The 20-time World gold medallists opens up about life outside her sport as a newlywed to Olympics.com in an exclusive interview
As four-time Olympic champion gymnast Simone Biles stands around the chalk bucket between turns on the apparatus with her Houston-based teammates, of whom Tokyo 2020 Olympic silver medallist Jordan Chiles is closest in age at four years her junior, something feels a little different.
At 26, the newlywed Biles says the conversations have changed from her previous two Olympic runs.
“Does it look a little bit different if we’re talking ‘chalk talk’? Yeah, because I’m like, ‘Well, I’m married. Like, I live with my husband,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, I live with my parents,’” Biles told Olympics.com in an exclusive interview prior to leaving for the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, underway this week in Antwerp, Belgium.
“They’re like, ‘Well, what are your next steps after this?’ I was like, ‘Well, I have a wedding coming up. I have this,’” continued Biles. “And they’re like, ‘Well, I’m going to prom.’ It just looks a little bit different. I knew I could still do it.”
That’s putting it mildly.
Biles is just two months into her competitive return, having competed at her first event since the Tokyo Games in early August. In Tokyo, Biles won team silver and balance beam bronze after priortising her mental health and withdrawing from four individual finals.
In her short time back, she’s added a historic eighth national all-around crown and qualified to a sixth World Championships.
Biles has only seen action on two days of competition in Antwerp and already she’s accomplished history: adding her fifth named element, a Yurchenko double pike vault, now called the Biles II during the women’s qualifying round and leading Team USA to a seventh-straight World team gold medal in Wednes, something no men’s or women’s team has ever accomplished.
“People think if you’re a wife, you can’t be a professional athlete, you can’t be a gymnast, you can’t do whatever,” Biles told us. “And I came to the realization, like, yeah, I can still be a wife and be out there.
