by Simone Biles
I’m always surprised when people say I was a late bloomer, because gymnastics has been my life since I was six years old. What they really mean is that, until I was fourteen, I wasn’t on anybody’s radar. I’d never been invited to gymnastics camp at Bela and Martha Karolyi’s sprawling ranch in Huntsville, which meant I hadn’t been identified as a possible candidate for a spot on the USAG’s national team.
All that was about to change. When Aimee sent recordings of my performances to Martha the second time, Martha invited me to developmental camp at the ranch. Martha did wonder if, at fourteen, I was already too old to groom, but I guess she thought I was promising enough to at least evaluate me. I was excited and nervous.
Everyone knew that Bela and Martha were responsible for numerous Olympic and World champions, including Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci, who made history with her perfect tens at the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal, Québec, and American Mary Lou Retton, who took gold at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California. I also knew that the women’s national team members went to camp at the ranch every four to six weeks for skills training and assessments, known as verifications. I didn’t know if I’d actually meet any of the girls on the team, but at least I’d be working out with a new crop of gymnasts who were up and coming like me.
Aimee drove with me to Huntsville. All the gymnasts’ regular coaches also attended the five-day camp, working with Martha’s staff to help push us to the next level. The Karolyi Ranch, which since 2000 has been the official training center for the USAG women’s teams, is a 2,000-acre spread in the middle of a national forest. The landscape is lush and green, with a huge lake at the center, and nothing but trees and woods for miles around. Tucked in the middle of the forest are three training gyms, a dance studio, medical facilities, dining and recreational spaces, and cabins that can sleep up to three hundred athletes and coaches at a time.
As Aimee and I drove down a long, wooded road to the corrugated metal main building, I have to admit I was picturing roasting marshmallows over a campfire, movie nights with popcorn, pool time with new friends, and outdoor games designed to help campers bond. The problem was I’d taken the word camp to heart. I thought the week would be fun and games with some workout sessions thrown in. Boy, was I mistaken! The only bonding our coaches intended on us doing was with the vault table, the uneven bars, the balance beam, and the training floor.
Developmental camp at the Karolyi Ranch is all about raising your game. You’re in the gym from eight in the morning until seven at night, with a three-hour break in between. The main gym looks like any training center, with coaches for each of the events who drill you on your skills. I was accustomed to repetition in practice, but the atmosphere was more hard-core than I was used to at Bannon’s. At the ranch, coaches would help you break down each skill into its basic elements so you could improve every part of the routine.
Martha would walk around from station to station, observing everything and making comments to our coaches. I don’t remember actually speaking to Martha at that first camp, although sometimes at the end of practice she’d line us up—always in height order—and give us little pep talks in her thick Eastern European accent. “We strive for perfection here,” she told us. “If that’s not your goal, then you’re in the wrong place.”
First-timers at the ranch are always a little intimidated by Martha. She’s very no-nonsense, and she wants results fast. If she thinks you’re not giving one hundred percent, she’ll say, “Well, you’re not doing this for me, you’re doing it for yourself.” But she’s always there to help you set goals and achieve them. She’ll push you to limits that you don’t think you can reach, and yet somehow you do. She definitely wants you to be your best, so I knew that everything we were doing at camp was going to make me better. But I wasn’t used to such a serious environment. Even when hard practices made me cry at Bannon’s, some other part of that session would make me break into laughter. It’s just who I am. But I had to keep that side of me tamped down because laughter in the gym would’ve been seen as a sign that I wasn’t committed. At the ranch, being committed meant you kept a straight face and did the conditioning drills and worked at perfecting your skills until you thought you were so tired you couldn’t go on—and then you worked some more.
Let’s just say that with all that formality and rigor, I was not a happy camper. Maybe the feeling of wanting everything to be more fun was normal for a fourteen-year-old, but there was no place for me to express that during the training. Aimee knew I was struggling; she’d caught me rolling my eyes once or twice at having to repeat a particular move again and again. The repetition was so relentless that, instead of feeling sharper, I was actually starting to feel blurry and a little bored—which might be why I started wobbling on my beam routine.
