Courage to Soar (with Bonus Content)

by Simone Biles

  I remember I’d brought a banana back to our room to eat after the first day of practice. But I didn’t eat it that day, or the second day. Day after day, I kept saying, “Oh, I’ll eat it tomorrow.” And then I didn’t eat it because the skin had started to get brown and the fruit was mushy inside. That poor banana just stayed there, deteriorating. Maggie and I made a big joke of it: Every day we’d pick up the wilted thing. “Oh my gosh, this is us,” we’d say, cracking up. “Our energy is just draining away.”

  A few days later, Maggie’s coach brought a new bunch of bananas, and somewhere there is a phone video of Maggie yelling, “Simone, we’ve got bananas!” and the two of us dying laughing. You know when you’ve had a really long day and you’re so punchy with tiredness that everything seems hilarious? That was Maggie and me.

  We did get to rest up a bit before the meet, but by then I’d started to obsess over my routines in a way that’s never good for me. I was dreaming about every move at night, and when awake, all I could think was, I’ve done fifty routines in practice and I haven’t fallen on one. What if I go up there and miss the one? No matter how I tried to talk myself out of those thoughts, I couldn’t seem to shut down my brain.

  By the time I got out onto the floor, there was so much extra adrenaline pumping through me that I overpowered a couple of my skills. I was able to regain control, except on one of my tumbling passes on floor, I went too hard into the somersaults and landed out of bounds. But the worst moment came in my beam routine, when I let myself get distracted by the crowd.

  Being in Scotland, I knew the audience was going to cheer extra loud for the gymnast from Great Britain, who was finishing up on floor right as I mounted the beam. In competition, there will always be routines happening simultaneously, and the crowd is always going to go nuts for the home team. I’d learned how to brace for that. But that day I didn’t time it right. The crowd cheered earlier than I expected, throwing off my concentration. I was right in the middle of a front tuck, and I started toppling. But I grabbed the beam with both hands and held on for dear life. I was thinking, I don’t care how hard you have to grab this beam, Simone, just don’t fall. A fall would have been a much bigger deduction than touching the beam, so I was determined to stay on. And I did.

  Despite my slight missteps on beam and floor, I was in first place on both and third on vault. I knew it was because my start values across the board had been high, and my D scores (difficulty) had helped push me over the top. My E scores (execution) were decent too. I guess we’d done so many pressure sets in training all week that at some point my body went on autopilot. That’s what saved me. At the end of the meet, the scoreboard showed that our team had once again taken gold—and I’d won the all-around for the third time. My teammate Gabby Douglas earned the silver, and Larisa Iordache of Romania, who’d shared in my ridiculous bee adventure the year before, won bronze.

  Still, unlike the excitement I’d felt the first two times I won Worlds, this time all I wanted was to go back to the hotel and climb into bed. It was late in the evening, and I just felt numb. I wasn’t even sure I’d read the scoreboard correctly.

  “Aimee, I did it, right? I won?”

  “You sure did,” she said, hugging me.

  Before the meet, some reporters had shared that they’d already written the story of me winning, and that if I lost, they’d have to pull the piece and craft a new story. “So you better win this, Simone!” they’d told me, laughing. I’d laughed along, but it had felt like an unbelievable amount of pressure. So when Aimee confirmed I’d won, I exhaled. I was relieved that I hadn’t disappointed the people who’d been rooting for me, but in an odd way, this win felt like it belonged more to them than it did to me. “Well, you got your three-peat,” I whispered as I left the arena.

  On my way back to Texas, I suddenly remembered that during my two weeks in Scotland, the World Champions Centre had opened for business. My parents had been busy moving all the equipment and mats from the Warehouse to WCC while I was competing at Worlds. I could hardly wait to see that wide-open, airy space when I got back to Spring. I was grateful that I’d be walking through those doors for the first time as a three-time World Champion. I’d had a couple of wobbly moments, but in the end, I’d lived up to WCC’s name.

