Simone Biles Becomes the Greatest Gymnast of All Time

Simone Biles was already the three-time defending gymnastics world champion when I met her for the first time, in January, at a photo shoot for her signature leotard line, yet everyone in her entourage was wary of talking about her qualification for the Olympics, let alone her anticipated coronation at the Games. “We have to get there first,” Aimee Boorman, her coach, said. “Everybody, collectively, let’s just knock on some wood here.” Boorman joked that she wanted to find a wooden bracelet to wear so that she could touch it anytime she talked about the Olympics. But keeping up the pretense, in the face of Biles’s overwhelming talent, eventually became too difficult. “I don’t say ‘if’ she wins anymore,” Nellie Biles, Simone’s mother, told me when we spoke in April, at the Pacific Rim Championships, in Everett, Washington. “I say ‘when.’ ”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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