by Simone Biles
Trying to sort out my feelings about my so-called boring life, I spent my free time stretched out on my bed, making lists in my notebook: countries I’d traveled to (Belize, Jamaica, Mexico, Canada, Cayman Islands, Isla Roatan); apps I wanted for my iPod (Facebook, MySpace, Cool Facts, Moron Test, Weird Laws, Pandora, Doodle Buddy); websites to find music for floor routines (floorexpressmusic. com, goody.good); favorite TV shows (Pretty Little Liars, Full House); things I wanted for Christmas (digital camera, jewelry box, bedroom walls painted purple); and inspiring gymnastics quotes (Nadia Comaneci: “Jump off the beam, flip off the bars, follow your dreams and reach for the stars.”).
I also spent hours planning what my bedroom at the new house would look like (zebra-print comforter, purple Phoebe lamp, wooden letters spelling out Simone, trophy case, tie-dye bulletin board, zebra bean bag) and designing my own line of leos. I daydreamed about who would recruit me for college gymnastics (LSU, University of Alabama, UCLA, Ohio State) and even planned my future wedding down to the smallest details (carriage pulled by white horses, lilacs and purple orchids, heart-top dress, edible arrangements, releasing doves, honeymoon in Bora-Bora).
Oh, there was also a list of 100 Things to Do After 2016 (cliff jumping, snowboarding, skydiving, swim with sharks, ride elephants, swim with dolphins). In that last list was a clue that I was already starting to look ahead toward the 2016 Olympics, because I didn’t plan to do anything before then that might cause me to get injured. Then again, since I was now competing at level ten and had recently told Aimee and my parents I definitely wanted to go elite, I needed to ramp up my weekly training schedule, so where would I find the time for cliff jumping anyway?
Aimee and my mom were trying to figure out how I could fit in more hours at the gym even though I would now be living farther away. Aimee offered to pick me up and drive me to practices herself, but in the end, my parents found another solution. They enrolled me in a private middle school that was right across the street from the gym; the plan was for me to finish seventh grade and do eighth grade there. This would allow me to add two hours of training every morning, from seven to nine a.m., and then I could just walk across the street to school. In the afternoon, I’d simply walk back to the gym for my second training session of the day. This would increase my gym time from twenty to thirty hours a week—and that was the good news.
The bad news? I hated my new school.
“Somalia, please answer the question.”
It was my second day at private school, and I didn’t know the other students’ names yet, so I looked around to see who one of my teachers had called on. I was glad it wasn’t me, because this man’s voice was such a slow, monotonous drawl that I’d spent the entire class trying not to fall asleep. I hadn’t even heard the question. When no one spoke up, I looked back at the teacher and realized he was staring straight at me.
“Somalia?” he said. “We’re waiting.”
A girl next to me whispered, “That’s you! He’s talking to you!”
I cleared my throat and started to explain my name was Simone, but before I could speak, the teacher decided I didn’t know the answer and he called on somebody else. That teacher never did get my name right. He called me Somalia for a whole year, maybe because there was a map of Somalia on the wall behind my head. Some kids told me later he had diabetes and that was why his energy was so low. More than once, he actually fell asleep in the middle of a sentence. I’m not even kidding. He’d be reading a lesson, droning out every word, and then nothing. Just silence. The weird thing was the kids in my class didn’t even think it was funny. They’d just sit there quietly, waiting for him to wake up and keep going.
I figured out pretty quickly that a lot of the kids at my new school had learning challenges or behavior issues, which is why the classes were kept small. In eighth grade, only seven students were in my homeroom—and one of them tried to stab me.
Brandon (not his real name) had something a little bit wrong with him. He hated getting any grade below a ninety. Whenever he scored lower than that, he’d dig his pencil into his arm, dragging it back and forth until he saw blood.
One day, he got back an eighty-one on a test right at the end of class. I was sitting next to him that afternoon, and as he took up his pencil, I grabbed it away.
“Brandon, don’t do that, please,” I said. The way he cut himself scared me. But what I didn’t realize was that Brandon had a pocketknife, so I wasn’t prepared when he pulled it out and tried to stab my hand. Luckily, he missed, and I didn’t wait for him to try again. I jumped up from my seat and ran out of the classroom without waiting for the teacher to dismiss us. Brandon ran after me, waving the pocketknife, but I was faster than he was. I raced outside the building and jumped over a gate that led to another part of the school, and I padlocked the gate behind me. I heard Brandon banging and pushing at the gate, trying to get it open, but I didn’t look back. I just kept running until I got to the safety of the school office.
“B-B-Brandon is trying to stab me!” I yelled. I barely got the words out, I was so terrified. The woman at the front desk was totally calm. She said, “Oh, we’ve known Brandon since the first grade, and he would never do that.”
Seriously?!
My parents were pretty upset when I told them what happened. They went in and talked to my teachers, who made sure to separate me from Brandon for the rest of the year. Since we all knew I wouldn’t be at that place for much longer, they let it go at that. I couldn’t wait to be reunited with my public school friends in high school.
