There is a moment in sports when an athlete stops being great and starts being something the sport has never quite produced before.
For Simone Biles, that moment happened so early and so completely that the gymnastics world spent years trying to build a scoring system capable of measuring what she was doing. The Code of Points, the international judging framework that governs elite gymnastics, had to be updated repeatedly to account for skills that only she was performing. Skills that now carry her name in the official record books.
She is the most decorated gymnast in World Championship history. She is a seven-time Olympic medalist. She withdrew from multiple events at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics to protect her mental health and turned that decision into one of the most important public conversations about athlete wellbeing in modern sports history. She came back at Paris 2024 and won four more medals including three golds.
She is married to Jonathan Owens, an NFL safety who once told her he had not known who she was when they first started dating. She found that refreshing.
She is 27 years old.
This is the full story of Simone Biles. Where she came from, what she survived, what she built, and why the argument about her place in sports history is not really an argument at all.
Who Is Simone Biles? Early Life and Background
Simone Arianne Biles was born on March 14, 1997, in Columbus, Ohio. Her early childhood was defined by instability that most people who know her only through her gymnastics career would not immediately associate with the composed, precise athlete they have watched on competition floors.
Her mother, Shanon Biles, struggled with drug and alcohol addiction. Simone and her siblings spent time in foster care before her maternal grandfather, Ron Biles, and his wife Nellie stepped in. Ron and Nellie Biles eventually adopted Simone and her younger sister Adria. Two older siblings, Tevin and Ashley, were adopted by Ron’s sister.
Ron and Nellie Biles provided the stable, supportive home environment that Simone’s early childhood had not included. They moved to Spring, Texas, outside Houston. Nellie became her primary caregiver and eventually one of the most important figures in her gymnastics career.
The gymnastics discovery happened the way the best origin stories do. Accidentally.
At six years old, Simone’s daycare group took a field trip to a gymnastics facility. She watched the gymnasts and started copying what they were doing. A coach noticed. A letter was sent home encouraging her parents to enroll her in gymnastics classes.
Nellie enrolled her. Everything that followed is history that is still being made.
She began training seriously at Bannon’s Gymnastix in Houston. By her early teens it was clear that what she was doing was not normal gymnastics development. The skill acquisition rate, the power, the spatial awareness, the ability to learn and execute complex skills with a speed that took coaches years to fully understand, all of it pointed toward something genuinely exceptional.
She began working with coach Aimee Boorman, a relationship that would define her development through her first Olympic cycle.
Important context: Simone Biles’s early life circumstances are not peripheral to her story. They are central to understanding the resilience that has characterized her response to every challenge her career has produced, from the abuse scandal that rocked USA Gymnastics to the mental health crisis at Tokyo to the comeback at Paris. The foundation she built on was difficult. What she constructed on top of it is extraordinary.
Age and Personal Details
Simone Biles was born on March 14, 1997. She is currently 27 years old as of 2025.
She stands 4 feet 8 inches tall. In gymnastics, where rotational physics favor compact frames, her height is an asset. The power she generates relative to her body size is genuinely anomalous. Coaches and biomechanics researchers have noted that her strength-to-weight ratio and her ability to generate rotational speed are at levels that are difficult to fully explain through conventional athletic development frameworks.
She is based in Spring, Texas, where she trains at World Champions Centre, the gym her parents Ron and Nellie Biles opened specifically to support her training needs at the elite level.
Gymnastics Career: The Skills, the Records, and the Dominance
Early Elite Career
Biles competed as a junior elite gymnast before transitioning to the senior elite level in 2013. Her senior debut at the 2013 World Championships in Antwerp produced an immediate result that signaled what was coming.
She won the all-around gold medal at her first senior World Championships. She was 16 years old.
What followed over the next decade was a level of sustained dominance in artistic gymnastics that has no meaningful historical parallel in the sport.
The Skills Named After Her
In gymnastics, when an athlete successfully performs a skill at a World Championship or Olympic competition that has not been performed before, the skill is named after that athlete in the Code of Points. The naming is an honor and a historical marker.
Simone Biles has five skills named after her across four events. That number is not just a record. It is a statement about the distance between what she does and what the sport previously understood to be possible.
