Simone Biles appears to have deleted her X account amid the Riley Gaines controversy. Several X users noted that her profile has been deactivated. Upon opening her profile, a message on the page currently reads, “This account doesn’t exist”.
The feud between Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines has taken a surprising turn as Gaines says she is open to collaboration.
Their back-and-forth erupted over transgender participation in women’s sports, with Biles condemning Gaines’ tone and calling her “sick” in a tweet, before issuing an apology.
Now, in a conciliatory shift, Gaines has praised Biles and expressed willingness to work together, provided they unite around “fairness” in women’s athletics.
Gaines has extended the olive branch to Simone Biles amid their public feud.
During a chat with TMZ, the political activist revealed she was open to working with the Olympic gold medalist.
“Look, Simone is someone I’ve looked up to, I’ve respected for so long. She has done so much for women’s sports, of course, for the sport of gymnastics, but even broader than that for women in general,” she said.
Gaines explained that Biles’s comments were disheartening not because of personal attacks but because of how she used her platform.
“A platform where young girls, all across the nation, young girls like my little sister, who’s a gymnast look up to her,” she added.
Gaines further criticized Biles’ initial comments, saying they came off as rushed and uninformed.
“In the blink of an eye, she effectively pulled up the ladder behind her,” the 25-year-old noted, referencing what she described as Biles’ lack of awareness in addressing the issue.
“I think there was a lot of ignorance to the issue when she issued her initial tweets on that Friday evening,” Gaines added.
Despite the tension, Gaines said she believed Biles’ influence could be a powerful force, if directed toward the cause she champions.
“I think Simone would be a fantastic ally in this fight,” she said. “Her platform is still incredible. Her career has been illustrious, to say the least. I think we could do a lot together if she was willing to do it.”
The feud between Biles and Gaines began on June 6 when the latter took a shot at a Minnesota high school softball team, arguing that having a trans pitcher created an unfair advantage.
Commenting on a celebratory post, she tweeted, “Comments off lol. To be expected when your star player is a boy.”
Gaines’ comments didn’t sit well with Biles, as the 28-year-old slammed the former swimmer, writing, “You’re truly sick, all of this campaigning because you lost a race. Straight up sore loser. You should be uplifting the trans community and perhaps finding a way to make sports inclusive OR creating a new avenue where trans [people] feel safe in sports. Maybe a transgender category IN ALL sports!!”
She continued, “But instead…You Bully them…One things for sure is no one in sports is safe with you around.”
Moments later, the gymnast took the war of words further with another post on X.
“Bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male,” Simone Biles tweeted.
Shortly after, Riley Gaines responded to that post, calling Biles’ comments “ so disappointing,” adding that her “take is the least controversial take on the planet.”
“Simone Biles being a male-apologist at the expense of young girls’ dreams? Didn’t have that on my bingo card. Maybe she could compete in the pommel horse and rings in 2028,” Gaines tweeted.
In a follow-up post, she then accused Biles of subtle “body shaming.”
Not long after, Gaines took to Instagram with a video, sharing Biles’ comments and revealing that she “couldn’t care less” about what the star had to say about her.
On June 10, days after her harsh reaction toward Gaines sparked backlash, Simone Biles issued a public apology on X.
“It didn’t help for me to get personal with Riley, which I apologize for,” Biles wrote.
She clarified that her frustration wasn’t about “policies that compromise fairness in women’s sports,” but about singling out young athletes for scrutiny in harmful ways.
Biles went on to reaffirm her belief in “competitive equity & inclusivity” and appealed for empathy and respect in the ongoing dialogue.
“I believe sports organizations have a responsibility to come up with rules supporting inclusion while maintaining fair competition. We all want a future for sport that is fair, inclusive, and respectful,” she finished.
She recently sparked a national debate after standing up for the inclusion of trans athletes in sports, fiercely clapping back at critics and defending young competitors from public scrutiny. Her outspoken stance led to a heated social media feud with activist Riley Gaines, centering on fairness and inclusivity in athletics. Biles ended up issuing a heartfelt apology to Gaines for making things personal. Through it all, Biles’ continued advocacy shows she’s not afraid to take a stand and inspire open conversation.
Riley Gaines and Simone Biles … working together?! Could happen, according to the former All-American swimmer herself, who tells TMZ Sports she’d “absolutely” be open to the idea.
