HOUSTON – The most decorated gymnast in Olympic history spent part of her husband’s birthday in a medical office, wearing scrubs and offering no explanation. Simone Biles posted a photo to social media Thursday showing her in surgical preparation, with the caption: “His birthday but he takes me to get my procedure.” She provided no other details.
The procedure comes six weeks after Biles described a health emergency in June that she called “one of, if not the scariest experience of my life,” Fox reported. In that earlier post, she wrote that she had “almost died” but did not identify what had happened. Her husband, Chicago Bears safety Jonathan Owens, was in Indianapolis for NFL training practices when the June incident occurred, and Biles said she had spent the week that followed resting in bed. “I’ll explain sooner or later,” she wrote at the time, “but shoutout to my close circle who reached out, checked in, visited and or sent flowers.”
She has not explained since.
Biles is thirty years old. She won four gold medals at the 2024 Paris Olympics and is the most decorated American gymnast in history, having accumulated more World Championship and Olympic medals than any other gymnast, male or female, in the sport’s record books. Her return to competitive gymnastics at Paris, following her withdrawal at the Tokyo Games in 2021 amid a mental health crisis she described publicly, was received as one of the defining athletic stories of recent years. The version of Biles the public has known since Paris – commanding, dominant, apparently settled – makes the deliberate privacy around her medical condition all the more striking.
Biles has acknowledged three plastic surgery procedures in a previous social media disclosure, though those were from a different period and not connected to the current incidents. The nature of the June near-death experience and the Thursday procedure remain undisclosed. Medical privacy is legally protected and a matter of personal choice; Biles has cited the value of privacy in her June statement, even while choosing to share that something had happened.
What she has disclosed – the fact of a near-death experience, the severity she assigned it, the resting week that followed, and now a procedure six weeks later – suggests something ongoing rather than resolved. Whether the two events are connected is not known. Whether either affects her competitive career is not known. Her management has not issued a statement, and her gym has not commented.
Jonathan Owens, whom Biles married in April 2023, has been one of the NFL’s most recognizable spouses for the past two years – a dynamic that has occasionally drawn commentary about the pressures of being publicly identified as the husband of a more famous athlete. He played safety for the Green Bay Packers before signing with the Chicago Bears, where he has been a regular starter. His training camp schedule in Indianapolis at the time of Biles’s June incident was a detail she included in her post – a note about being alone, perhaps, rather than a complaint.
The gymnastics world has not commented publicly on Biles’s medical situation, which is consistent with how the sport handles personal matters. What commentary exists has come largely from fans and sports media, most of it noting the absence of explanation and respecting it. Biles has trained the public, over several years, to understand that she will share what she chooses when she chooses – a boundary that her audience has largely learned to accept, even when, as now, the disclosed fragments are troubling.
A 2020 Eastern Herald report on Biles’s uncertainty about Tokyo participation following the Olympic postponement captured a different kind of vulnerability – the question of whether a postponed Games would demand more than an athlete already running at her limit. She competed in Tokyo, withdrew from the team final, and returned to win a bronze on beam. She then went away and came back. The pattern has held across her career: a period of withdrawal, followed by a return that redefines the terms of what the return means.
Whether that pattern is operating now is not something anyone outside her inner circle can confirm. What the Thursday procedure confirms is that her medical situation has not resolved in the six weeks since she described near-death. The post from Thursday – a photo in scrubs, a brief caption, no identification of what was happening – was, in its way, consistent with everything Biles has communicated about the June incident: enough to acknowledge reality, not enough to define it.
She has said she will explain sooner or later. It has been later than sooner.
