This week, in one of the most anticipated moments of the 2024 Paris Olympics, Simone Biles proved yet again why she’s not just the greatest gymnast of all time but is, like, maybe the greatest human being who’s ever done anything a human being can do. That statement has the ring of hyperbole, but let’s consider: Biles, the 27-year-old gymnastics champion from Spring, just outside of Houston, hasn’t been considered an underdog in the gym since she was a young teenager. She has reached heights that were previously considered impossible in her sport. She took two years off from competition after her decision to withdraw from part of the competition at the Tokyo Olympics and then went on to become the oldest female gymnast to win an Olympic gold medal in sixty years. (She’s five years older than the previous oldest American gymnast to bring home the gold.) Her achievements are beyond impressive, but if you watched her medal-clinching floor routine on Tuesday, you may have had another thought: How on earth does a person jump that high?
Biles’s aerial somersaults reach an incredible height. In Tuesday’s floor routine, seven feet of air separated her four-foot-eight frame from the ground beneath her. Through the power of arithmetic, we can confidently say that means her head was eleven feet and eight inches above the ground. If that feels abstract, allow us to provide some concrete examples for you. These are some things that Biles could jump over and on if they happened across her path during the floor exercise.
Tim Duncan
The legendary Spurs big man stands at a mighty six eleven. If you’re at H-E-B and you see Tim Duncan there, your reaction will be, “My goodness, he is very, very tall.” There are roughly two hundred Americans who stand seven feet tall or taller, so the odds are very good that you will be looking up—probably way up—while he looks down to make eye contact with you. And yet! Wee Simone Biles could, at least in theory, dunk a basketball over the great Tim Duncan, if she caught him flat-footed and with his arms out instead of up. We would pay a good deal of money to watch that happen. (Alas, Biles’s Olympics leaps would fail to clear current Spurs superstar Victor Wembayama’s seven-foot-four height, but her leap at the Olympics trials earlier this month would have gone over his head too.)
A 2025 Ford F-150
Not only could Biles clear an F-150, she could probably do it if she had the flu. Ford’s flagship pickup is tall, at almost six feet eight inches in height, but it’s considerably lower than Biles’s peak. This means that you could park a truck in the middle of the gym and Biles would just be like, “Cool, I got this” and still walk away with gold.
Some Real Big Animals
The average dromedary camel stands around six feet tall at the shoulder, while a full hump adds about another foot to its height. If you were to introduce Biles to an ordinary-sized camel, she could ride it simply by running up to it and jumping—an absurd thing to say about a woman who stands well under five feet tall. But let’s keep going. While Biles couldn’t jump over an African bush elephant, which averages twelve feet in height, she could happily run over to it, take a leap, and pat it on the head while staring deeply into its eyes, getting a glimpse of its wise soul. Perhaps the elephant would learn something too.
Of course, the tallest land mammal is the giraffe, and Biles, for all her immense talent, could not reach the eighteen feet of height that the average male giraffe stands—nor could she leap over its back, which reaches an average of ten feet. But if she were at the zoo and encountered a family of giraffes, she could easily clear the head of a baby (six feet) and probably get over the back of an adolescent too. If the parents ducked their heads down a bit, she could jump and feed them leaves.
Nearly 20,000 One-Dollar Bills
A dollar bill is approximately 0.0043 inches thick. Once more harnessing the power of arithmetic, we can thus conclude that a stack of singles that reached seven feet into the sky would be worth $19,535. That is roughly what Biles earned, on average, every single day in 2023, when her income from endorsements and competitive awards was estimated by Forbes to be $7.1 million.
Beto O’Rourke With a Hedgehog on his Shoulders
Former El Paso congressman and twice Democratic candidate for statewide office Beto O’Rourke seems like he might have some spare time these days, and he stands at an impressive six feet four inches. As we’ve established, that is a height well within Biles’s comfort zone, so to increase her difficulty score, imagine that the progressive political darling of 2018 has a hedgehog standing on his shoulders. Assuming that Beto has a normal-sized head (and from our reporting on him in the past, we are confident that is the case), that would mean that, with a real-life Sonic the Hedgehog perched on Beto’s shoulders watching in awe, Biles could sail over the man once believed to be the future of the Democratic Party.