The gym became my refuge. I wished I could spend my days there, instead of going to the private school between my morning and afternoon sessions. Even though I was the only team gymnast training at level ten, I had made some good friends at Bannon’s, including two girls who are my BFFs to this day.
One was Caitlyn Cramer, who came to Bannon’s to try out for JO gymnastics classes when we were both nine years old. I remember the year because I turned ten shortly after, and as soon as I did, Caitlyn dubbed me the “double digit midget.” She had the whole gym calling me that. She was a lot taller than I was, with dark brown hair and big dark brown eyes. She looked a little bit like one of my idols, Shawn Johnson, who had won the 2006 US Junior National All-Around Championship with a score that was higher than all her senior-level competitors.
Caitlyn’s first day at Bannon’s happened to fall on stair day, which meant we’d spend an hour running up and down the gym’s two levels of stairs.
“Oh man,” I told her, “you picked the wrong day to try out.”
She laughed nervously and told me her name. She said her family had just moved to Houston from Ohio.
“I was born there!” I said, bonding with the new girl over our Buckeye State connection.
Sure enough, by the end of cardio conditioning we felt like we were dying. “OMG! You were right!” Caitlyn gasped. She was hunched over and breathing hard with her hands on her knees. But when her mom came to pick her up at the end of class, Caitlyn said she definitely wanted to stay at Bannon’s. Later, she told me it was because of me.
My other bestie at Bannon’s was Rachel Moore. She started out in Adria’s group, but she was my age and we had a lot in common. She had short hair like me, and we went to the same Dominican hair stylist for a while. Some Saturdays, we’d make appointments together so we could hang out at the hair salon as well as at the gym. Rachel was generally a happy person to be around. At Bannon’s, if I started getting really hyper, Rachel was the one who’d settle me down and tell me to focus. And she and her mom often drove hundreds of miles to cheer me on at gymnastics competitions.
I was doing fairly well in most of my meets, but until I began competing at levels nine and ten, no one paid much attention to individual wins. We were competing for the glory of our team, and all the major accolades went to our gyms. But at level ten, that began to change, because most gymnasts at that level were intending to pursue an elite career. The USAG began tracking thes
e higher-level gymnasts more closely to see who might show potential for future national and international assignments.
The first big level ten win I remember was at the Houston National Invitational in 2010. Out of 652 gymnasts competing, I placed first on vault and floor, and third all-around, and at the end I was presented with a huge cardboard check for $5,000. That check was as tall as I was, and when they brought it over, Aimee stepped in and took it. “Let me hold this for you,” she said. “You can’t touch the check or you’ll be NCAA ineligible.” She explained that my winnings would have to go to my gym program instead of to me as an individual, because once athletes accepted money for their performance, it meant they’d turned pro and could not compete in college.
Aimee knew I looked forward to the day when I could compete in NCAA gymnastics for a top college team, but she didn’t realize how literally I’d taken her explanation. I didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize my chances of being a college gymnast, so later that day when the press photographer wanted to take a picture of me holding the big cardboard check, I kept telling him, “I can’t touch it!” He was so confused. One of the meet organizers tried to simply lean the check against me for the pictures, but I jumped out of the way.
“Simone, please, you have to pick up the check,” the photographer pleaded.
“No, no, my coach said don’t touch it,” I said, looking around for Aimee, who, at that moment, was nowhere to be seen.
Finally, my dad came over. “Simone,” he said, “this is just a copy of the real check. You can touch it. You just can’t accept the real thing.”
I was like, “Oh.”
How embarrassing.
After the Houston National Invitational, Aimee sent a video of my routines to Martha Karolyi. Aimee was hoping I’d get an invitation to attend developmental camp at Karolyi’s training center in Huntsville—a critical step in an elite career. But Martha’s response wasn’t encouraging. “This kid has no bars,” she told Aimee later. “I can’t let her come to camp. She can tumble great, but that’s it.”
When my mom heard what Martha had said, she sat down with my coach.
“Aimee, we need to talk,” she said. “I know you’ve never trained an elite gymnast. The highest you’ve gone at Bannon’s is level ten. So I need to know whether you can take Simone farther, or do I have to find her another gym?”
“I can definitely take Simone to the elite level,” Aimee told my mom.
But Momma Biles wanted to be sure. “So how are you going to do this?” she pressed. “Do you know the skills she needs? Because I’m not going to mince words here, Aimee. You’re a rookie at the elite level. But we all started out on this journey together, so if you think you’re up to the challenge, then I’ll take a chance and put my daughter in your hands.”
Aimee promised my mom that if I ever needed more than she could give me, she’d bring in help from other coaches, and even take me to train at other gyms. So my parents decided to keep me with Aimee, which was the best thing they could have done. Aimee and I had formed a strong bond over the years. She felt like family to me. She knew where I was confident and where I was less sure, and she believed in me. Most important of all, I trusted her.
For the rest of the season, Aimee worked with me to strengthen my performance on bars and to push my degree of difficulty and consistency in all my routines. Aimee also wanted me to have fun. She knew I loved gymnastics, and she didn’t want that to ever change. Before meets, she’d say, “Okay, Simone, go out there and enjoy yourself. All of those expectations people put on you, that’s their baggage. It’s not yours to carry. You go out there and be yourself. Do your best and don’t worry about the rest.”
