Let us begin with the facts of her early life. Simone Biles was born on March 14, 1997, in Columbus, Ohio, and she is from Spring, Texas, a suburb north of Houston. At age 6, she first tried gymnastics, on a field trip with her day-care group. As a child, she trained at Bannon's Gymnastics. She is 4 feet 8 inches tall, which is 142 centimeters. After that, we will look at the sport and then at her results.
Women's artistic gymnastics has four events: vault, uneven bars, balance beam and floor exercise. Each routine gets two scores added together, one for difficulty and one for execution. The execution score starts at 10.0 points, and judges take points off for each visible error, such as a step on a landing or a fall. The difficulty score starts at zero and goes up as harder skills are added. Before 2006, the highest possible score in gymnastics was a perfect 10. The newer scoring system removed the perfect 10.
Now let us look at the Olympic Games. Simone has competed at three of them: 2016, 2020 and 2024. At the 2016 Olympics in Rio, she won four gold medals. Her first Olympic gold came in the team event, on August 9. She also won gold on the floor exercise and on the vault. Next, we will see what happened in Paris in 2024.
At the 2024 Olympics in Paris, Simone helped the U.S. team win the team gold medal. On the floor exercise, she lost the gold medal by 0.033 points and won the silver medal. She won three gold medals and one silver medal in Paris. As of November 2026, she has won 11 Olympic medals, and 7 of them are gold. Let us see how that compares with the other records she holds.
As of November 2026, Simone has won 30 World Championship medals: 23 gold, 4 silver and 3 bronze. In May 2021, she became the first woman to land a vault called the Yurchenko double pike in competition. Also as of November 2026, she is the most decorated gymnast in history.
Let us end with what she has done off the mat. In 2022, Simone Biles was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2017, she published an autobiography, Courage to Soar: A Body in Motion, A Life in Balance. Gymnastics moves have also been named after her.
Words to know
- routine: planned performance
- difficulty: how hard
- execution: how well done
- autobiography: life story
