Simone Biles Will “Never” Perform 1 Of Her Signature Skills Again

After her triumphant comeback at the 2024 Paris Olympics, Simone Biles is giving her body a well-deserved break. For the gymnastics GOAT, that means leaving behind some of her most challenging and gravity-defying moves. She shared in a Threads post on Dec. 15 that she has no intention of ever doing one of her eponymous skills again.

“the fact I’ll never do a triple double again,” Biles wrote, adding a face-holding-back-tears emoji as she publicly said goodbye to the floor exercise element that required her to simultaneously execute three twists and two backflips in a tucked position.

The triple-double is one of Biles’ signature skills. She became the first-ever woman to land it in competition at the U.S. Gymnastics Championships in August 2019. Weeks later, the element gained the name the Biles II when she successfully executed it in international competition for the first time at the 2019 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships.

“I feel like you should never settle just because you are winning or you are at the top,” Biles told the New York Times in the lead-up to her debuting the skill and winning the 2019 U.S. Gymnastics Championships. “You should always push yourself.”

Now that Biles’ triple-double days are over, fans are as emotional as the seven-time Olympic gold medalist is. She remains the only woman to compete it, and gymnastics lovers made sure to applaud her incredible feat. “You don’t have to do another one,” a fan responded to her post. “You’re already the GOAT.”

At this stage in her career — and after becoming the most-decorated gymnast ever with 11 Olympic medals and 30 world medals — 27-year-old Biles knows her body needs to rest. She also retired her Yurchenko double pike vault in September, after it helped her on her way to gold in the Olympic all-around and vault finals in Paris.

Posting a photo of herself sitting on a vault table and surrounded by flowers, Biles wrote, “rest in peace yurchenko double pike,” alongside a heart-hands emoji. Also called the Biles II due to gymnastics’ naming system, the vault is another skill that she is the only woman to ever land in competition.

Biles opened up about the vault’s intense difficulty during her 2021 Facebook Watch docuseries, Simone vs. Herself, saying, “Usually when you do a new skill, you’re scared the first couple of times and then you kind of get used to it. But every time I stand down at that vault runway, I’m, like, praying.”

Though she’s putting some of her signature skills to rest, Biles still hasn’t announced her retirement from gymnastics. Before the premiere of Netflix’s Simone Biles: Rising Part 2 in October, she indicated to the Los Angeles Times that she still doesn’t have an answer about whether or not she’ll try to compete in the next Olympics in 2028.

“You never know what can happen in four years,” she said. “Gotta wait and see.”