Attainable Expectations

Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast in history, spoke with Holly Ransom for Monday’s keynote about her accomplishments, coaching, and her mental health advocacy—she joked that the opening session was the earliest she has woken up since she was actively training.

A Promising Start

Biles began by talking about how she fell into gymnastics because of a canceled field trip to an oil rig in Texas when she was six years old. Instead, the class went to a gym and a coach noticed her trying to flip. The coach sent her home with a letter asking if Biles wanted to join the gym and try gymnastics, and her parents signed her up immediately.

“Most of those girls, as soon as they start gymnastics, want to go to the Olympics and want to be an elite gymnast,” Biles said. “I didn’t know any of that. I’d never even seen the Olympics before. I just loved doing it. I wanted to have fun.”

In fact, winning medals wasn’t on Biles’s radar when she began competing.

“I know this is going to be hard to believe, but we were never gunning for medals or to try to win gold,” she explained. “[My goal was] to be better than I was at my last competition and to show up better than my best self yesterday. And so, at the end of the day, if I was doing that, then the outcome usually looked pretty good.”

But then, after seeing a magazine highlighting a competition in Italy, something changed. The winners “were at the top of the podium,” Biles remembers, “and they had their medals. And I was like, ‘I want to go to Italy. I want to do that.’”

That wasn’t a straightforward path, however. Biles spoke openly about setbacks she’s experienced in gymnastics, including not making the national team (where she would’ve competed in Italy) and her first meeting with a sports psychologist to figure out what worked, what didn’t work, and how to deal with her struggles in the sport.

Coaches Who Care

A major solution for Biles was finding coaches who worked with her, rather than trying to change her into something she wasn’t. Communication, she noted, is paramount in coaching and culture has a huge effect on environment.

“My first coach that I had from the time I was six years old until I was 19 was like a second mom to me. We learned the whole entire process together because she had never had an elite athlete either,” Biles said. “I think she didn’t conform to what was normal because she was American. Most of the coaches who were really, really great were European.”

As it turns out, that bond was life changing. “Me and my coach, we knew what worked for one another,” Biles continued. “And that was keeping it fun and lighthearted. And at the end of the day, she always told me, ‘It’s just gymnastics.’”

Biles’s coaches at the Tokyo Summer Olympics in 2021, Laurent Landi and Cécile Canqueteau-Landi, supported her when she withdrew from the team competition because of “the twisties”—a potentially dangerous mental block where gymnasts lose their sense of body while they’re in the air.

“Trust the people that you’re surrounded with,” she said. “I had that in Tokyo. I’ve never had a stronger support group. That’s the first time I’ve ever felt worth more than gold and [it’s] the most courageous I’ve ever been.”

Passion and Success

En route to winning 41 medals, Biles finally made it to Italy—and the Olympic podium—more than once.

That mentality to succeed came from Biles’s mom, who encouraged her children to write down their short- and long-term goals each year.

“As gymnastics begins to progress and I get better and better each and every year, and then I start thinking, ‘Oh, I want to go to the World Championships or the Olympic Games,’ those goals start to look a little bit different,” she stated. “For me, it was good to have that visualization so that if I ever felt not motivated anymore, felt like I wanted to quit, I would look at my goals, and be like, ‘These are the reasons I’m doing it. This is why I fell in love with this sport, and this is what I’m trying to accomplish.’”

TikTok Challenge

Before Biles took the stage, SongDivision members came out onto the stage with Ransom to introduce a TikTok challenge to attendees. Follow these instructions to participate and submit your video before 2 p.m. Tuesday. SongDivision will play submitted videos at the last general session on Wednesday.

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