SCAZZERO | Simone Biles and the World Championships

By SOPHIA SCAZZERO

Gymnastics is the kind of sport that no one really cares about until the Olympics roll around. It’s not really a classic “fan” sport like basketball or football, but every four years come Olympic season, suddenly everyone cares about the super swole girls in tight glittery spandex doing flips. Obviously, these women don’t just suddenly appear every four years and most of them have been training all their lives for that moment. It takes a ridiculous amount of hours training— roughly 1,500 by the time they become elites — and even then these women are not guaranteed a shot at the Olympics. In a study by USA Gymnastics in 2009, they found that out of the 68,797 U.S. athletes participating in women’s gymnastics in total, only 79 of them were elite.