Skills named after Biles:
| Skill | Event | Description |
|---|---|---|
| The Biles | Floor Exercise | Double layout with half twist, blind landing |
| The Biles II | Floor Exercise | Triple-double, three twists with two flips |
| The Biles | Vault | Yurchenko double pike |
| The Biles | Balance Beam | Double-double dismount |
| The Biles | Uneven Bars | Toe-on Tkatchev to Pak salto |
The Yurchenko double pike on vault deserves specific mention. When Biles performed it at the 2021 US Classic, she became the first woman to successfully land it in competition. Coaches who watched described it as something they did not expect to see performed in women’s gymnastics in their lifetimes. She landed it. She competed it. It is now in the Code of Points with her name on it.
World Championship Record
Simone Biles is the most decorated gymnast in World Championship history, male or female.
World Championships Career Medals:
| Medal | Count |
|---|---|
| Gold | 23 |
| Silver | 3 |
| Bronze | 2 |
| Total | 30 |
Thirty World Championship medals. The previous record was held by Vitaly Scherbo of Belarus with 23. Biles has 30.
2016 Rio Olympics: The First Gold Rush
The 2016 Rio Olympics were Biles’s first Olympic Games. She was 19 years old.
She won four gold medals and one bronze. The four golds came in the team competition, the individual all-around, the vault, and the floor exercise. The bronze came on the balance beam.
The all-around competition in Rio was not close. Her margin of victory was the largest in Olympic all-around history at the time. Judges ran out of conventional descriptors. Commentators resorted to simply telling viewers to watch.
She was the best gymnast in the world by a margin that the sport’s scoring system struggled to fully capture.
The USA Gymnastics Abuse Scandal
In January 2018, the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal broke into full public view. Nassar was the longtime USA Gymnastics team doctor who had sexually abused hundreds of athletes over decades under the guise of medical treatment.
Simone Biles was among the survivors who came forward publicly. In a statement released in January 2018, she confirmed she was one of the athletes abused by Nassar.
Her public statement was significant beyond its personal courage. She was the most famous gymnast in the world. Her willingness to speak publicly gave other survivors visibility and contributed to the accountability process that eventually resulted in Nassar’s life sentence in prison.
She has spoken in subsequent interviews about the anger she carries about the institutional failures that allowed the abuse to continue for so long. Her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2021, delivered alongside fellow survivors Aly Raisman, McKayla Maroney, and Maggie Nichols, was one of the most powerful pieces of public testimony in recent congressional history.
She told senators that she felt betrayed by USA Gymnastics, the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and the FBI, which had failed to act on information about Nassar that could have stopped the abuse years earlier.
Tokyo 2020: The Twisties and the Mental Health Decision
The Tokyo 2020 Olympics, held in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, produced the most discussed moment of Biles’s career. And possibly the most discussed athlete mental health moment in modern Olympic history.
What Happened
On July 27, 2021, Biles withdrew from the team final after one vault. She had experienced what gymnasts call the twisties, a dangerous mental block in which a gymnast loses spatial awareness mid-air and cannot reliably control their body’s rotation and landing.
In gymnastics, performing at elite level with the twisties is not just a performance risk. It is a genuine physical danger. Gymnasts performing complex twisting skills without reliable spatial orientation can land catastrophically. Biles made the decision to withdraw rather than risk serious injury.
She subsequently withdrew from the individual all-around, the vault final, the uneven bars final, and the floor exercise final. She returned for the balance beam final, where she removed a difficult dismount to reduce risk and won a bronze medal.
The Public Response
The public response split along lines that revealed something genuine about how different audiences think about athletic obligation, mental health, and the relationship between elite athletes and the expectations placed on them.
Critics argued she had abandoned her team and her country at the most important moment. Some public figures made those arguments loudly.
Supporters argued she had made a medically sound decision to protect herself from serious physical harm and that her transparency about the mental health dimension of that decision was an act of courage rather than weakness.
The mental health conversation her decision sparked was genuinely significant. The visibility she gave to the reality of psychological challenges in elite sport, and the legitimacy her decision gave to prioritizing mental health as a real medical concern, changed how that conversation happens in sports media and in broader cultural discourse.
Expert observation: The twisties are documented in gymnastics literature as a genuine neurological phenomenon rather than a metaphor for performance anxiety. Gymnasts who have experienced them describe complete loss of spatial orientation mid-rotation. In a sport where landings from height are a constant, performing elite skills with the twisties is a genuine physical danger. Biles’s decision was medically rational regardless of its competitive implications.
