It’s official: Simone Biles will be competing in all four women’s gymnastics team finals events during the Paris 2024 Games, despite a calf tweak that had her crawling to the vault – moments before absolutely nailing her vault routine. With the gymnastics phenom looking stronger than ever, some people need a refresher: how many Olympic medals does Simone Biles have again?
The answer is seven: four gold, one silver, and one bronze. That ties her for the record of most Olympic medals won by an American gymnast with Shannon Miller. Here’s the breakdown of when and how she earned her seven Olympic medals.
At the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, Biles won five Olympic medals: four gold and one bronze. These included three individual gold medals for floor exercise, vault, and the all-around competition; one gold medal in the team event; and one individual bronze medal for balance beam, where she finished behind Dutch gymnast Sanne Wevers and “Final Five” teammate Laurie Hernandez. That’s one medal for every event in which she competed, excluding only the uneven bars.
Biles was expected to compete for six more medals at the Tokyo Olympics, but after developing the “twisties” – a mental block that can cause a gymnast not to know where they are in the air, putting them at great risk for injury – she was forced to withdraw from the team final, as well as the individual all-around and event finals for vault, uneven bars, and floor exercise.
Even so, Biles earned a silver medal in the team event and was able to alter her dismount on beam in order to safely compete in the event final, where she won bronze behind Chinese gymnasts Guan Chenchen and Tang Xijing. This brings her career Olympic medal count to seven, tying an American record set by Miller, who earned a total of seven medals at the 1992 and 1996 Olympic Games.
Biles’s overall medal haul is even more impressive. Outside of the Olympics, she has a whopping 25 medals at the World Championships, 19 of which are gold, making her the most decorated gymnast in World Championships history. She’s also the first American to win a World medal in every event.
We won’t speculate about what might happen in the four events Biles will compete in during these Games. After all, anything can happen – as her calf issue shows. But she’s been looking stronger than ever, and she’s even expected to debut a new element on the uneven bars that may become the sixth gymnastic move named after her. So we’ll be watching her with some serious interest.
– Additional reporting by Karen Snyder Duke and Mirel Zaman
Amanda Prahl is a freelance writer, playwright/lyricist, dramaturg, teacher, and copywriter/editor. Amanda has also contributed to Slate, Bustle, Mic, The Mary Sue, and others.
Karen Snyder Duke is the editorial operations director at PS. She previously spent 13 years writing and editing health and fitness content for digital and print media brands, including Redbook, Good Housekeeping, and Parents.
