Simone Biles has called out men who didn’t recognize her in public, saying they thought she was a contestant from a reality show.
Biles is the most decorated gymnast of all time, having won 11 Olympic medals and 30 World Championship medals—and she is widely considered the greatest of all time.
Despite her impressive achievements, it turns out not everyone recognizes the Olympian in public. Biles took to Threads, an app from Instagram, to reveal that men she met thought she was from the reality competition show Too Hot to Handle.
“these guys just asked if I was from too hot too handle lmao GOODBYE,” she wrote. At the time of writing, the post had been viewed more than 367,000 times.
People took to the comments to share their shock, with one person writing: “Asking one of the greatest athletes of ALL TIME that is insane.”
“…so then you leapt into the air, flipped around six times, stuck a perfect landing, and answered, ‘Always,’” someone else wrote.
A third person added: “And then you reply it with no I’m an Olympic gold medalist ever heard of those?”
However, one person said she did bear a resemblance to Brianna Balram, who was on Season 6 of the show. “No lie, you and Bri from the last season do favor each other. but also, that’s insane lol,” they wrote.
This isn’t the first time that Biles hasn’t been recognized. Her husband previously received backlash when he claimed he didn’t know who the gold medalist was when they matched on a celebrity dating app.
Biles is married to Chicago Bears safety Jonathan Owens. The pair started dating in 2020 after they met on Raya. During a December 2023 appearance on The Pivot Podcast, Owens said he had never paid attention to gymnastics and when Biles made the first move, he had never heard of her before.
“Literally had been on the app for a couple of days, man, and it’s like she pops up. And, I’m like, ‘Let me see who this is.’ I had never really paid attention to gymnastics, so it piqued my curiosity,” he said.
“I go do my workout, and I come back and I had some likes on my Instagram. I still waited, and then I come back to my phone, and then she messaged me on the app, like, ‘Hey.’”
“I didn’t know who she was at the time, but the first thing that I saw was that she just had a bunch of followers. So in my mind, I’m like, ‘OK, she got to be good.’”
While it may seem hard to believe that Owens had never even heard of Biles, he said that while she was collecting medals at the Rio Olympics in 2016, he didn’t have access to networks that aired the Games.
“When she won the Olympics, I was in college, and we didn’t have NBC, we didn’t have Olympics channels, and we’re in camp. So I’m not paying attention to, I never would have had a moment to, where I would have watched,” he explained.
What angered people even further was the fact that Owens, when asked by host Ryan Clark, quickly agreed that he considered himself the “catch” in the relationship. He also revealed he had also been “afraid to commit.”
The outrage on social media came thick and fast, but both Biles and Owens appeared to laugh off the backlash. “Unbothered,” Owens wrote in an Instagram post on December 22, 2023, which included a series of photos of the couple. “Just know we locked in over here.”
