Courage to Soar (with Bonus Content)

by Simone Biles

  I stood my ground, not mounting the bar, and Nicole was losing patience. “You know what, Simone?” she said. “You’re doing a giant right now.”

  “You can’t make me!” I said, crying harder.

  Nicole reached over and easily lifted my skinny eight-year-old frame, then placed my hands on the bar. At this point, I was sobbing so hard I couldn’t see anything.

  “I can’t, I can’t—” I wailed.

  “You can,” Nicole said firmly as she spun me up into a handstand. She held my legs straight up with one hand and held onto my arm with the other, and then she spun me around the bar. Then she did it again. And again. The whole time, she just kept spinning me around the bar, keeping her hands on my arm so I wouldn’t fall. I’m going to die! I kept thinking. I can’t do this! But while the voice in my head said one thing, my motions were proving that I could do a giant.

  After a while, I calmed down enough to get the feel of the rotations, and I began to pay attention to my form, fully stretching out my legs and pointing my toes, trying to make my shape like a perfectly straight spoke in a wheel. When Nicole finally let me dismount, my fear was gone. But it had been replaced by another emotion: anger at being forced to get back up on the bar before I’d felt ready.

  I glared at Nicole. But she was hardcore. “See?” she said. “You’re just fine, Simone.”

  I stormed off to the bathroom without another word. I knew if I’d stayed out there I’d be tempted to say something rude, and my parents would never let me get away with that. Later, though, I had to admit that Nicole had done me a favor. As scared and angry as I was, she’d refused to let me psych myself out. She helped me see that even after an ugly fall from the high bar, a giant was nothing I couldn’t handle.

  Nicole was on the sidelines the following January as I performed flawless giants in competition as part of my bar routine. I’m sure she must’ve been secretly pleased that she’d pushed me beyond my comfort zone that day, because I easily circled the high bar. At that point, Aimee took over as my main coach.

  Aimee was in charge of training Bannon’s team gymnasts from level seven and up. My coaches had been eager to get me to level seven, because that’s when JO gymnasts finally get to add their own optional routines, pushing the degree of difficulty on required skills and looking toward larger state and regional meets. But I wasn’t thinking that far ahead, at least not yet. Maybe that’s why I ended up having to take the level seven test twice. The first time I kept falling off the bars, mixing up my skills on the beam, and doing little hops on landing from my tumbling passes on the floor. The second time, I performed much better, sticking all my landings and not wobbling or messing up on the beam.

  The difference? I’d practiced so much that I knew the skills cold, which meant I could go out on the floor and just enjoy the feeling of flying, bouncing, and whirling through air; I could just have fun. I’d put in the hours to polish my form, fully extending my limbs for a long, clean, graceful line. Most important, my mind was in the game—I was determined not to fail level seven a second time. I’m not sure what was going on with me the first time, except I’ve noticed that, sometimes, when we’re zooming along and it’s all blue skies, we can suddenly hit a bump in the road. That’s tough, but it can also force us to slow down and reassess what we want, where we’re going—and just how hard we might need to work to get there.

  While some gymnastics skills came fairly easily to me, it was clear from the start I’d have to put in a lot of extra effort on bars. I didn’t love that apparatus the way I loved all the others, and at first my instinct was to avoid it. Aimee explained bars were harder for me because I was so short and my hands were small. That’s why the jump to the regulation height high bar felt like a crazy daredevil move. Not gonna lie: the only thing I’ve ever been truly afraid of in gymnastics—apart from letting everyone down—was that high bar.

  Bars can also be tougher for a power gymnast, which I definitely was, because power gymnasts are used to controlling the apparatus instead of letting it control them. I would drive hard through my other routines, exploding off the apparatus and gaining enough air to do multiple sequences of flips and twists. But bars were another story. I had to be willing to let the bar swing me around. I had to find the flow and get in sync with the bar, and I had to let it control me.

