also the one who braids her hair and buns before each major competition. “It’s like a kind of ritual. In Tokyo, because of Covid, it was the only time we couldn’t be with her and I didn’t braid her hair, and look what happened,” says her mother in one of her interventions. “When I won all the medals in Rio de Janeiro, I was sad. I didn’t know what depression was. In Tokyo, I realized that something was not right,” says Biles, who, thanks to psychological help and that of her family, has managed to overcome her problems.
When she left the competition and exposed the emotional fragility of elite athletes, she was heavily criticized, something she says she does not understand today. Added to this is the trauma she has had to overcome due to the sexual abuse she suffered along with 200 other gymnasts, at the hands of Larry Nassarthe former doctor for the US national gymnastics team, sentenced to 175 years in prison. Simone admits that no one had explained to them what abuse was and their innocence prevented them from interpreting that cruelty.
Public denunciation
In the documentary, she takes the opportunity to publicly denounce – along with two other veteran gymnasts – the harsh methods and sacrifices they face in order to achieve perfection. “It is a mental drain that is often covered up because competition prevails, although in the end it ends up being reflected in the exercises, as happened to me in Tokyo,” Simone confesses. She has learned to disconnect from gymnastics, something she didn’t know how to do before. She is surprised to be traveling to Wisconsin on weekends to attend the games of the Green Bay Packers, the NFL team for which her husband plays. Jonathan Owens, just a few months before the Olympics. Her coaches recommend it because it comforts her. Owens and Biles met in 2020 through the paid dating app Raya. They matched and were getting to know each other within two weeks. Owens proposed to her on Valentine’s Day 2022, and in April 2023 they were married in a civil ceremony in Houston, and in May they celebrated in style with 144 guests in Mexico.
She can’t get used to the distance between their sports careers and would like to have more of a married life. “Everything will come,” she says hopefully. Biles has not only given names to movements in artistic gymnastics, she has also done away with the stereotypes of gymnasts of yesteryear, who had to be extremely thin, blonde with ponytails and wearing unimpressive leotards, like the legendary Nadia Comaneciwho also appears in the documentary. Biles has revolutionized the mat with her leotards decorated with thousands of Swarovski crystals, her perfect makeup that she touches up before starting the exercises and her curly afro hair that she gathers with style. With 30 world and 7 Olympic golds, Biles is a TikToker, has a fortune of 16 million dollars and does not plan to retire until she dethrones the historic Larisa Latin.