“Get it together, Simone,” Aimee warned me in a low voice. She told me later that Martha had said to her, “Simone floats like a butterfly, but she has to stop falling on beam.”
I was glad I had Aimee quietly in my corner. She knew better than anyone how to manage me when I became unfocused. Sometimes, depending on how she read my mood, we’d power through. Other times, when my resistance hardened into opposition, she’d send me to do conditioning and we’d tackle the skill again later.
“I would rather you do three hours of conditioning than for you to do poor technique on your gymnastics,” she’d say. “I will not allow you to do bad gymnastics, because that’s just a waste of time.”
Fortunately, my parents had raised me to be polite even when I secretly had an attitude, so even though I wasn’t enjoying the drills, I didn’t dare let anyone else see that. It was not just a privilege, but also a rite of passage simply to be invited to the ranch, so I dug deeply and did everything the coaches asked. I was starting to realize that if I truly wanted to move to the next level, I was going to have to get used to this intensive style of training. Up until then, gymnastics had been mostly fun and games for me; I had to start seeing it as work too.
About thirty girls were at camp that week, including a few I recognized from level ten and pre-elite meets. I was rooming with Courtney Collins, Nia Dennis, and Destinee Davis. We were from different states, and we struck up a friendship outside of practice. I read years later in a TIME magazine article that the hidden gift of the boot camp-like atmosphere at the ranch was that the girls who attended sessions together became close friends. From my own experience, I’d say that’s absolutely true. On breaks, Courtney, Nia, Destinee, and I would go for walks around the ranch to see the animals: donkeys, horses, camels, chickens, and peacocks, all roaming freely on the property. Sometimes we’d play on a swing set, which was more like a tetherball machine, with rings we could swing around on. Mostly, we spent our time in the training center, breaking skills down and putting them back together again until our execution became second nature.
I came around to appreciating Martha Karolyi’s results-oriented approach when I returned to the ranch a few weeks later to compete in the American Classic. I ended up taking first on vault and balance beam in my junior session, and third all-around, with a final score of 53.650. That was a full point higher than I needed in order to qualify straight to the Visa National Championship in August.
I was in!
I’d achieved my first goal. My score also allowed me to compete at the CoverGirl Classic a couple of weeks later. On the drive back to Spring after the meet, Aimee suggested that Classics would be my last chance to add some new dream skills to my competition routine before Nationals.
Back at school, teachers had started talking to my parents about my lack of concentration in the classroom. It seemed that any little thing—a bird flitting by outside, footsteps in the hallway, one student whispering to another at the back of the room—was enough to distract me from what the teacher was saying. Near the end of the school year, my dad made an appointment to have me tested. Given how hyper and energetic I’d always been as a little kid, no one was entirely surprised when it turned out I had ADHD.
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The funny thing was, even with ADHD, when it came to gymnastics, I could be laser focused. With my sights now set on making the junior national team, I wanted to do more, more, more. “I just got some new skills on beam, an aerial, which is a cartwheel with no hands, and a round-off double into the pit,” I wrote in my journal that year. “On bars, we’re working on Tkatchevs. I hope I get it on the high bar soon. I feel like every time I learn a new skill, I have accomplished something.”
Bars again—the dread of my gymnastics existence. I’d been wrestling with the Tkatchev for almost a year, trying to nail the complicated release-and-catch move. In a Tkatchev, a gymnast swings around the bar like she’s doing a giant, but a little bit before she gets to the top—right when her toes are just past horizontal—she releases the bar and turns her hands over so that she’ll fly backward over the bar in a straddle position and then catch the bar again on the other side.
My trouble with this skill was the same old story—a bad experience had made me afraid of the move. Here’s what happened: One day when one of my other coaches at Bannon’s was spotting me on bars, I threw my body into the motion for the Tkatchev, getting ready to sail backward over the bar, but at the last second, I didn’t release the bar. I ended up backbending on the bar, and next thing I knew, I was spinning around on my neck and flying off the apparatus.
