Courage to Soar (with Bonus Content)

by Simone Biles

  “Remember, Simone, you’re still just a junior, and you came so close,” my mom reminded me as I dragged my sorry self to the bathroom. “You’ll come back and make it next year.”

  In the bathroom, I turned on the shower, but I didn’t get undressed right away. For a long time, I sat on the edge of the bath, mentally going over the days’ routines. I would later learn how to shake off these kind of setbacks in competition and get my head back in the game. But that night, I was in despair. I was sure I’d failed everyone: my parents, my coaches, my team at Bannon’s, and, most of all, myself.

  I heard a light knock on the door. My mom called out that my brother was on the phone from Texas and wanted to speak to me. At the time, Ron was twenty-seven. I knew that he and his fiancée, Lindsay, had been watching my performance on TV back home. I cracked open the door and took the phone.

  “Ron?”

  He launched right in. “Hey, girl, I saw what happened, and I know you’re disappointed right now, but you’re just one slot off from making the team, and that is something!” he told me. “Because you know what, Simone, you can use this as motivation to go into the gym and train even harder. Coming in at number fourteen means you’re almost there! And maybe it’s just not your time yet, but trust me, your day will come, because you’re that good. But maybe this is your year to get better.”

  I was bent over my knees, still sobbing. But somehow, my brother’s words were getting through to me.

  “Simone,” he continued, “you have to keep your chin up. You represented Bannon’s so well out there.”

  “Thank you, Ron,” I managed to whisper. “That means a lot.”

  My brother wasn’t quite finished. “No matter what, all of us are just so proud of you, and you need to stop being so hard on yourself. So go ahead and take your shower, and when you’re done, promise me, no more tears.”

  My shoulders still shaking, my face still wet, I promised. And when I clicked off the call, I did feel lighter, as if I’d started to put down a great weight, releasing not just the pent-up emotions of the meet, but also the accumulated expectations that I’d placed on my own shoulders ever since deciding to go elite.

  Back in Texas, my teammates at the gym crowded around me eagerly. It turned out they were thrilled by the way I’d represented them, and since I was the first one from Bannon’s ever to compete at Nationals, they wanted to hear every detail. After a while, our head coach yelled for everyone to get back to practice, and I sat down with Aimee to review the video of my routines. That’s when I discovered that, as proud as my family and the girls in the gym had been of my performance, not everyone had that point of view.

  Aimee had always been my main coach, but after I went elite, she sometimes brought in other coaches and specialists to help me with certain skills. One of the coaches seemed disappointed that I’d chosen not to do a skill that the powerful Martha Karolyi herself had requested. He thought I’d failed to make the national team because I’d refused to do the Amanar. He hadn’t been at the meet, but he knew from Aimee that Martha had asked to see me perform it. In my heart, I knew I wasn’t ready, which is why I’d done my usual double-twisting Yurchenko. Now, in our debrief, he stressed what I already knew—that the Amanar would have increased my degree of difficulty, and that would’ve raised my starting score, possibly enough to push me up to number thirteen in the standings.

  “No wonder you didn’t make the cut,” he told me. He kept beating that drum: If only you’d done the two-and-a-half. You didn’t make the team because you were too scared to do the two-and-a-half.

  While he was sure I’d choked, I was absolutely convinced that if I’d gone out and done the Amanar, I would’ve been rolled out of that arena on a stretcher. And that would have been much worse than my little meltdown back at the hotel!

  Still, I couldn’t help secretly wondering if performing the Amanar—even an imperfect one—would have been my ticket onto the team. Then again, my mom and Aimee had always told me to listen to my instincts and set my own limits. Every time I replayed Nationals in my head, I knew it wasn’t fear that had kept me from doing the Amanar; it was good sense. I finally decided that it had been a quiet victory for me to stand up and say, “You know what? I don’t feel properly prepared to do that vault. It’s not safe.” That was huge for a girl who loved a challenge as much as I did.

  Aimee had a different approach. She’d been at the meet with me, so she’d seen the pressure I’d put on myself. The first thing she said to me was, “Simone, you have to understand you’re every bit as good as those other girls. Now you just have to perform as if you believe it.”

  As we reviewed my videos, we talked about my tendency to overthink my performance, which made me tighten up. And when I’m tight, mistakes are inevitable. I’m not in control; my nervous energy is running the show. Aimee talked to me about adding hours to my training regimen so that I could become so rock solid on all my skills, I could go out and just enjoy myself in competition.

  A lot of good actually came from me failing to make the national team my first time out. For one thing, Aimee and I zeroed in on skills I needed to upgrade, not just on the vault but also on bars, beam, and floor. When we compared my videos to those of the elite gymnasts who’d scored higher than I had, it was clear that I needed to push the degree of difficulty in all my events. Of course, no matter how high my start value was, it wouldn’t help unless my execution was as clean and polished as possible.

  I can see now that what I mostly lacked at Nationals was maturity—and practice time in the gym. More maturity and practice would have helped me to be cooler in my gymnastics: I still needed to learn how to control the explosive power and soaring height of my routines so that my landings would be spot on, because every tenth of a point counted. When a gymnast does a little hop on the landing, that’s an automatic one-tenth deduction. And the judges know that the bigger the hop, the less in control the gymnast is; that’s why there’s a greater deduction.

