These are some of the ways Simone Biles has been described by her competition, even before her Olympic debut. Biles, a 19-year-old gymnast for Team U.S.A., is already the most decorated gold medalist in world championship gymnastics history. In Rio, she is on the fast track to becoming the best in the world, again, being an odds-on favorite to bring home as many as fivegold medals.
Biles is able, with ease, to pull off moves other gymnasts could only dream about in a world seemingly unbound by the laws of gravity. Her routines and dismounts are so complex and so rarely seen in competition, they just name them after her.
Here is her signature move, known as “The Biles”:
Simone is on her way to bringing the U.S.A. glory on an international stage, becoming a household name for millions, and signing ten of million of dollars worth of lucrative endorsement deals.
And to think, none of it would have been possible without adoption.
Biles and her siblings were born into a fatherless, drug abusing family and eventually placed in foster care. According to Texas Monthly:
Biles was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1997 to drug-addicted parents who struggled to care for their children. Biles and her three siblings were shuffled back and forth between their mother’s house and a foster home. (Biles’s father had abandoned her mother and was never present in his daughter’s life.)
When I asked her what memories she has from those days, Biles recalled that one of the foster homes had a trampoline that she and her siblings weren’t allowed to play on.
Her upbringing was chaotic. Biles bounced back and forth between state and foster care until she was six years old. In 2001, her grandparents, Ron and Nellie Biles, officially adopted Simone and her sister and moved them to Spring, Texas.
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