Chapter 1Columbus

Foreword

For roughly four-tenths of a second, at the top of a vault, a gymnast is fifteen feet in the air and rotating fast enough that the room becomes a smear, and everything she does next depends on a system that tells her, without her having to ask, exactly where her body is. On July 27, 2021, in an empty arena in Tokyo, that system failed Simone Biles in the middle of the most important vault of her life. She came down not knowing which way was up. Then she walked off the floor and withdrew from the Olympic Games. That instant — the body losing the map of itself — is the phenomenon this book is named for, and it is where I want to begin, because it is where I began.

I do not write about gymnastics. My work has been the NFL and the NBA — the games, and, more than the games, the institutions that sit on top of them collecting the money. I have spent years on the machinery that turns a young body into an asset, extracts what it can, and files the body away when the extraction slows. Gymnastics was never my beat. I came to it the way you come to a country you have only read about: expecting it to confirm what I already believed, prepared to be a tourist.

What stopped me was the vault, and what came after it. I had watched, across two decades on my own beat, a hundred men play through injuries that would put a civilian in a hospital, because the institution wanted them on the field and had built an entire culture to make sure they went. I had almost never watched one of them say no in public, at the summit, with the cameras running and the medal on the table. Biles said no. She said it in a few plain sentences in a mixed zone in Tokyo, and an institution that had spent her entire life telling athletes to push through discovered it had no answer. I wanted to understand how a person arrives at the capacity to do that.

I expected the answer to be a sports story. It is not, or not only. Following it backward took me somewhere I had not planned to go: a Columbus apartment where a hungry three-year-old was told to eat cat food; the paperwork of a Texas adoption; and, unavoidably, the record of what a team doctor did to hundreds of girls across two decades, and the testimony the survivors gave, under their own names, in the public hearings. I worked from what is on the record — her own memoir, the court and congressional transcripts, the press archive that has tracked her since she was a teenager. I did not need to invent anything. The record is more than sufficient, and in places it is almost unbearable.

What I found there rearranged the question I had walked in with. I had assumed the Tokyo withdrawal was the argument — courage or cowardice, the debate the country spent that summer having. It is not the argument. The withdrawal was a body registering a limit that a mind, trained across twenty years never to acknowledge limits, had refused to hear. And the thing that let her survive registering it was assembled long before Tokyo, in the deprivation of those first three years: the durability of a child who had already learned, before she could form lasting memories, how to absorb a life coming apart and keep functioning. The gym did not build that. Columbus did.

That is what makes her worth a book, to me, and worth one written by someone from outside her sport. The medals would make her worth a record; they would not make her worth three years. What makes her worth the three years is the combination the medals obscure: the most dominant athlete her sport has produced, and the person who, at the highest-pressure moment of her life, valued her own body above the thing the whole apparatus was built to make her win. Those two facts are supposed to be in tension. In her they are the same fact, and following how they became the same fact is the reason I stayed.

I came to this book a partisan of my own beat's grim certainties — that the institution always wins, that the body is always spent, that nobody at the top ever gets to walk away whole. I leave it having watched one person prove the certainties are not laws. That is what the good subjects do. They make you put down what you were sure of and look again.

— Roland Mercer, Boston

Chapter 1 · Columbus

She was born in Columbus, Ohio, on March 14, 1997. The hospital was Riverside Methodist on the north side of the city. The mother was Shanon Biles, twenty-three years old, an unmarried woman whose life had been organized for the preceding several years around a sustained struggle with drug and alcohol addiction. The father, Kelvin Clemons, was twenty-six. He was not present at the birth. He would not be present, in any sustained sense, at any subsequent moment in the child's life.

Shanon already had two children. Ashley, the oldest, was four. Tevin was two. Both had been born during Shanon's relationship with Kelvin. Both lived, when they were not in the foster system, with Shanon in a small apartment in the Linden neighborhood of north Columbus, a working-class district whose demographics in the late 1990s reflected the broader socio-economic reality of Black Columbus: low-wage employment, inadequate housing, the cumulative effects of decades of disinvestment. The apartment was poorly maintained. The utilities were inconsistent. The food in the refrigerator was, on most days, what Shanon had been able to obtain through a combination of food stamps and the kindness of relatives.