Of course, this comes on the heels of the two athletes’ social media dust-up earlier this month … which culminated with the 7x Olympic gold medalist apologizing to the former University of Kentucky swim star for likening her physical stature to that of a man while the women debated trans athletes’ participation in youth girls’ sports.
We spoke to Riley, a political activist and host of Outkick’s “Gaines For Girls“ podcast, where we asked her if she’d be down to team up with Biles.
The message was blunt, blistering and wildly off-brand. Simone Biles, the transcendent gymnast whose gravity-defying routines have been appointment viewing at the past three Olympics, needed just one social media post to shred her wholesome image in the most jarring fashion.
Railing against Riley Gaines, the former swimmer who has campaigned vigorously to keep biological males out of women’s sport, she wrote on X: “Bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male.” With that crass drive-by shot, she definitively affirmed the old Warren Buffett maxim of it taking 20 years to build a reputation and just five minutes to ruin it.
For Biles, the provocation, if you could call it that, was Gaines’ highlighting of the fact that a Minnesota girls’ softball team won a state title this month despite their dominant pitcher being male. “Your star player is a boy,” she said, prompting Biles, until that point a mute figure in the ferocious battle to compel sports to respect the reality of sex, to go off the deep end.
“You’re truly sick,” she raged at Gaines, who was infamously denied a United States collegiate trophy in 2022 by transgender opponent Lia Thomas. “Straight-up sore loser. You should be uplifting the trans community and perhaps finding a way to make sports inclusive, or creating a new avenue where trans [people] feel safe in sports. Maybe a transgender category in all sports. But instead, you bully them. One thing is for sure: no one in sports is safe with you around.”
The problem was not just her language or her highly personal attack, but her mind-bending hypocrisy. Could this truly be the same Biles who attracted universal sympathy at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, when she withdrew from several events to concentrate on her mental health? Was it the same person who, in 2020, made an impassioned statement decrying body-shaming and the pressure on women to conform to perceived standards of beauty?
“I’d be lying if I told you that what people say about my arms, my legs, my body, how I look in a dress, leotard, bathing suit or even casual pants hasn’t got me down at times,” she said then. Now here she was, five years on, mocking a female athlete with a similarly muscular physique – but a radically different view on the transgender debate – as a “male”.
It is a parable for our times, in many ways, where those preaching about kindness often reveal themselves as the least kind of all. For Biles, desperate to be seen as an ally of the trans community, going after Gaines was the logical extension of her activism, which has involved frequent promotions of LGBT Pride Month. Except the move has backfired horribly, with Biles’ stock falling faster than that of Bud Light, which lost its place in 2023 as America’s best-selling beer after a tone-deaf partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Danica Patrick, a trailblazer for women as the first female winner of an IndyCar race, was quick to take Gaines’ side, saying: “Defending men in women’s sports is the woke mind virus and/or another issue that requires therapy. Either way, it is so irrational.”
So, too, was Martina Navratilova, despite being the polar ideological opposite to Gaines – a committed Republican – as a Democrat to her core. “I couldn’t disagree with her more on politics, but on keeping sports safe and fair for women and girls, I agree with her 100 per cent,” said the nine-time Wimbledon singles champion. “As most people, Republicans and Democrats and everything in between, do also.”
The backlash to Biles has not stopped there. This week, MyKayla Skinner, a US gymnast who fell out with her at last summer’s Paris Games after suggesting Biles’ team-mates were not of a high enough standard, alleged that the seven-time Olympic champion’s targeting of Gaines formed part of a pattern.
“Throughout my career, there have been many times when I have been belittled and bullied by Simone and have wanted to keep quiet for the other athletes,” Skinner said. “I’ve wanted to stay silent through this, because she has a huge platform.”
Biles has not responded to the comments, although she has offered a carefully-scripted apology to Gaines, acknowledging: “It didn’t help for me to get personal with Riley.” She explained: “These are sensitive, complicated issues that I truly don’t have the answers to or solutions to, but I believe it starts with empathy and respect.”