  A week later, I was at the mall with Adria and people kept watching me. I thought maybe I was imagining it, but some people actually nodded in my direction and smiled. Others looked away quickly when I met their eyes, as if embarrassed to be caught staring. I glanced down to make sure I hadn’t buttoned my yellow silk shirt wrong or something, but no, my clothes were fine.

  “Why are these people looking at me?” I whispered to Adria.

  We’d stopped for smoothies at a Jamba Juice pop-up booth in the mall, and had found a seat at one of the nearby tables. Now, as I sipped my Orange Fusion concoction, I felt several sets of eyes studying me.

  “Adria, do I know any of these people?”

  “No, but maybe they know you,” Adria said, indifferently slurping her Strawberry Whirl.

  “Don’t be silly, Adria. Why would they know who I am?”

  As I said those words, a tiny girl with her blond hair in a ballerina topknot walked over to our table. She looked like she was about eight. An older woman, probably her mother, stood a few steps behind her, smiling at us.

  “Are you Simone Biles?” the girl asked me shyly.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Would you mind if I took a picture with you?”

  “Sure,” I agreed, even though I was a little puzzled by her request.

  The girl put her face next to mine, and her mom snapped a photo with her phone. The girl thanked me and walked away, beaming.

  “That was bizarre,” I said to Adria, watching them leave. “Why do they know my name?”

  Adria rolled her eyes and looked at me as if I was the craziest person on the planet. “Duh,” she said. “Wake up, Simone. You’re only the three-time gymnastics world champion.”

  I stared at Adria, realizing just how big a deal my win at Worlds had been. For a fleeting moment, I wished I could see the hugeness of that achievement from the perspective of other people. Don’t get me wrong, I’d worked hard to get where I was, and I was thrilled to have won gold, but inside I was still just Simone sitting next to her bored and unimpressed sister in a Houston mall.

  “Don’t get a big head or anything,” Adria said, angling her straw to get the last sip of her smoothie. “I mean, you might be World Champion and everything, but so what?” As soon as she said that, Adria whacked me on the arm to let me know she was kidding, and we both burst out laughing.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll admit it. My sister’s pretty cool.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Bora-Bora

  “The size of your dreams must always exceed your current capacity to achieve them. If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.”

  —ELLEN JOHNSON SIRLEAF IN THIS CHILD WILL BE GREAT

  Carly, our UCLA team host, dumped a pile of red, purple, orange, and blue scarves on her dorm room bed then laid out a set of olive green T-shirts with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle images on the front. But she wasn’t finished. She reached into another bag and brought out a tangle of wildly colored tutus, several pairs of black tights, and some turtle-green socks.

  “We’re all going to the basketball game tonight as Ninja Turtles!” she announced to the seven of us girls on a two-day recruiting visit, which happened to fall on Halloween. “Okay, everyone, choose your colors!”

  Colleges with strong NCAA Division 1 gymnastics programs had been scouting me since I was thirteen years old. Over the years, coaches had come to see me practice at Bannon’s and later at WCC. I’d also been invited to visit several schools and was excited at the prospect of eventually competing for a top-ranked team. Next to going to the 2016 Summer Games in Rio, doing college gymnastics was my most heartfelt dream.

  The University of Alabama had emerged as my parents’
early favorite. They were impressed with the facilities there, and the school’s winning record, but I felt more at home at UCLA. Some of the girls I knew from Nationals Camp were already enrolled there, and I’d had an instant connection with Valorie Kondos Field, aka Miss Val, their coach. She’d visited me in Spring the year before to assess my skills and recruit me for her Bruins team. She was a lot like Aimee: she believed gymnastics should be fun and that the team should be a family. Miss Val thought I’d be a good fit for her squad, and I thought she’d be a good fit for me.