The new infant, named Simone Arianne Biles, was the third of Shanon's four children. The fourth, Adria Diona Biles, would be born nearly two years later, in early 1999, also to Shanon and Kelvin. By the time of Adria's birth, Shanon's situation had deteriorated further. Heroin had entered the picture. The infant Adria was, like the infant Simone two years earlier, born into a household whose capacity to care for her was already exhausted before her arrival.

The four children (Ashley, Tevin, Simone, Adria) moved between Shanon's apartment and the Franklin County foster-care system across the late 1990s and early 2000s. The pattern was and recognizable to anyone familiar with the operations of American county foster systems serving substance-affected mothers. Shanon would, at various points, lose custody of the children when her addiction or her absences from the home came to the attention of the relevant social services authority. The children would be placed in temporary foster care. Shanon would, in some cases, complete the recovery and reunification programs the county required. The children would be returned. The pattern would, over months or a year, deteriorate again. The cycle would repeat.

Simone, in her subsequent memoir and in subsequent interviews, has described what she remembers of these years. The memories are fragmentary, as the memories of a child between the ages of one and three would necessarily be. She remembers being hungry. She remembers a kitten that her mother kept and then lost. She remembers her older siblings, particularly Ashley, who at four and five and six was already being asked to perform the caretaking functions that an absent or impaired adult would otherwise have provided. She remembers being told, on one occasion, that her mother had instructed the four children to eat cat food because there was nothing else in the house and her mother was too unwell to leave to get groceries. The cat food, Simone remembers, did not taste the way her mother had said it would taste. She ate it anyway.

The intervention came in 2000. Shanon's father, Ron Biles, Simone's biological grandfather, who lived with his second wife Nellie in Spring, Texas, north of Houston, became aware of the situation through the Franklin County social services apparatus. Shanon, by 2000, had been deemed by the county to be unable to care for her children on a sustained basis. The county's options were either to place the children in long-term foster care with non-relatives or to place them with available relatives who could provide stable home environments.

Ron Biles was sixty-four years old. He had spent his professional career in air traffic control: a career that demanded precision, the simultaneous management of multiple moving objects in three-dimensional space, and the particular variety of steadiness required to operate under conditions where errors produce catastrophes. He had retired after a long career in the field. He and Nellie (his second wife, a Belizean-born woman who had immigrated to the United States in the 1970s) were living a comfortable middle-class life in suburban Texas. Their own children were grown. They were not, in the terms of the typical late-middle-aged American couple, planning to take on the raising of additional children. But they were available, and the alternative for the four children was placement in non-relative foster care that would have, in all likelihood, separated the siblings from each other.

The question of what Ron and Nellie would take on was settled, by the family's accounts, with a clarity that reflected both the love and the pragmatism that the situation required. Ron would take the two younger children: Simone, three, and Adria, nearly two. Ron's sister, also in Ohio, would take the two older children, Ashley and Tevin. The two older and two younger would be split, but all four would remain in family rather than in the state system. The split was the best available option given the ages and the available kinship placements. Ron assessed it with the precision his career had trained into him and concluded, without extended deliberation, that the calculus was clear.

Ron flew to Columbus in late 2000. He met with the social services workers. He met with Shanon. He spoke with the four children. He determined, with Nellie, that they would take the younger two to Texas, at minimum on a temporary basis, and on a longer-term basis if the situation continued to require it.

The four children flew to Houston with Ron in February 2001. Simone was three. Adria was two. Ashley was seven. Tevin was five. They arrived at the Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston on a winter afternoon. Nellie met them at the airport. The two younger children (Simone and Adria) were taken directly to the house Ron and Nellie owned in Spring. The two older children (Ashley and Tevin) went with them temporarily but would, after a series of subsequent arrangements that the county and Ron worked out, eventually go to live with Ron's sister in Ohio: an aunt who also provided a kinship-care placement for the two older children. Ashley and Tevin would, in the years that followed, be raised separately from Simone and Adria, though the family maintained contact across the subsequent decades.

