Exclusive - Simone Biles: "I came to the realization, I can still be a wife and be out here."
The 20-time World gold medallists opens up about life outside her sport as a newlywed to Olympics.com in an exclusive interview
Artistic Gymnastics
As four-time Olympic champion gymnast Simone Biles stands around the chalk bucket between turns on the apparatus with her Houston-based teammates, of whom Tokyo 2020 Olympic silver medallist Jordan Chiles is closest in age at four years her junior, something feels a little different.
At 26, the newlywed Biles says the conversations have changed from her previous two Olympic runs.
“Does it look a little bit different if we’re talking ‘chalk talk’? Yeah, because I'm like, ‘Well, I'm married. Like, I live with my husband,’ and they're like, ‘Oh, I live with my parents,’” Biles told Olympics.com in an exclusive interview prior to leaving for the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, underway this week in Antwerp, Belgium.
“They're like, ‘Well, what are your next steps after this?’ I was like, ‘Well, I have a wedding coming up. I have this,’” continued Biles. “And they're like, ‘Well, I'm going to prom.’ It just looks a little bit different. I knew I could still do it.”
That’s putting it mildly.
Biles is just two months into her competitive return, having competed at her first event since the Tokyo Games in early August. In Tokyo, Biles won team silver and balance beam bronze after priortising her mental health and withdrawing from four individual finals.
In her short time back, she’s added a historic eighth national all-around crown and qualified to a sixth World Championships.
Biles has only seen action on two days of competition in Antwerp and already she’s accomplished history: adding her fifth named element, a Yurchenko double pike vault, now called the Biles II during the women’s qualifying round and leading Team USA to a seventh-straight World team gold medal in Wednes, something no men’s or women’s team has ever accomplished.
“People think if you’re a wife, you can’t be a professional athlete, you can’t be a gymnast, you can’t do whatever,” Biles told us. “And I came to the realization, like, yeah, I can still be a wife and be out there.”
“I was, like, married to gymnastics.”
Biles lights up when asked about her life outside the sport, particularly her marriage to Owens.
She’s focused, she says, on making sure she takes time for herself, for her husband, for her friends and vacation this time around.
“[I’m] even being intentional outside of the gym, making time for me and my husband, making time for my family, making time for those vacations, which before I wouldn’t say necessarily I skipped because y’all know I have my vacation time,” Biles says with her trademark giggle. “But I feel like before, it’s just like you put relationships and all of that on the back burner.
“I was, like, married to gymnastics,” she continued, “and now I feel like I’m attached to so many other things and gymnastics is just a part of my day because at the end of my practice, I’m like, ‘Well, I get to go home to a house, to my husband, to my dogs, to all this stuff,’ where before it was like, man, gym, gym, gym, gym.”
Biles and Owens are adjusting not only to married life but also to being apart.
After four years in Houston, Owens signed with the Packers as a free agent in May, moving him more than 1,200 miles from their shared home.
“We’re a long-distance relationship right now. It’s pretty crazy because he left right after the wedding,” Biles said. “But it’s so much fun having two professional athletes and people think that we would compete so much. He's competitive. I'm not competitive. If we're playing a video game or whatever or cards, I think that's so much fun and I don't care if I win or lose.”
Biles laughs as she says everyone asks her what she and Owens do at home.
“I think we like to have a lot of fun, but we also like to relax because at the end of the day, we both workout so much and our schedules just look so different,” she said. “It’s not as crazy as you think, like we’ll be doing therapy together or go get massages together or our nails done.”