  That feeling had only grown stronger during my campus visit. By the second afternoon, I’d pretty much decided that after I graduated high school in June 2015, I wanted to be a Bruin. The more time I spent in the company of Miss Val’s team, the more I wanted to finish out my gymnastics career as part of UCLA’s program. And I wasn’t the only elite-level girl who dreamed of attending the school. In fact, two of my friends on the national team, Kyla Ross and Madison Kocian, were with me on that overnight visit. The first day, we’d watched the gymnastics team perform in an intramural exhibition meet, and then we’d attended a football game. That evening, I’d be cheering on the Bruins’ basketball team with my tutu-wearing Ninja Turtle crew.

  I chose a purple color scheme, of course—it was still my favorite color. Kyla chose red. We folded the scarves into headbands and wrapped them around our heads.

  “Tied at the front or at the back?” Kyla asked me, spinning the knot of her scarf to the crown of her head and fanning her long black hair over her shoulders.

  “Front,” I said. “It looks kind of cool with your hair like that.”

  I wore my own headband across my forehead and tied over my hair at the back with the ends hanging down, like my purple Ninja Turtle namesake Donatello. All the girls huddled together, taking selfies with our phones and making crazy faces to send to our friends on Snapchat. In the midst of the happy, talkative commotion, I remember thinking, This is so my scene. I’d been imagining times like this ever since making the decision to be homeschooled. I’d missed out on all the social experiences of high school, and even though Adria kept joking that I could be her date for prom, it would never be the same as attending my own. With college, I’d have another chance at all that. I’d finally get to have the homecoming games and school dances, study groups and student clubs, and all the crazy spontaneous times with friends. That night, for example, we all went for ice cream after the game, and then, since it was pouring rain outside, we holed up in the dorm, chatting with our hosts and soaking up stories of college life.

  When I got back to Spring, I wanted to call Coach Val right away and commit to UCLA for the following fall. My parents urged me to wait. They wanted me to consider the University of Alabama, because it was closer to home and didn’t have all the distractions of a big city like Los Angeles. But I kept pressing.

  “I really want to commit to UCLA,” I said.

  Finally, my mom said, “You know what, Simone, do what you want.”

  She said it like she didn’t really agree with me, but I’d worn her down. And I ran with it. The next day, while I was alone at home, I dialed the number on the card Coach Val had given me.

  “Hello, Miss Val, this is Simone Biles, and I just want to let you know I’m committing to UCLA for college, but if I make the Olympic team, I’ll need to defer enrollment for a year.”

  Miss Val was so ecstatic at my news that she screamed. I felt as if my future in gymnastics was now set, and I couldn’t wait to be a Bruin. If only I’d known it wasn’t going to be so easy.

  I’d been at this fork in the road before. The last time, when I’d had to choose between high school with my friends or homeschool, was after my devastating failure to make the 2011 national team. Now I was at a similar crossroads, one that might require me to give up my dream of a traditional college experience with my peers. This time, my dilemma was the result not of failure, but of success—my back-to-back all-around wins at the 2013 and 2014 Worlds, which had brought sponsors to my door.

  So once again I had a choice to make: Should I work toward my dream of one day competing in the Olympics? Or should I hold onto my goal of pursuing an NCAA gymnastics career and having the “normal” college life I’d fantasized about for so long? If I wanted to go to the Olympics, it made sense to turn professional, which would make me NCAA ineligible. On the other hand, going pro would bring me the kind of financial security that amateur gymnastics could never give me.

  I played with the idea of turning pro when I was done with college, but I knew the timing wouldn’t work. Sponsors wanted me now, in the run up to the 2016 Olympics in Rio. Turning pro in advance of Rio was the sure thing. I’d be twenty-three when the Olympics came back around in 2020. There was no way to know if I’d still be at the top of my game. Gymnastics wasn’t like soccer or swimming or track and field, where athletes could qualify multiple times. Most female gymnasts only go to the Olympics once.