The two younger children would not return to Ohio. Simone and Adria would, across the subsequent year, be formally adopted by Ron and Nellie. Ron and Nellie became, in legal and operational terms, Simone's parents. She would, going forward, call them Mom and Dad. Nellie, born in Belize and having immigrated to the United States in the 1970s, brought into the household a Belizean-Creole family culture that added to the domestic environment a cultural particularity that the suburban Texas setting would not otherwise have contained. She was Catholic. She was strict about church attendance. She was strict about manners. She was, in the most direct sense, the parent who had opinions about how children should conduct themselves and who enforced those opinions with the focused attention that the child-rearing literature would recognize as authoritative parenting.

The biological mother Shanon would, across Simone's subsequent childhood, be the biological mother Shanon: a person Simone knew about, who would attempt over the years to reestablish contact, and whose substance-related struggles would continue across the subsequent decades to be an intermittent feature of the extended family's life. Simone has addressed the subject of her biological mother across a series of interviews conducted over the years. The portrait she has given is neither sentimental nor bitter. Shanon was sick. The sickness had consequences. The consequences had been survivable, for Simone, because of what Ron and Nellie had provided. The biological mother and the adoptive mother are, in Simone's articulation, different categories. She does not confuse them. She does not, in her public accounts, confuse love with obligation, or gratitude with denial. She knows who raised her. She knows who could not.

The Spring house was a four-bedroom suburban property on a quiet residential street. The family that lived there included Ron, Nellie, Simone, and Adria. The household's rhythm was the rhythm of suburban Texas family life in the early 2000s: school, weekend errands, sports activities, church on Sundays, family dinners, the cadence of a working-class-rising-to-middle-class family that had stabilized after years of professional careers and had now, in a later stage of life, taken on the responsibility of raising young children for a second time.

The arrangement was, in its structure, more common in working-class and lower-middle-class Black American families than in the mainstream cultural imagining of foster care and adoption. Kinship care, the practice of relatives taking in children whose parents cannot care for them, has been, across American history, a particularly common child-welfare response in Black communities. The institutional foster-care system has, across decades of research, been documented to have notably negative outcomes for children who are placed in non-relative care: worse educational outcomes, worse mental-health outcomes, higher rates of subsequent involvement in the criminal justice system. Kinship care, by contrast, produces substantially better outcomes across the same metrics. Ron and Nellie's decision to take Simone and Adria was, in the framework of the research, the decision that gave both children the best realistic prospects available to them. It was also, by any honest assessment, an act of love by a couple in their sixties who had raised their children and were not obligated to raise more.

Ron, by Simone's accounts and by the accounts of family friends, was the gentle parent. He had the patient temperament that the unexpected late-life parenting required. He played with the children. He read to them. He took them to weekend activities: gymnastics for Simone, dance for Adria, various other programs as the children's interests developed. Nellie was the disciplinarian. She was, Simone would say in subsequent interviews, the parent who made sure the children behaved. She enforced bedtimes. She inspected homework. She maintained the household standards that the family's aspirations required.

Simone has, in subsequent interviews, described both parents with a precision that goes beyond sentiment. Ron was patient. He was present. He came to her competitions. He drove her to practice when Nellie could not. He was the parent who, in the early gymnastics years, sat in the parents' viewing area and watched his granddaughter (now legally his daughter) perform skills that he had no framework for evaluating beyond the obvious fact that the other children at the gym could not match them. He was, in those years, simply proud. The pride was, in Simone's subsequent description, uncomplicated: the straightforward pride of a parent watching a child do something that is, in whatever terms the parent can assess, exceptional. Ron did not need the gymnastics-technical vocabulary to recognize that Simone was doing something the other children in her age group could not. He knew it from watching.

Nellie was the parent who managed. She managed the schedules. She managed the finances. She managed the relationships between Simone and the coaches, between Simone and the gym administration, between the family's resources and the sport's escalating demands. She was the parent who made the phone calls, wrote the checks, negotiated the arrangements. The two roles were, together, what the development of an elite athlete requires: one parent who gives uncomplicated emotional support and one parent who handles the operational logistics.

