What was it like teaching Simone Biles her out-of-this world skills? Her first coach Aimee Boorman explains.
Simone Biles has understood gymnastics from day one.
“Simone walked into the gym already almost having figured out gymnastics,” Aimee Boorman, the woman who guided the superstar from the start of her career through to a five medal run at Rio 2016, told Olympics.com in an exclusive interview. Boorman is detailing that experience in her upcoming book The Balance: My Years Coaching Simone Biles, due out 15 April.
“She had said that her brother taught her how to do a back handspring in their backyard, but she had never had any formal gymnastics training.
“In those early years,” continued Boorman, “she would just watch people do skills and go and try them. For example, she had seen a cheerleader doing a back tuck in her practice one day and she said, ‘I can do that,’ but she had never done one before.
“She stood up, and she did it just by watching,” she concluded.
It wasn’t always that simple, though.
As Biles progressed through the ranks and the skills became more difficult, Boorman used the same techniques to teach the now eight-time Olympic medallist as she would any other student. Biles helped Team USA to its fourth-ever Olympic team title Tuesday (30 July) at the Olympic Games Paris 2024.
“In the early years, it was definitely just more of a visual thing for her,” explained Boorman. “When she started learning the really difficult skills, we broke them down just like would for any athlete. So, she had the drills in there, it just took her less time than the average person to put all the pieces together.
“She was able to figure it out faster.”
For the most part, that is.
If Biles has a weak event – she doesn’t – it would be the uneven bars. It’s the only event on which she doesn’t own a world or Olympic title, but she did take silver at the 2018 global championships.
As a youngster, says Boorman, a skill there was a big hurdle.
“I think the skill that stands out the most was her learning a Tkatchev on bars. I feel like that took 17 years,” she said. “She could throw it, but she could never catch it because her timing wasn’t right, like her quickness and power weren’t matching up with the small detail of it until one day [former U.S. junior champion] Lexie Priesman told her, ‘Just try to land on the bar and then you’ll catch it,’ and so she did, and it worked.”
Make no mistake, that was the exception not the rule for Biles.
“She was learning all the skills really quickly – in the first day essentially,” said Boorman. “When we were like, ‘Okay, it’s time,’ she would go in and do it and hit it.”