Stuttgart (Germany) (AFP)
Placed as a foster family in her childhood and then sexually assaulted as a teenager, Simone Biles overcame all the trials to settle at the top of the pantheon of gymnastics. And even become an icon far beyond his sport.
In Stuttgart on Sunday, Biles became the world's most successful gymnast at the age of 22, winning 25 awards, claiming the only record she had shared since the previous day with legendary Belarusian Vitaly Scherbo ( 23).
Not only that, she poses her as the greatest gymnast in history - and even one of the greatest figures in sport in general.
Never, before her, a gymnast had capped five world crowns in the general competition (3 max). Never before, a gymnast had accumulated 19 world seals (12 max).
"It's true that it's a lot, she wonders herself, doe eyes and smile + ultra bright + Sometimes I wonder how I do, I wish I could extract myself from my body for to see myself with my own eyes. "
More athletic, more bouncy, more powerful, the small American bomb (1.42 m, 47 kg) hovers above all in pure technique. Four acrobatics - two on the floor, one on the beam and one on the jump - bear her name, including two ultra-complex ones that she named at the Mondials-2019.
"I never thought I would be able to do them in competition one day," she says.
- "Saved" by her grandparents -
For her compatriot Morgan Hurd, world champion in the general competition in 2017 - in her absence - it's simple: she is "superhuman".
When little Simone discovers gymnastics at the age of six during a school trip, a coach spots her immediately.
It might look like a fairy tale, it's not one. Because her early childhood, Biles, born in Ohio, shares with a mother "addicted to alcohol and drugs", who "back and forth in prison", which is worth, her and her three brothers and sisters, to be placed in foster care, she confides with emotion on the American television in 2017.
"I have never been able to count on my biological mother, I remember that I was always hungry, always afraid."
"My grandparents saved me," she says of Nellie and Ron Biles, whom she sees as her parents and who changed the course of her story by adopting her, as well as her little sister, while that the rest of the siblings landed in other family members.
At the age of eight, Biles made a decisive encounter, that of Aimee Boorman, the coach who will take her to the heights, her "second mom" too, who will watch her balance on the apparatus as in life.
It is under her wing that she becomes, at 16, world champion for the first time, in 2013. Under her wing also that she offers herself four Olympic gold medals, plus one bronze, in 2016 in Rio.
- "I'm much more than that" -
Boorman left in Florida, Texan adoption returns to training under the leadership of the French Laurent Landi and Cécile Canqueteau-Landi after a post-Olympic sabbatical year.
It is soon after Biles reveals another personal injury: in January 2018, she reveals to be one of the more than two hundred victims of Larry Nassar, the former doctor of the American women's gymnastics team, heavily condemned for hundreds of years. sexual assault for two decades.
Out of silence, she has not hesitated since to denounce publicly the passivity of the American sports authorities. It's "not easy to go back to a sport, an organization that has let you go," she was still launching at the US Championships last summer.
"I know that this horrible experience does not define me, I'm much more than that, I'm unique, intelligent, talented, motivated and passionate, and I promised myself that my story would be much bigger than that," she wrote. the time
Biles has largely kept his word. At the Worlds-2018, his comeback on the international scene was crowned with six medals out of six possible. A year later, she won five gold.
If she repeat the feat in Tokyo next summer, she will match the record of Olympic seals (9) established by Soviet gymnast Larissa Latynina. An umpteenth - ultimate? - Prowess to his excessiveness.
© 2019 AFP