I think I frightened Coach Tomas (not his real name) that day. He ran over to me shouting, “Simone, what are you doing? You can’t do that! You have to follow through with the skill or you’ll get injured.”
No, I didn’t get injured, but after that, I was terrified of the Tkatchev. This is where my stubbornness did me some good, however, because as much as I wanted to never attempt that release and catch again, I didn’t give up. There were days when I hit the mat with every single release I did, and I never came close to catching the bar. The problem was my timing. After I released the bar, I had to know the exact moment to catch it on the way around, and I had to be precise on every single repetition. But I was all over the place. I’d reach for the bar early and crash into it, or I’d be way too late and completely miss it. Other times, I would kind of catch it, but my grip wasn’t sure and I’d slip off.
On a particular afternoon when I was slipping off the bar every time I tried to catch it, I sobbed to Aimee, “I’m never going to get it!” I was crying my eyes out that day. “Aimee, this isn’t working! I’ve been trying to do the Tkatchev for seven months now. Why can’t I learn this release move?” I was so frustrated. During the forty-five-minute bar rotation, I’d try the release and catch over and over, and I’d miss, cry, miss, cry, miss, cry. And then, just before practice ended, I said to myself, I’m going to do it this time. And you know what? I actually did! I was so ecstatic that now I was crying from the pure joy of finally catching the bar!
I didn’t feel ready to debut the skill in competition though, because I still wasn’t consistently catching the bar. But Tomas argued that I should make the Tkatchev part of my uneven bar routine for the upcoming CoverGirl Classic so I could compete with it at least once before Nationals. “You can’t go to Nationals without a strong Tkatchev,” he insisted. Aimee agreed. So even though I was still failing regularly on the catch, I reluctantly said yes. We all knew I needed a greater degree of difficulty on my bar routine anyway, and Tomas calculated that if I could nail the Tkatchev in competition, when the rush of adrenaline often boosted a gymnast’s execution, then I might gain enough confidence to perform the skill flawlessly at Nationals.
Of course, if I miss the catch and fall in the gym, my coach just picks me up and lifts me back onto the bar to finish my routine. But falling in competition is another story. The week leading up to Classics, all I could think about was how embarrassed I’d be if I ended up crashing to the mat in front of all these elite girls who could do perfect single-bar releases in their sleep. With that self-defeating thought looping in my head, I never caught the bar once that entire week. Then during the warm-up period right before the meet, guess what? I was still missing the bar on the Tkatchev.
By now you’ve probably figured out that I can burst into tears almost as easily as I can burst out laughing. Stress does that to me—makes me laugh or makes me cry. So just before it was time to march out onto the floor with the other competitors, I was in the bathroom crying from sheer nerves and the fear that I was about to humiliate myself. Right then, one of the girls in my group, Lexie Priessman, came into the bathroom.
I’d read about Lexie in the pages of USA Gymnastics magazine, and I’d followed her competitive career online. She’d made her national team debut the year before at the Nastia Liukin Supergirl Cup in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she won the all-around title. We’d met for the first time earlier that day, but I’d been too starstruck to say much. Now, seeing my tears, she came over to me.
“Hey, are you okay?” she asked.
“No,” I mumbled, dabbing at my mascara with a tissue, trying to wipe away the smudges before I went out onto the arena floor. “I keep falling on the Tkatchev. During warmups, I didn’t catch it a single time. I’ve tried everything, and it’s not working.”
Lexie stood in front of me and put her hands on my shoulders.
“First of all, stop crying,” she said. “And if it helps, I used to have a lot of trouble on Tkatchevs too. This is what helped me: just let go of the bar so early that you think you’re going to land on the bar. It’ll feel too soon, but just go ahead and do it. Works for me every time.”
“Okay,” I said, willing, at that point, to try anything.
“Now let’s go out there,” Lexie said. “They’re calling us.”