  “I’m just not good at bars,” I complained to Aimee one day. “Maybe I can just be a three-event specialist like Alicia Sacramone.” Alicia was one of the gymnasts I’d read about in USA Gymnastics and Sports Illustrated for Kids. She was a beast on beam, vault, and floor, and she’d brought home numerous medals in all three. But she never touched the uneven bars.

  Aimee wasn’t hearing it. “You might not feel as sure of yourself on bars as you do in your other events, but you can still do a great bar routine,” she assured me. Then she added, “You have the ability to go as far as you can dream, Simone. You’re good enough to be a champion all-around gymnast, but you’re going to need to master all four events to get there.”

  After that, Aimee worked hard to build my confidence on bars. We’d practice the routines till I was dreaming about them in my sleep. I remember when she was teaching me how to do a move called the counter swing, aka a straddle back, which is when I swing on the high bar backward with legs straddled, then let go of the high bar and catch the low bar as I’m swinging back around. When I’m doing the move, I can’t really see the low bar except through my legs, but at first I kept not looking for the low bar because it seemed so terrifyingly far away.

  “Look for the bar!” Aimee kept yelling, because she could see I was flying blind.

  “I don’t want to look!” I yelled back. “It’s too scary! I just want to swing and catch it!”

  I eventually mastered the counter swing and made it through to level eight. A few months later, I tested up to level nine. I was one of only two gymnasts on Bannon’s team at that level, and the only one already training on skills for level ten. At that point, Aimee and I were learning everything together, because Aimee, once a JO gymnast herself, had stopped competing at level eight. She’d wanted to continue, but she’d broken one leg so badly that she couldn’t go on.

  Injuries aside, in Aimee’s experience the only girls who continued past level eight were those who wanted to pursue an elite career. The sport demands so much more of you after level eight: the skills get harder, and I would have to devote a lot more time. By the time I reached level eight, I was spending three or four hours at the gym every day after school. By then Adria had returned to gymnastics and was putting in hours at the gym too. I loved looking across the room during practices and seeing my sister doing her own routines.

  During my level nine competition season, I was eleven years old and a sixth grader at Strack Intermediate, a public middle school that my friends Marissa and Becca also attended. Even though I was starting to win more consistently at gymnastics meets, at school I was nothing special. Okay, I was a dork. In one photo from that year, I’m rocking bell-bottom jeans with white flowers embroidered on them and a blue polo shirt. And I have on this blue macramé belt that, when I tied it around my waist, had ends hanging almost to the floor. I look at that picture now and I don’t know what I was thinking. To make matters worse, I was starting to become self-conscious about my muscles, so I always wore an athletic jacket on top of whatever outfit I’d put together. I definitely wasn’t one of the cool kids. Maybe the only cool thing I did in middle school was fight my way into the boys’ soccer games.

  “Get off the field! No girls allowed!” the boys would shout at Megan and me when we tried to get in on their game. Megan was the other girl in my class who wanted to play soccer. The boys thought we weren’t tough enough to play with them, so when we tackled them for the ball, they’d kick our shins hard enough to hurt, thinking that would scare us away. But Megan and I were determined. Remember that stubborn streak I shared with my Grandma Caye? I was like, If you’re going to kick our shins, we’re going to kick y
our shins too, and we’re going to take the ball away from you. When the boys saw how tough Megan and I were, they backed down. We ended up playing soccer with them for the entire year.

  Meanwhile at meets, my hard work in the gym was starting to pay off. Even though I was now competing in local and state meets against gymnasts who were much older and taller than me, I was starting to win medals regularly. Some of the other coaches worried that I was moving too quickly and would get burned out. “Don’t let her win too fast,” they’d say, but Aimee didn’t see any reason to hold me back. As long as I was having fun out there and not getting too stressed, she was happy to let me compete as much as I wanted.

  My mom and dad were on the same page as Aimee. My family supported my gymnastics, cheering me on at meets both at home and away. And now that I was winning more, they began paying closer attention. “Simone,” Mom said, hugging me after I’d earned the all-around highest score at the 2008 South Padre Invitational meet. “God truly gave you a gift.”

