Jonathan Owens knows his wife, Simone Biles, is the greatest of all time when it comes to gymnastics.
“I try to remember her routines. It’ll be like random times, she’ll be on the floor [and] does something and then she does, like, that,” Owens, 29, said in a clip from HBO’s Hard Knocks shared via Instagram on Wednesday, August 7. “I try to be up there and knowing the beats, so I know what’s going on.”
According to Owens, he’s been “spoiled” by watching Biles, 27, perform her routines flawlessly “so many times.”
“I’m just sitting there watching, especially when she’s on beam,” Owens recalled. “Oh, my gosh! Beam, like, trips me out. I’ve tried to be on it [and] I’m like, ‘Babe, it’s no way y’all are doing flips, just land on it.’ But blind landings [and] all this type of stuff? I’m just watching [holding my breath].”
Owens was there to support Biles when she recently competed at the 2024 Paris Olympics, earning three gold medals for the team finals, individual All-Around and vault final. She also earned a silver medal for the individual floor exercise event. It wasn’t quite a clean sweep for Biles, who failed to qualify for the uneven bars final and fell off the balance beam in her last competition of the Games.
“Beam final is always the most stressful,” Biles said in a press conference on Monday, August 5. “Usually we have musical or background noise, whatever that may be, and honestly we do better in environments when there’s noise going on because it feels most like practice. Today you could hear some of the Android ringtones going off, the photo flickers, whatever that was [and] so you try to stay in your zone.”
She continued, “And then people start cheering and the shushing gets louder. … I don’t know, it was really weird and awkward. We’ve asked several times if we can have some music or some background noise, so I’m not really sure what happened there.”
According to Biles, none of her fellow gymnasts “like” the beam rotation. “It was an odd beam final,” she stressed after teammate Suni Lee also fell off the apparatus in the middle of her routine.
Throughout her third Olympics, Biles felt the love from her parents and Owens in the stands. The Chicago Bears safety was granted special permission to skip several days of the team’s training camp in order to travel to Paris to cheer on his wife.
Owens has since returned to Chicago for the remainder of preseason practices. Owens and his Bears teammates are the focus of Hard Knocks season 3, which premiered on Tuesday, August 6.