Nellie's background as a Belizean immigrant (she had immigrated to the United States in the 1970s from Belize, a Central American nation with a predominantly English-speaking and Creole-cultural heritage) added a particular cultural dimension to the household. Nellie was Catholic. She was strict about church attendance; the family attended services regularly. She was strict about manners and about academic performance. The household she and Ron had built was, in its values, organized around the middle-class Catholic Belizean-American framework that Nellie's own upbringing and immigration experience had produced. It was a household with high expectations, clear rules, and the family-cultural warmth that Nellie's background provided. It was not, by any account Simone has given, a cold or austere household. It was warm and demanding simultaneously: the combination that developmental psychologists identify as authoritative parenting, and that the research consistently finds produces the best outcomes for children.

Simone, by all accounts, adapted to the new household quickly. She had, by three, already developed the resilience that the early childhood had required of her; the move to Spring was, in the psychological terms, a relief rather than a trauma. She had food. She had her own bed. She had a sister sleeping in the same room. The adults around her were, for the first time in her conscious memory, reliably present. The transition was not, by any account she has given subsequently, traumatic in the way that disrupting transitions for some adopted children become. She accepted the new family. She loved the new parents. She did, across her subsequent childhood, sometimes ask about the biological mother, and Ron and Nellie answered the questions honestly, without concealment, in the way that responsible adoptive parents in the 2000s had been counseled to do, but the asking was not a feature of distress. It was, simply, the normal curiosity of a child about her own origins.

What the early childhood (the Columbus years, the foster transitions, the Shanon-related instability) left in Simone is one of the questions the rest of this biography has to address. The standard psychological literature on early-childhood adversity would predict lasting effects: hypervigilance, difficulty with emotional regulation, attachment patterns that would shape subsequent relationships in ways. Simone has, in subsequent interviews, acknowledged that some of these effects have manifested across her adult life. She has described her own anxiety patterns. She has described her therapy work. She has described the psychological architecture that her early years built and that she has, across her adulthood, been attentively working with.

What the early childhood also left, however, was something else. It left a durability. The three-year-old who had been hungry, who had been moved, who had been separated from one mother and given to another, had developed in those years the psychological resource that the subsequent twenty-five years would call upon repeatedly: the capacity to absorb dramatic discontinuity and to continue functioning. The capacity would be tested, across her career, by events that would have broken many other people. It would not break her. The Columbus years had, in their brutal way, been the training for what was coming.

The Columbus years left visible marks. Simone's height, across her entire adult career, would never exceed four feet eight inches. The growth delay produced by the inadequate nutrition of those early years was a physiological fact she carried. She has described it in subsequent interviews with a characteristic lightness, noting that the compact body it produced turned out, in the physics of gymnastics, to be advantageous. The child who did not get enough to eat in a Columbus apartment became the adult with the most explosive power-to-weight ratio in the history of women's gymnastics. The irony is not lost on her. She has, in various interviews, noted it.

The irony goes further than the height, in fact. The early deprivation that produced the growth delay also produced, across the research literature on adverse childhood experiences, the kind of early adversity that is associated with the development of exceptional stress-tolerance and emotional regulation in children who receive adequate protective-factor support afterward. Simone's early childhood was, in the clinical terms, a high-ACE environment. The subsequent adoption by Ron and Nellie was, in the clinical terms, the high-quality protective factor that the research predicts will substantially modify the effects of the ACE exposure. The result (a person who can absorb extraordinary stress and continue to function at the highest level her domain requires) is not an unusual outcome for the combination of high-ACE early childhood and high-quality subsequent protective factors. It is, in fact, the predicted outcome. Simone embodies the prediction at the most extreme end of the distribution.

What the Columbus years also produced, however, was a resilience that the subsequent chapters of this biography will have repeated occasion to document. The three-year-old who had been moved and fed inadequately and placed with temporary strangers had, by three, already practiced the core psychological skill that the subsequent twenty-five years would demand of her repeatedly: the skill of accepting profound discontinuity and continuing to function. The skill is not taught. It is, in the developmental literature, acquired through the kind of early adversity that the Columbus years represented. The acquisition has costs. It also has, as Simone's subsequent career would document, capabilities.

The next chapter is about the day, in 2003, when a daycare center in Spring took a group of children on a field trip to a local gymnastics gym. Simone was six. The trip would be the moment her life found its direction. The biography proper begins there.