I left the bathroom and walked with one of my idols into the arena to march with the rest of my competitors. I was more aware than ever that I was about to go up against some of the best in my sport, but Lexie’s kindness in the bathroom had made me a little less scared. When it was time for me to do my bar routine, I looked around and saw she was smiling at me from the sidelines with both thumbs up. I thought, Okay, just do what she said, let go of the bar a little bit earlier than you think you should, and that’s exactly what I did. And I caught the bar! In competition!
In the moment I grabbed the bar, I heard my sister Adria’s voice screaming my name from somewhere in the audience, and then I caught sight of Lexie jumping up and down and cheering.
But here’s the thing: I was used to falling on my Tkatchev and having my coach put me back up on the bar. Then I’d go on from there to do a good, clean routine. Now that I’d actually caught my Tkatchev, everything after that was just a little bit off. I realized that all along, I’d been practicing my routine expecting to fall, so I didn’t know how to flow smoothly into my other skills. I fell on the Pak salto—a release from the high bar to the low bar, with a backward layout just before you catch the low bar—even though I’d never before fallen on the Pak. Right after my Pak salto, I fell on a toe catch from the low bar to the high bar. But at the end of the routine, I did manage to at least stick the dismount.
As I stepped off the mat, Aimee ran over and gave me a hug. Lexie rushed up to me, face beaming, and said, “Hey, you caught your Tkatchev!”
“I did!” I said, high-fiving her. “Thank you!” Everyone else was looking at us, completely puzzled. They were probably wondering, Why on earth is she so excited? She just fell off the bars twice! But I didn’t care right then. I’d caught my Tkatchev, and I was on my way to Nationals.
One month later, it wouldn’t be the Tkatchev that would put me out of contention for the USA women’s junior team by just one spot—it would be that dang Amanar. Maybe if I’d spent more time practicing the vault, I might’ve gotten picked. But the same thing that’s true in gymnastics is also true in life: You can’t go back. The best you can do is forgive yourself, take a deep breath, and get to work on the next challenge. But that doesn’t mean you can’t bawl first—and let me tell you, I did.
CHAPTER 10
Game Change
—LORII MYERS, AUTHOR
I stood on the sidelines of the arena in St. Paul, Minnesota, clapping till my palms stung. The roar of the audience drowned out my own cheers for the thirteen newly selected members of the USA women’s junior team. The two-day 2011 Visa National Championships were over. While I’d loved meeting so many of my idols and competing against the best my sport had to offer, the meet hadn’t turned out for me the way I’d dreamed. My bright, pasted-on smile hid my bitter disappointment. Coming in at number fourteen in the rankings, I’d missed making the thirteen-woman team by a hair, but it might as well have been a mile.
As the girls who’d been chosen began walking off the stage, family and friends swarmed onto the floor to congratulate them. Cameras flashed at such a blinding rate, the entire scene seemed to be lit by strobes. Everything felt unreal in that moment, like a bad dream I couldn’t wake up from. I had spent the entire competitive season with one goal in mind, to make the national team. But I’d come up short.
I managed to keep it together till I got to the safe embrace of my parents, who waded into the crowd to find me. Mom hugged me close, while Dad patted my shoulder. They could see right past my cheerful act; they knew I was devastated. I’d been determined not to act like a big baby, but once we got back to the hotel, I couldn’t hold it in any longer. Oh, I cried. I threw myself across the bed and bawled.
My parents were saying all the right things to help me feel better. “It’s okay, Simone. We’re proud of you. You don’t need to be sad about this. You have a fresh opportunity here. This is really okay.”
My mom rubbed her hand in circles on my back to try to comfort me while, above my sobbing, I could hear my dad ordering room service. I hadn’t eaten since early that morning, and now it was evening. They knew I was tired and hungry, and that my exhaustion was probably making everything worse. When the food came, they coaxed me to have some. I had no idea what I was eating; it was completely tasteless. When I couldn’t make myself take another bite, they suggested I go take a shower and call it a day.