  Yet I never felt as if my parents were forcing me to keep going. Leveling up in the JO program was completely my choice. In fact, while a lot of other moms came to watch their kids during practice, my mom was never a gym mom in that way. Of course I’d have loved looking up to see her in the viewing area as I trained, but I also enjoyed the feeling that my gymnastics practice was completely my own. I found few things more exhilarating than flying high above an apparatus, tumbling through air, then landing cleanly on the dismount. There was nothing in me that wanted to stop. In fact, I was already dreaming of performing as an elite-level gymnast and making the national team. And although the 2012 Olympics were still four years away, I secretly fantasized about going with the team to London.

  But I had a problem.

  “My birthday is on March 14, so I will only be fifteen the year of 2012,” I wrote in a five-subject notebook that I’d turned into a diary. My coach had explained that to compete in the Olympics, I’d have to turn sixteen within the Olympic year. “I won’t turn sixteen until 2013, then I will have to wait a long time,” I continued in my diary.

  I knew that many gymnasts got injured, had already peaked, or simply lost the motivation to compete by age nineteen, which was how old I’d be when the next Olympics rolled around. There was no way to tell what my story would be eight years into the future. “I don’t know if I will make it,” I scribbled. Feeling deflated, I closed the notebook and rested it on my nightstand. I switched off the lamp and turned over to go to sleep.

  After staring into the dark for a few minutes, I switched back on the light, picked up the notebook, and wrote one more sentence: “I want to go the farthest I can.” Looking back now, that was the most important sentence I’ve ever written.

  CHAPTER 8

  Daydreamer

  “Dreams come in a size too big so we can grow into them.”

  —JOSIE BISSETT, ACTRESS

  Simone, are you ready to do this?” Dad asked me, his gaze holding mine. He was sitting at the dining table with his laptop open, sorting through school forms and gymnastics permissions slips for Adria and me. He’d called me downstairs to fill out an entry form for an upcoming regional meet. We both knew I’d need to earn a minimum score of 34 in that statewide competition if I hoped to qualify for level nine Western Championships, which would be held a few weeks later in May 2008.

  Did I mention that this competition was a big deal? Huge, actually. All the top USAG officials would be there to scout talent, including national team coordinator Martha Karolyi. If a gymnast performed well enough, Martha just might notice her and invite her to developmental camp at the world-famous gymnastics training center she and her husband, Bela Karolyi, operate in Huntsville, Texas. In gymnastics circles, it is known simply as “the ranch.”

  But as much as I’d daydreamed about attending gymnastics camp with some of my elite-level idols, I had something else on my mind that afternoon.

  “Dad,” I said, “why can’t we get a dog?”

  “Oh, Simone, not again,” he said. “We’ve been over this so many times.”

  That was true. Adria and I had been pleading with him for a dog for years. We would ask for a puppy for every single holiday, until one Christmas we found two huge stuffed animals under the tree, one for Adria and one for me. Those things were bigger than I was! “Well, I got you your dogs,” Dad said, smiling as if he was very pleased with himself. But if he thought that would make us give up asking for a real, live dog, he was wrong. And now, I had a new way to persuade him: My sister and I loved playing with our neighbor’s dog, Bo. A few weeks before, our neighbor had had to travel for business, and he’d asked our parents if Adria and I would feed, walk, and play with Bo while he was gone.

  “Look how well we took care of Bo,” I said now. “See, Dad? That proves we’d be really responsible if we got a dog.”

  Dad paused over his paperwork, tapping the table with his pen. My heart raced a little, because this was the first time he looked as if he was actually considering our request.

  “Okay, Simone,” he said finally. “I’ll tell you what. You qualify for Westerns this year, and you’ll get your dog.”

  “Are you serious?” I said, jumping out of my chair. I wasn’t sure I was hearing him right.

  “But it has to be a German shepherd,” Dad added. Adria and I had always imagined getting a little dog, like a Yorkie or a Chihuahua, but if my dad was set on a German shepherd, that was fine by me. “If you train them right, they’re protective, obedient, and playful,” Dad told me. He then mentioned a farm named Heidelberg where they raised German shepherds. “You score high enough at regionals,” he said, turning back to his paperwork, “I’ll take you there to pick out a dog myself.”