  In the end, the most important lesson I took from the 2011 Visa National Championships was this: a person can only fail if they stop trying, if they refuse to pick themselves up and try harder. It would take some time, but I finally understood that I hadn’t failed at that meet. I just hadn’t succeeded—yet. I simply had more work to do in order to convince the gymnastics world that I could earn a spot on the national team. Now I was ready to do that work. But where would I fit all the extra hours I’d need to put in at the gym?

  It was August by then, and I was due to enter high school in a couple of weeks. I was already training twenty-five to thirty hours a week, and I needed to put in more like thirty-five hours a week. This dilemma is the main reason a lot of top-level gymnasts make the decision to be homeschooled, but everything in me screamed No! at the idea. As much as I loved gymnastics and being able to soar above the arena, I was beyond excited about attending public school again with my longtime BFF Marissa. It was time for at least two of the Cheetah girls to reunite!

  I’d missed Marissa and Becca after we moved away from Shady Arbor Way and I’d transferred to the private school across the street from the gym. Even though Becca was still two grades behind me, at least Marissa and I would be going to the same high school that fall. I was stoked to share this new experience with her. I kept imagining what it would be like to be back with my public school friends, going wild at football homecoming games, joining clubs, and finding dates for prom. Together, we’d figure out the high school social scene and—let’s be real—we wanted to have some fashion fun too.

  All summer, Marissa and I had been texting, tweeting, and Snapchatting back and forth, making elaborate plans about what outfits we’d wear on the first day of ninth grade. For me, it would be a pair of white jean shorts with a black lace peplum blouse. And after wearing my hair constantly swept back into a regulation ponytail for gymnastics, with a braid at the front, I was looking forward to trying out some looser hairstyles.

  But how would I juggle my training a
nd a busier schedule of competitions away from home? Would my public high school allow me to miss so many days of school? Would my parents? And if they did, how far behind would I fall in my classes? How would I make up the work? I wanted the best of both worlds—the thrill and the drama of high school with all my friends and a top-tier gymnastics career. But could I really have it all? I didn’t know. What I did know was that not getting a spot on the national team had made me more determined to excel in elite gymnastics.

  For the first time in my gymnastics career, I was facing an agonizing decision—high school with my friends, or homeschool at the gym? As I wrestled to make that choice, I entered into a phase that would become famously known in my family as “Simone’s bratty period.”

  CHAPTER 11

  New Normal

  “To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires courage.”

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, ESSAYIST AND POET

  Around our dinner table on most evenings, we had the same conversation over and over: high school or home school? My mother would ask, “Which way are you leaning, Simone?” I’d just shrug, roll my eyes, and stare down at my plate. I hated talking about it all the time, but I was just as mad when everyone avoided bringing it up, as if it wasn’t on my mind day and night. My parents had made it clear they’d be fine with whatever I decided. One part of me wished they’d just tell me what they thought was best for me, but my mom and dad have never been that way. They knew I had to choose, and they had given me a deadline.

  The new school year was just around the corner, and if I chose to go to regular high school, they needed to enroll me. “We have to make a plan,” Mom told me firmly over dinner one Tuesday. “You have until Sunday to make up your mind. Time is ticking by.”

  She’d cooked my favorite meal of salmon and rice that evening, but I had no appetite. The problem was, I didn’t see the situation the same way my parents did. As far as they were concerned, going to high school meant I’d no longer be pursuing an elite career—in my dad’s words, I’d be giving up “all this gymnastics business”—but I didn’t agree. Why couldn’t I do both? Dad told me I was being unrealistic. “The public school system in the state of Texas won’t allow you to miss as many days as you’ll have to miss if you make the national team and have to go to monthly team camps and do these international assignments,” he explained.

  Mom chimed in. “You can always go to high school if you want,” she said. “If you have your heart set on it, that’s absolutely okay, but you have to know that you’re also deciding to give up all this gymnastics stuff.” And yes, she actually called it that—gymnastics stuff.

  “I can do both!” I insisted, my voice rising. “Lots of girls do both!”

  “Very few of the top gymnasts can manage that,” my mom said, hoping her levelheadedness would calm me down.

  I was in no mood to be calmed down. I’d tried hard to make peace with the idea that an elite gymnastics career would require certain sacrifices. But why did high school with my friends have to be one of them?

  “You can’t do both,” my dad repeated for the umpteenth time. He sighed, looking up at the ceiling as if he was praying for God to give him strength. “Honestly, Simone, you’re wearing us out with this.”

  “Katelyn Ohashi does both,” I argued, naming the gymnast who’d taken first place at Nationals. She was just a few days younger than I was, but she’d been named to the national team two years before. I wanted to be just like her.

  “She’s not in Texas,” Dad said.