Paris 2024: The Comeback That Answered Every Question
If Tokyo was the chapter that asked the hardest questions about Simone Biles, Paris 2024 was the chapter that answered them.
She returned to Olympic competition at 27 years old, three years after Tokyo, and delivered a performance that removed any remaining ambiguity about her status in the sport.
Paris 2024 Medal Haul
| Event | Medal |
|---|---|
| Team Competition | Gold |
| Individual All-Around | Gold |
| Vault | Gold |
| Floor Exercise | Gold |
| Balance Beam | Silver |
Four gold medals and one silver at 27 years old, three years after the most publicly scrutinized withdrawal in Olympic history.
The all-around gold in Paris was particularly resonant. She won it with a performance that included the Yurchenko double pike on vault, a skill that no other woman in the world competes. She won the all-around by a margin that again stretched the descriptive capacity of gymnastics commentary.
Her Paris performance gave her a career Olympic medal total of seven golds, two silvers, and two bronzes across two Olympic Games. Eleven Olympic medals total.
What Paris Meant Beyond the Medals
The Paris comeback was watched by people who had followed her career for a decade and by people who had never watched gymnastics before. The narrative arc from Tokyo withdrawal to Paris triumph was one that transcended sport in the way that only a handful of athletic stories manage to do each decade.
She did not just win medals in Paris. She completed something.
[Suggested external link: Olympics official results database for Paris 2024 gymnastics]
Husband: Jonathan Owens
Simone Biles and Jonathan Owens met on the Raya dating app in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown period when both were in Houston.
Who Is Jonathan Owens?
Jonathan Owens is an NFL safety born on July 22, 1995, in St. Louis, Missouri. He played college football at Missouri Western State University and went undrafted in the 2018 NFL Draft before signing with the Arizona Cardinals as an undrafted free agent.
He eventually signed with the Houston Texans, where he established himself as a reliable NFL safety. In 2024, he signed with the Green Bay Packers, giving him his first significant long-term NFL contract.
Owens has been publicly candid about the fact that he did not know who Simone Biles was when they first connected. He has said in interviews that he had to Google her. He also said, in remarks that generated significant social media debate, that he considered himself the catch in the relationship.
Biles responded to the debate around his comments with good humor, suggesting she found his confidence attractive rather than offensive. The dynamic between a partner who arrived without preconceptions about her fame and an athlete who has spent her entire adult life as the most scrutinized gymnast in the world appears to work for them.
The Wedding
Biles and Owens got engaged in February 2022. They had a courthouse marriage in April 2023 and a formal wedding celebration in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, in May 2023.
The wedding was attended by fellow Olympic gymnasts including Team USA members from multiple cycles. Photographs from the celebration circulated widely on social media and reflected what appeared to be a genuinely joyful occasion.
Biles has spoken about Owens in interviews as a grounding presence during the Paris Olympic preparation period. Having a partner whose primary identity is not defined by her gymnastics career appears to provide a relational balance that she has described as important to her mental health and competitive preparation.
Simone Biles’s Net Worth
Simone Biles’s net worth is estimated at approximately $16 million as of 2025, according to Celebrity Net Worth and sports financial industry sources.
The figure reflects her endorsement income over a career that has now spanned more than a decade at the elite level, combined with competition prize money and business ventures.
Endorsement Portfolio
Biles’s endorsement portfolio reflects her crossover appeal beyond gymnastics into mainstream American culture.
Key endorsement partnerships:
| Brand | Category |
|---|---|
| Nike | Apparel and Footwear |
| Athleta | Athletic Apparel |
| Visa | Financial Services |
| United Airlines | Travel |
| Beats by Dre | Electronics |
| GK Elite | Gymnastics Apparel |
| Uber Eats | Food Delivery |
| Powerade | Sports Nutrition |
Her relationship with Athleta, the Gap-owned athletic apparel brand, deserves specific mention. Biles left Nike for Athleta in 2021, a move she described as aligning with a brand whose values better matched her own priorities including athlete wellbeing and women’s empowerment. The timing, shortly after the Tokyo withdrawal and the public conversation that followed, was not coincidental.
