Simone Biles once revealed that when she and her sister Adria were dominating the gymnastics competitions, people thought it wasn’t fair before the latter quit the sport. The American gymnast competed at the 2024 Paris Olympics, winning three gold medals as sister Adria cheered her on in the French capital.
Simone and Adria were adopted by their grandparents when they were aged six and three respectively. The duo had earlier spent a couple of years in foster care and it was Simone who used to take care of her young sister.
While the Olympic medalist started gymnastics at the age of six, Adria started six years after her and had reached level 9 by 2015. She dominated competitions just like her sister but quit the sport in 2016, competing in her last event in April at the Western Gymnastics Championships.
Simone opened up about her sister’s gymnastics career in an interview with Glamour in June 2021 and revealed that she quit because people drew comparisons between the two.
“My sister did gymnastics until she was about 17. She was level 9 gymnast, training for level 10. She was really good but she quit because of pressure and everybody compared her to me,” Simone Biles said [3:40 0nwards]
The 27-year-old further added that Adria used to dominate meets just like her but people thought it wasn’t fair.
“She used to win a lot of competitions too and people thought that wasn’t fair and she was tired of people talking about it because whenever she went to competitions, they were like ‘oh her sister always wins, she always wins, that’s not fair.’ So she quit,” she added.
Adria has an impressive personal best of 35.600 in the all-around competition, with the highest score of 9.0 on the balance beam. The 25-year-old recently trained little kids at her parents’ owned World Championships Center, where the eleven-time Olympic medalist also trains.
Simone Biles once invited Adria back to gymnastics after a study found promising signs of her success in gymnastics
In 2021, a study conducted on American athletes concluded that “in two out of three cases, when a pair of siblings played the same sport professionally, the younger one was more successful.” Olympic gymnastic Simone Biles was elated to find the interesting results of the study and invited her sister Adria to return to gymnastics.