There is no pleasure to be taken in Biles’ unexpected fall from grace. She is perhaps the most captivating athlete of her age, setting herself fiendishly complex repertoires but performing them with apparent effortlessness. At 4ft 8in, with a powerful build, she has the perfect body shape for executing her absurd twists and flips, maximising time in the air before somehow unwinding all her rotational energy to stick the landing. She has five skills named after her in gymnastics’ Code of Points: two on vault, two on floor, one on balance beam. Watching her unleash her Catherine-wheel kinetics at the Olympics is, truly, a supreme sporting pleasure. All of which has made her self-immolation on social media so cringeworthy.
Biles’ mistake was to put the projection of virtue before even a fleeting consideration of fairness. None of her astounding distinctions – the 11 Olympic medals, the 30 world championship medals, 23 of them gold – would have been possible without the existence of the female category. The same applies to the most dominant women in any sport. Serena Williams alluded to this once with talk show host David Letterman when asked what would happen if she played against Andy Murray, subsequently her mixed doubles partner at Wimbledon, in singles. “Men’s tennis and women’s tennis are almost two separate sports,” she said. “If I were to play Andy, I would lose 6-0, 6-0 in five to six minutes, maybe 10. The men are a lot faster, they serve harder, they hit harder. It’s just a different game.”
Williams’ remarks stand as the best rebuke to the trans rights zealots who argue that women should just show some compassion by allowing men into their sports. Elite competition is segregated by sex for a reason: male physiological advantage is immutable, with every world-record time in women’s athletics between 100 metres and 1500m having been broken by 14- and 15-year-old boys. Biles only needs to take a cursory look at her own sport to grasp this principle, given that the pommel horse and rings exercises – both requiring prodigious degrees of upper-body strength – are reserved exclusively for men.
After their events at the 2023 world championships in Antwerp, Biles and Fred Graham, a member of the US men’s team, decided to have a little fun by copying each other’s routines. Biles’ challenge was to copy the explosive floor flares typically seen only in men’s gymnastics. She crumpled after only a couple of spins, just as Graham tried and failed to emulate her immaculate wolf turn. In terms of artistry and flexibility, she could eclipse anyone alive, male or female. But when it comes to the power-focused disciplines prioritised on the men’s side, she would be nowhere. So why, in sports that do place a premium on power, is she calling for ways for biological men to be accommodated alongside women? Why is she denigrating Gaines for defending the sex-based rights of a high-school softball team? Why are those girls any less deserving of fairness than she is?
Biles imagined she had found the ideal compromise solution when she advocated introducing a specific transgender category. This has already been attempted, though, and swiftly abandoned. In 2023, World Swimming, reacting to the Lia Thomas scandal, became the first global governing body to trial an “open” category for transgender athletes, but not a single entry was received. Is this truly a situation where trans people desire nothing more than to participate according to their self-declared “gender identity”? Or is it more about mediocre men seeking to dominate women?
The row has now escalated to the point where even Biles’ history in testifying against Larry Nassar, the former US team doctor who sexually abused hundreds of female gymnasts, has been weaponised against her. “All the horrific sexual abuse Simone Biles witnessed and spoke out against caused by one man, yet [she] believes women should be forced to strip naked in front of men to validate the man’s feelings,” Gaines said. Many have accused Gaines of going much too far in bringing Nassar’s name into the equation, with Stephen A Smith, the most influential sports pundit in America, telling her the tactic was “really below the belt”.
Gaines, however, has held firm. “I stand by what I said 100 per cent,” she clarified. “Nassar is a monster, who should spend every day for the rest of his life rotting in jail. But does it get more perverted than standing in a shower totally undressed when a 6ft 4in male, fully naked and fully intact, comes in and watches you shower?”
This is the scenario that she alleges she was forced to endure when Thomas was permitted by the National Collegiate Athletics Association to swim competitively as a woman and, by extension, to enter female changing quarters. So, too, does Paula Scanlan, Thomas’ former team-mate at the University of Pennsylvania, who says she has suffered “nightmares” about the experience.
To be clear, Biles has not explicitly endorsed the idea of shared changing facilities. But she is under attack because she appears not to have given the implications of her supposedly inclusive philosophy the slightest thought. If she is relaxed about women sharing their sports with men, does this same laissez-faire attitude apply to the showers? And if it does, surely this is the very opposite of what it means to be progressive?