  For many athletes, the decision about whether to turn pro might have seemed like an easy one. Money talks. But can I explain the deep sense of loss I felt at the thought of giving up college gymnastics? For years, I’d imagined the camaraderie of team practice, the adrenaline rush of competition, and maybe even being noticed on campus as one of the school’s athletic stars. These were the experiences that my gymnastics friends who were already in college were always telling me about on Snapchat and Instagram. They were following the exact same path I dreamed of taking—and they were having fun.

  Here’s what I found difficult to accept: I had to choose between college and turning pro while talented male gymnasts got to turn pro at the end of college. Their skill level tended to peak at around age twenty-two, when they were older and stronger, which meant they were able to enjoy competing over a much longer period. But for girls, the more our bodies matured physically, the less easily we soared and flipped and twirled through the air. Our gymnastics life span was shorter. Most of us peaked in high school. It just didn’t seem fair.

  It was true that American gymnastics had evolved in recent years, with older girls like 2012 Fierce Fivers Aly Raisman and Gabby Douglas now back in contention to make the 2016 Olympics team. But the juniors coming up behind us were so good that it was just a matter of time before they pushed us out. With college, at least I’d be guaranteed four more years as a student athlete.

  Everyone had an opinion about the choice I was facing, but, of course, no one could make the decision for me. As my friend, the 1996 Olympic gymnast Dominique Moceanu, told me, “This is your future, Simone. You make up your own mind.” My mom echoed the same sentiment. “We can tell you what we think,” she reminded me, “but not what to do.”

  And what did my family think?

  Mom: “You can always go to college, Simone, but you won’t always be able to turn professional. That’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

  Adam: “If you have the talent to go pro and don’t do it, that would be pretty stupid. You might always regret it.”

  Dad: “Every Olympic year, there are only a few select kids in the world who have a chance to go professional in something they love doing. You are one of those kids, Simone. Whatever you decide, the main thing is to respect your talent.”

  Ron had the most to say. He’d called me from a gas station in Louisiana, where he’d traveled on business. “Simone, if I were in your shoes and had the chance to be well compensated for something I enjoy, I’d go for it. I mean, you’re doing a full-time job already, so why not get paid for all the hours you put in? Real talk: Are you going to the Olympics? Yes, probably. And then you’re going to go back to college? Really? Look, I’ve been to college, and while it’s great, it can’t compare to what you’re doing. Look at all the places you’ve been; all the challenges you’ve overcome. And now you have these great sponsors knocking on your door. And let’s be clear, Simone—this is your deal. Mom, Dad, Adam, Adria, me, we don’t need anything from you. We’re all blessed, and we are set up. So this is not abo
ut you taking care of us. This is your chance to set yourself up—your future family, your future children. To be honest, Simone, if I were you, I’d do it.”

  Compared to Ron, Adria was brief and to the point: “Whatever, Simone. Do what you want. Just stop asking me what I think!”

  After weeks of agonizing and praying for guidance and weighing my family’s loving advice (yes, even Adria’s), this is how I finally explained the decision to myself: Okay, Simone, you’re giving up one of your dreams for an even bigger dream that you’re chasing—Olympic success, and everything that comes with it, including your face on the cereal box and maybe even your own line of leos. You’re giving up a smaller dream for a bigger one that you actually have a chance of achieving. You can still go to college afterward.

  So in July 2015, I made the decision to turn pro—which meant I now had to make one of the hardest phone calls of my life.

  For almost a week, I’d been putting off the call to let Coach Val know I wouldn’t be enrolling at UCLA after all. Maybe it was because telling Miss Val about turning pro meant I was truly closing the door on being a Bruin. She’d been so excited when I’d committed, and I hated to disappoint her now.

  I tried to get my mom to make the call for me, but she just looked at me like I was crazy. “You made the call to commit to UCLA all by yourself,” she said. “I’m quite sure you can make this call too.”

  Finally, I mustered up the courage and called Coach Val’s number.

  “Hello, Miss Val, this is Simone.” My voice was quavering. “I’m calling to say I’m going pro, so I won’t be able to compete for UCLA next year.”