Why Her Net Worth Is Lower Than Her Fame Suggests
The $16 million estimate is lower than many people expect given her global profile. Several factors explain the gap between her fame and her financial position relative to male athletes of comparable cultural stature.
Gymnastics does not have the professional league revenue infrastructure that baseball, basketball, or football have. Elite gymnasts compete for Olympic medals and World Championship titles rather than for professional league contracts worth hundreds of millions.
The pay structure for elite gymnastics is built around endorsements, appearance fees, and tour income rather than team contracts. Even the most commercially successful gymnast in history operates within a financial ceiling that the team sports economy does not impose on comparable male athletes.
That disparity is a real and documented feature of how women’s sports have been commercially structured historically. Biles’s career has pushed against that ceiling more effectively than any gymnast before her. The ceiling remains.
Expert observation: If a male athlete had won 30 World Championship medals, seven Olympic gold medals, and had five skills named after him in the sport’s official Code of Points, the commercial infrastructure around his career would look significantly different from what Biles has been able to build. The gap between her athletic achievement and her financial position relative to that achievement is one of the clearer illustrations of the structural inequities in sports commercialization across gender lines.
Career Achievements Summary
Olympic Medals
| Games | Gold | Silver | Bronze | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rio 2016 | 4 | 0 | 1 | 5 |
| Tokyo 2020 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| Paris 2024 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 5 |
| Career Total | 7 | 1 | 2 | 11 |
World Championships Medals
| Gold | Silver | Bronze | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 23 | 3 | 2 | 30 |
Skills Named in Code of Points
Five skills across four events bearing the Biles name in the official FIG Code of Points.
Timeline of Key Career Events
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| March 14, 1997 | Born in Columbus, Ohio |
| 2003 | Discovers gymnastics on daycare field trip |
| 2011 | Begins training as elite gymnast |
| 2013 | Wins first World Championship all-around gold |
| 2016 | Wins four gold medals at Rio Olympics |
| 2018 | Publicly confirms she is a Nassar abuse survivor |
| 2020 | Meets Jonathan Owens on Raya dating app |
| 2021 | Performs Yurchenko double pike, first woman in history |
| July 2021 | Withdraws from multiple Tokyo Olympic events |
| September 2021 | Testifies before Senate Judiciary Committee on Nassar case |
| February 2022 | Engaged to Jonathan Owens |
| April 2023 | Courthouse marriage to Jonathan Owens |
| May 2023 | Formal wedding celebration in Cabo San Lucas |
| 2024 | Returns to competition after Tokyo withdrawal |
| Paris 2024 | Wins four gold medals and one silver at Paris Olympics |
| 2025 | Most decorated gymnast in World Championship history |
The GOAT Debate in Gymnastics
In gymnastics, the GOAT debate is less of a debate than in most sports.
The historical comparisons are genuinely difficult across eras because the sport’s difficulty standards, judging systems, and skill requirements have changed significantly over time. Nadia Comaneci’s perfect 10 at the 1976 Montreal Olympics is one of the most iconic moments in Olympic history. Larisa Latynina’s nine Olympic gold medals across three Games represented a standard of sustained excellence that stood for decades.
But the specific measurable markers of achievement in the modern era point consistently and clearly toward Biles.
Thirty World Championship medals. No one else in history, male or female, has thirty.
Seven Olympic gold medals. Only Latynina has more Olympic gymnastics golds with nine, accumulated across the 1956, 1960, and 1964 Games.
Five named skills. No active gymnast in the world competes skills at the difficulty level Biles routinely performs.
The scoring system had to be changed around her. When a governing body modifies its official judging framework multiple times in response to what one athlete is doing, that athlete is operating outside the boundaries the sport previously understood.
The honest assessment is this. Within the modern era of gymnastics, using any analytical framework that attempts to measure competitive achievement, Simone Biles is the greatest gymnast in history. The argument for any other conclusion requires discounting evidence rather than weighing it.
Honest framing: The cross-era comparison between Biles and Comaneci or Latynina is genuinely complex because the sport has changed so fundamentally. What is not complex is the assessment within the modern era. Within the sport as it currently exists and has existed since the Code of Points system was implemented, Biles’s record is without equal.
FAQs: People Also Ask
How old is Simone Biles?
