Simone Biles

Simone Biles was born in Columbus, Ohio, to a mother struggling with addiction. She and her siblings were placed in foster care when she was three, and she was adopted by her grandfather Ron and his wife Nellie in Texas, whom she calls her parents. She was spotted on a day-care trip to a gym, copying the gymnasts' moves, and started training at six.

She was small, powerful and prone to doing things nobody had seen. At the Rio Olympics in 2016, aged 19, she won four golds and a bronze. Two years later she publicly identified herself as one of the hundreds of gymnasts abused by the national team doctor Larry Nassar, and became a sharp critic of the governing body that had failed to stop him.

In Tokyo in 2021 she was expected to win everything. Instead, after a vault in the team final went badly wrong, she withdrew. She had the "twisties", a loss of the sense of where her body was in the air, which for a gymnast is genuinely dangerous. Some commentators called her a quitter. She returned days later to win a bronze on the beam.

She took a long break, married, and came back in 2023. In Paris in 2024, at 27, she won three golds and a silver, bringing her total to 11 Olympic medals. She has said the year off was the best thing she did for her sport.