  With motivation like that, you can bet I hit all my routines at the Region 3 Championships that spring, placing first on floor and second all-around, and qualifying for Westerns. Adria was sitting in the stands with Mom and Dad when she saw my final score of 38.100 light up the scoreboard. My sister started bouncing up and down and screaming, “We’re getting a dog! We’re getting a dog!” I could hear her from all the way down on the floor of the arena. What I didn’t hear was when Dad groaned, looked at Mom, and said, “Oh man, now we have to get a dog.”

  A few months later, when school let out for the summer, Mom and Dad took us to Heidelberg to look at the stalls and stalls of puppies. Some were still too young to leave the farm, so Adria and I picked out a brown one that was old enough to go home with us right away. After pleading for so long to get a dog, we didn’t want to wait even one more day. But then my mom stopped by the very last cage, where a playful little black-and-brown puppy caught her eye.

  “What about that one?” she said, calling us over.

  “It’s not old enough yet,” I said. But one of the farm workers was already pulling the puppy out of the pen and placing her in my arms. She was a frisky little thing, kind of like me, and when she began licking my face I fell in love with her right away.

  “We’ll come and play with her on weekends till she can come home with us,” Dad promised. “It will only be a month.”

  “Okay, this one,” I agreed. “But since I won her, I get to pick her name.”

  And that’s how Maggie Elena Biles, German shepherd, joined our family.

  Borinnnnng year!

  *Put it at that*

  I wrote that in my diary about my entire seventh grade year. My social situation at Strack Intermediate hadn’t improved one bit since sixth grade. At school, there were the jocks, the cheerleaders, and the popular kids—and then there were the nobodies like me. Don’t get me wrong, I had friends, and I’d get loud and crazy with them sometimes. So many things made me crack up that I was always bursting into laughter in class. The teacher would say, “Be quiet, Simone.” I wasn’t ever a discipline problem, but I wasn’t a shy girl either—except when I liked a boy.

  There was this one boy, Dillon, who sat behind me in social studies. He had long dark hair in a Justin Bieb
er kind of cut. I thought he was cute. He was always whispering and joking with me in class, so I suspected he might like me too. The other kids would ask, “Are you guys gonna date?” and we’d always say no, because in seventh grade, you never admit to that. One day in class, Dillon passed a note to me that said, “Be my girlfriend.” Feeling suddenly flustered, I quickly scrawled “Yes” on the note and passed it back, but after class I ran out of the room before he could say anything.

  When I got to school the next morning, I didn’t know how to act. So many questions swirled in my head: Is Dillon really my boyfriend now? What does that mean? Should I go by his locker before class? What do kids do when they’re dating? I didn’t have the first clue, and I didn’t want to seem stupid, so when I saw Dillon in social studies later that day I called the whole thing off. “So, um, Dillon, we’re not dating,” I said, trying to act all casual. He just shrugged, and that was that. You could say my biggest adventure in seventh grade was having a boyfriend for one day.

  The whole year, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was just passing time. That’s because my parents had told us that we’d be moving soon to a larger home, a brand-new Tuscan-style house with a huge yard and a saltwater pool. I didn’t know whether to be excited or sad about the move. On the one hand, Adria and I would have our own rooms that we could decorate in any way that we wanted, but on the other, I’d be leaving behind friends and starting at a new school. Worst of all, I’d miss the eighth grade dance, which all the seventh graders were already gearing up for. And since the new house was forty-five minutes farther away from Bannon’s than our old one, getting to and from gymnastics practice was going to be more complicated.

  I’d gotten used to carpooling to the gym with Loren from down the street. Because my mom and dad were so busy working and getting the new house ready for our move, they’d arranged for Loren’s mom to pick us up at school every day, drive us to practice, and then bring us home. Loren was small and skinny with short blond hair. She was as hyper as I was and super flexible as a gymnast, and her playful antics during practice made me laugh. We were starting to become friends, but once we weren’t carpooling anymore, we’d probably lose touch.