And you know what? Her encouragement seemed to be working. At the Region 3 Championships that year, I finished fourth all-around and first on vault, which qualified me for JO Nationals in Dallas, Texas. After winning third all-around and first on floor at Nationals, I was super excited to end the season as the US Challenge Pre-Elite All-Around Champion for 2010. At the medal ceremony, Aimee was beaming. She didn’t have a single doubt that it was just a matter of time before Martha Karolyi would change her mind about me.
CHAPTER 9
Bar Release
“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes it’s the quiet voice at the end of the day whispering, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’ ”
—MARY ANNE RADMACHER, AUTHOR
I love Sundays. That’s when I get to leave my gym clothes in the closet and put on a dress and heels for church with my family. When we come home, Adria and I will change into shorts and race around the house with our four German shepherds, whose doggie beds are lined up in the hallway right outside my bedroom door. There’s Maggie, the dog we got after my level nine Westerns, and then there are her puppies Lily, Atlas, and Bella, who were bred at the same farm where we found Maggie. It’s great having four big, frisky German shepherds around; we’ve come such a long way since the days when Adria and I had to beg our dad for just one dog. Eventually, when I get tired of playing, I’ll go to my room and laze around for hours on my zebra-print comforter, flipping through gymnastics magazines as the delicious aroma of dinner fills the house.
As long as I can remember, I’ve devoured stories of gymnasts who travel and compete internationally as part of the USA women’s national team. And in the gym, I’d press Aimee to teach me more of the tricky, high-start-value combinations that might one day land me on the same podium as the top elite girls in my sport. How can I get where they are? I wondered obsessively. What skills do they have that I don’t?
I knew that performing high-degree-of-difficulty routines was the key to taking my gymnastics to the next level, especially under the revised international Code of Points introduced in 2006. That year, the old ten-point maximum score was replaced with a system that rewards each routine’s difficulty and technical content (the D score), as well as the gymnast’s execution and artistry (the E score). The D score has no upper limit, while the E score tops out at ten points. Both numbers are tallied for the final event score, with anything above fifteen points usually in medal range. All of this meant that the sooner I could do the hard skills flawlessly, the greater my chance of climbing onto the winner’s podium.
On Valentine’s Day 2011, I finally got the chance to compete using some of my new skills while at the Gliders National Elite Qualifier in Riverside, California. There I was, the pint-sized, muscled girl in the swirly black-and-pearl-white leo, my hair neatly cornrowed into a topknot. At four feet eight inches tall, I looked about ten years old even though I’d turn fourteen in exactly one month.
As I stood at the end of the vault runway, waiting for the signal to perform my optional vault, I felt jittery with anticipation. Time seemed to crawl, as if all the action around me was happening in slow motion.
Earlier, my compulsory vault had gone well enough, but I’d taken a small step on the landing, and I wanted my second vault to be flawless. Finally, the judge raised the start flag. I lifted both arms above my head, flashed a smile in the usual salute to the judges, then stepped to the center of the runway. The sounds in the gym faded to a hush, until all I was aware of was the runway and the vault table at the end of it. Adrenaline coursed through me as I visualized just how I’d hit the springboard. I imagined the sound of my hands punching off it, and the feel of my body lifting, spinning weightlessly through the air before surrendering to gravity, my feet finding the mat. I took a deep breath and sprinted toward the vault, hitting my round-off back handspring entry cleanly and soaring high off the table into a double twist, then falling to earth on the layout, digging my toes into the bright blue padding and lifting my chest to stick the landing.
“Nice job!” Aimee said, high-fiving me as I stepped off the mat. There was no time to analyze the vault like we did in practice. Aimee put a hand on my back and steered me over to the uneven bars for my next event. All around us, other gymnasts were performing their routines, and officials with clipboards we
re tracking them. I did just okay on the uneven bars. My routine was pretty basic, and my execution wasn’t as smooth as it could have been—definitely not enough to push me to a win. Next up was the balance beam: I wobbled a bit but made it through the entire event without falling, and even put together a back handspring, and then a one-arm back handspring, followed by a two-and-a-half twist off the beam.
Floor has always been my favorite event. Aimee told me later that as I launched into my first tumbling pass, people who were milling around and chatting suddenly became still, watching me. “Wow, she can really tumble,” somebody said.
When final scores were posted at the end of the meet, I emerged as vault champion and—seemingly out of nowhere—I’d taken first place all-around. This was my debut as a junior elite gymnast, and somehow I’d managed to win gold right out the gate! A part of me felt as if the result was a fluke, but another part of me was starting to believe I really could go all the way to Nationals—and make the 2011 women’s junior team.
With the win at Gliders, that goal seemed within reach, because my score had qualified me to compete in the American Classic at the Karolyi Ranch on July 1. Anyone who did well enough at that meet would automatically go on to compete at the Visa National Championships in August. That was the golden ticket, because Martha Karolyi would select the next artistic gymnastics women’s senior and junior national teams based on the results at Nationals. My entire plan now was to be one of the chosen.