  “Yes, she is! She’s in Dallas!” I knew that Katelyn trained with Nastia Liukin, the 2008 Olympic all-around gold medalist, at the World Olympic Gymnastics Academy in Plano, just outside of Dallas. I didn’t mention to my dad that while I was sure that Katelyn used to attend public school, I wasn’t so sure she was still was. It didn’t matter; he wasn’t buying my argument anyway.

  “Okay, but she’s not in Houston,” Dad said. “Even within states, different public school districts have different rules about how many days you can miss.”

  That seemed just plain stupid to me. The way I figured it, if you were getting your classwork done, it didn’t matter how many days of school you missed. As irritated as I was by all this, deep down I was beginning to grasp what my parents already knew: no matter which path I chose, I’d be giving up something. The question was, which experience did I want more—high school homecoming games and senior prom and wild, crazy times with my friends, or the international experience at gymnastics meets with the girls I’d been reading about for years?

  As I weighed the question, my heart felt heavy and water filled my eyes. I thought they were tears of anger at my parents for trying to shut down my options, but looking back on it now, I can see what was really happening—I was sad that I wouldn’t get to take part in an experience I’d been dreaming about for so long. I knew what I had to do, but I wasn’t ready to admit it yet. And so it was easier to lash out at my parents, to make them the bad guys who were standing in my way.

  “Neither of you understand me!” I cried as Adria studied the peas on her plate. I was so full of fourteen-year-old drama, you’d have thought I was auditioning for my own reality show, especially when I pushed away from the table and stood up in a huff, my chair scraping the tile of the kitchen floor.

  “Sit back down, Simone,” my mother said, her voice tired. But I’d recently turned into a cranky, disobedient girl, and so, with my dinner hardly touched, I ran to my room and slammed the door.

  My family was becoming used to these temper tantrums. Ever since failing to make the national team, I’d been in a funky mood. Normally, Mom and Dad wouldn’t have tolerated such rudeness. In this case, I think they were being more lenient than usual because they knew how much I’d wanted the social experience of high school after my lonely year in private school. I was looking forward to ordinary teenager fun like meeting up with my girls at the movies or going shopping at the mall. I was even excited about picking out my classes and figuring out what school clubs to join. And after years of track suits and crystal-covered leos on competition days, just getting dressed every day for school seemed like an adventure I couldn’t wait to start.

  Sometimes, late in the evening, Mom would knock on my door. She’d come in, sit on the side of my bed, and talk to me softly. “If high school is that important to you, just go,” she’d say after I’d explained yet again how much I dreamed about just being a “normal” teenager. “If it will make you stop crying and complaining about this, then just go to high school, Simone.”

  But the next day, after mastering some new skill in my workout with Aimee, I’d change my mind back to homeschool and an elite career. Other times, when I was feeling stuck all over again about which path to take, I’d whimper, “Mom, tell me what to do.” She and my dad refused to take the decision out of my hands.

  My mom broke it down this way. “Simone,” she said, “this won’t be the only big decision you’ll ever have to make, but it will most certainly be one that, when you look back, you’ll see that this was a fork in the road, and you’ll need to be one hundred percent okay with whatever route you decide on. That’s why you have to make this decision yourself. But know that whatever you choose, we are completely behind you.”

  Other times, my dad would take over, laying out the pros and cons. “You can go to public school and quit elite gymnastics tomorrow if that’s what you want,” he’d say. “Or if it’s more important to you to make the national team, to travel and compete internationally, you can do that too. Most kids don’t get to do that, but you have that option. But you’d need to be homeschooled to do that. The good thing is, whether you choose public school or homeschool, you can do college gymnastics either way.”

  My dad knew how much I’d always wanted to compete with a top college gymnastics team like the University of Alabama or UCLA. I felt as passionate about that as I did about my goal of making the US national team. At least I wouldn’t have to give up all my
dreams, I’d think. Then Adam said something that helped me gain a sense of humor about the debate I was having with myself. “Well, sis,” he said, “if you decide on homeschool, you’ll be at the top of your class.” He paused and then added, “But you’ll also be at the bottom of your class.” We all laughed, which was a nice change from me slamming doors.

  It eventually occurred to me that even if I was being homeschooled, I could still see my friends in public school. We texted, tweeted, and sent Snapchats to each other all the time anyway, so really, we could stay in touch. And when I looked into it a little more, I realized that most of the girls in the elite gymnastics world were already being homeschooled. That made me feel a little better—I’d be just like the girls I’d spent so many years looking up to.

  But what finally pushed me to make up my mind was something my dad had told me years before. He’d said, “Simone, never squander what God has given you.” When I thought about that, I realized God had given me the ability to do gymnastics in a powerful way. He’d also gifted me with a love for the sport and a passion for competing. I didn’t want to waste that. Once I approached it that way, the decision seemed inevitable. Besides, if it turned out that all the extra hours I’d now be putting in at the gym didn’t give me enough of an edge to make the national team next year, I could always go to the public high school for tenth grade.

  The next day, I walked into my mom’s home office, where she was busy working, and I announced, “Okay, Mom, I’m going to try homeschool.”

  “Thank God,” Mom said. “And guess what? I already have the perfect teacher lined up for you.”