• Chronicle Simone Biles rounds the story: she is already the most successful gymnast of all time
  • Opinion: Biles: talent, power and risk

In the process of writing his biography, Courage to Soar (Without fear of flying, Word, 2017), Simone Biles returned to a forgotten taste, a childhood taste: cereals with water. The milk was too expensive for his mother, Shanon, who with four children under seven years of age ( Ashley, Tevin , Simone and Adria herself ) suffered a serious drug addiction, and the children had no choice I bathe the cornflakes under the tap. «I don't remember much more about Shanon. I do remember chasing a cat that everyone fed. At that time I was very hungry and I got mad at the cat with that, ”Biles wrote in that story of the miracle, which led him from a very precarious situation to discover his gift: gymnastics.

Because if Biles is today the prodigy she is, the woman with the most medals in the World Cups, it is only for a series of coincidences and for her ability to rise in the face of adversity.

Adopted at age three by a couple, Doris and Leo , and months later by his maternal grandfather, Ron Biles , and his second wife, Nellie , their move from Columbus, in Ohio, to the town of Spring, near Houston, was key to its beginnings: at age six, he went on an excursion to the Bannon gym, there coach Aimee Boorman noticed his talent and in a short time he was already part of the United States team. There, in the national team, he met the very hard regime of Marta Karoly , former coach of Nadia Comaneci , which prohibited him from joking and laughing during training - much less in competition - and that prompted him to make a dangerous pirouette, the Amanar, for which I was not prepared. There, in the national team he met the horror of doctor Larry Nassar, who sexually assaulted her, as he did with another 300 gymnasts for more than two decades.

"I am also one of the many survivors who suffered sexual abuse by Larry Nassar, " Biles wrote on Twitter in January 2018 when he had already been champion of everything (five medals, four of them gold, at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games ) and when he was in treatment to swallow everything.

His childhood, his path to success and, above all, the abuses of Nassar - and the judicial process for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment - forced Biles to make a break that led him to announce his retirement in 2017, with only 20 years, and that required a lot of preparation to return big last year at the Doha World Cup. Then he confessed that he was taking medicine and going to therapy. Then he warned that in the coming years, heading to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, he would offer the show he is offering.

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