Simone Biles was born on March 14, 1997. She is currently 27 years old as of 2025. She won four gold medals at the Paris 2024 Olympics at age 27, making her one of the oldest individual all-around champions in Olympic gymnastics history.
Who is Simone Biles married to?
Simone Biles is married to Jonathan Owens, an NFL safety who plays for the Green Bay Packers. The couple met on the Raya dating app in 2020, got engaged in February 2022, had a courthouse marriage in April 2023, and held a formal wedding celebration in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, in May 2023.
What is Simone Biles’s net worth?
Simone Biles’s net worth is estimated at approximately $16 million as of 2025. Her wealth comes primarily from endorsement deals with brands including Nike, Athleta, Visa, and United Airlines, combined with competition prize money and appearance fees across her elite career.
How many Olympic medals does Simone Biles have?
Simone Biles has 11 Olympic medals across three Games. Seven gold, one silver, and two bronze from Rio 2016, Tokyo 2020, and Paris 2024. She is the most decorated American gymnast in Olympic history.
Why did Simone Biles withdraw from Tokyo Olympics?
Simone Biles withdrew from multiple events at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics after experiencing the twisties, a dangerous mental block in which gymnasts lose spatial awareness mid-air. The condition creates genuine physical danger in elite gymnastics where complex twisting skills are performed at height. She made the medically sound decision to withdraw rather than risk serious injury.
How many World Championship medals does Simone Biles have?
Simone Biles has 30 World Championship medals, including 23 gold medals. She is the most decorated gymnast in World Championship history, male or female, surpassing the previous record of 23 total medals held by Vitaly Scherbo of Belarus.
How tall is Simone Biles?
Simone Biles stands 4 feet 8 inches tall. Her compact frame is an asset in gymnastics where rotational physics favor athletes who can generate high rotational speed from a tight body position. Her strength-to-weight ratio is considered exceptional even by elite gymnastics standards.
What skills are named after Simone Biles?
Five skills in the FIG Code of Points bear Biles’s name across four events. They include the Biles and Biles II on floor exercise, the Biles vault which is a Yurchenko double pike, the Biles on balance beam, and the Biles on uneven bars. She is the first woman to successfully compete the Yurchenko double pike in international competition.
Is Simone Biles the greatest gymnast of all time?
Within the modern era of gymnastics, using any measurable framework of competitive achievement, Simone Biles holds a stronger case for GOAT status than any other gymnast in history. She has 30 World Championship medals, seven Olympic gold medals, five skills named after her in the Code of Points, and forced multiple updates to the sport’s official judging system to account for skills only she performs.
Conclusion: What Simone Biles Actually Represents
Take the medals off the table for a moment. Remove the World Championship record and the named skills and the scoring system updates.
What you have is a woman who grew up in circumstances that did not promise this outcome. Who found a sport through a daycare field trip and turned that accidental discovery into the most decorated career in the history of that sport. Who survived abuse by someone who was supposed to protect her and then stood in front of a Senate committee and said so clearly and on the record. Who walked away from the Olympics when her body and mind told her to and refused to apologize for making the right decision. Who came back three years later and won four more gold medals.
That is not just an athletic career. That is a character study in resilience that happens to also include the greatest gymnastics record ever compiled.
The GOAT debate in gymnastics is settled by evidence. The broader story of what Simone Biles represents is settled by watching what she has done with every challenge the sport and life have placed in front of her.
She is 27 years old. She has said she is not sure whether Paris was her last Olympics. The possibility of Los Angeles 2028, on home soil, at 31 years old, is something she has not ruled out.
If she goes, the gymnastics world will be watching. So will everyone else.
If you want to follow what comes next:
- Monitor USA Gymnastics official communications for Biles’s competition schedule and any LA 2028 announcements
- Follow the LeBron James Family Foundation model and track the Simone Biles Foundation for her growing philanthropic work
- Watch for endorsement portfolio updates through sports business outlets including Sportico and Front Office Sports
- Track Jonathan Owens’s NFL career through Green Bay Packers official channels and NFL reporting
- Follow Biles’s social media for personal updates she chooses to share on her own terms
The story of Simone Biles has produced more chapters than anyone had a right to expect from a six-year-old copying gymnastics moves on a daycare field trip in Columbus, Ohio.
Whatever comes next, the foundation is already built. And it is unlike anything the sport has ever seen.