“What is regressive is thinking it’s OK to allow any males who say they are trans into women’s sex-based spaces, like locker rooms,” Navratilova says. “That is peak misogyny and peak patriarchy. We women deserve to have privacy, safety and dignity.”
For Biles, it never needed to be this way. If she had taken the same care over an incendiary issue as she did over her recent corporate platitudes about the Met Gala and the Kentucky Derby, she could have averted this PR calamity. Instead, she appealed to the bleeding hearts by calling Gaines a “bully” and wound up looking like the bully herself.
Ultimately, Biles has stoked such outrage through the impression she has left of pulling up the bridge behind her. Having forged her own legend thanks to the presence of a women’s sporting category, she seems to assume that the girls following in her wake are unworthy of the same protections, that they should simply tolerate the addition of males for the sake of being inclusive.
This month, she has a Netflix documentary out that depicts her – not unreasonably, given the scale of her feats – as a champion for women. But that is a credential she has just torched.
How can you build a legacy in women’s sport while acquiescing in the type of thinking that would lead to the erasure of women’s achievements? This is not 2020 any longer, a time when Biles could have been assured of glossy publicity for her trans allyship. It is 2025, and her double standards are laid bare for the world to see.
A kind gesture from an Olympic star has caught everyone’s attention. After a long and successful journey together, Simone Biles recently did something very special for her former coach. Fans were touched by the surprise, and the internet loved it. While Biles is currently enjoying her break after the Paris Olympics, this sweet moment has made people talk about their strong bond again.
On June 18, 2025, former gymnastics coach Cecile Landi shared on her Instagram that Simone Biles had sent her a luxury bottle of Casa Del Sol tequila. Landi showed her audience the gift and thanked Biles in her article.Years of training together at the World Champions Center in Spring, Texas, the 27-year-old Olympic gymnast and her former coach also did. Former French gymnast Cecile Landi moved to the United States looking for a coaching position.
After her big wins at the 2024 Paris Olympics, Simone Biles opened up about how hard the event was on her body. In a conversation shared by eonline.com, Biles said, “I went back to the village, took the elevator and my body literally collapsed. I was sick for 10 days.” She also shared that even after small activities with friends, her body ached for days.
Simone Biles took offense to college swimmer Riley Gaines’ disparaging comment about a trans high school athlete—and the chalk started flying in both directions.
Simone Biles wasn’t afraid to dive headfirst into controversy to call out behavior she found toxic.
Riley Gaines—a former college swimmer who has become an advocate for banning trans girls and trans women from competing in girls’ and women’s sports—drew Biles’ ire June 6, when she mocked the Minnesota State High School League.
The league had turned off comments on an X post celebrating the 2025 Softball State Champion Champlin Park, whose 17-year-old star pitcher is trans.
“Comments off lol,” Gaines wrote. “To be expected when your star player is a boy.”
In a June 6 X post, Biles called the 25-year-old Fox News pundit “truly sick” and “a sore loser,” seemingly in reference to Gaines tying for fifth place with Lia Thomas, a trans woman, in a race at the 2022 Women’s NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships. The gymnast, 28, also slammed Gaines for sowing division and punching down instead of using her platform to find a way to “make sports inclusive” or create “a new avenue where trans feel safe in sports.”
Gaines was unfazed, calling the 11-time Olympic medalist’s response “so disappointing.”
Of course, that was only the beginning.
Their war of words went viral, and Biles eventually offered an apology for getting personal instead of just arguing on behalf of her position.
Gaines, however, was happy to keep invoking their feud, even bringing it up while confirming to a Turning Point USA audience that she’s pregnant with her first child.
Read on for all the details as to how Biles vs. Gaines started and how it’s going:
Former US gymnast MyKayla Skinner is calling out Olympic icon Simone Biles, accusing her of years of bullying and saying Biles’ recent clash with swimmer Riley Gaines triggered painful memories.
Skinner, who competed alongside Biles from 2014 to 2020 and represented Team USA at two Olympics, says that moment pushed her to finally speak out.
Last week, Skinner claimed she “endured being belittled, dismissed and ostracized behind the scenes by Simone,” and expanded on those remarks in a new interview.
“Throughout my career, there have been many times when I have been belittled and bullied by Simone and have wanted to keep quiet for the other athletes,” Skinner told Fox. “And there have been multiple times through my Olympic journey and through camps, training, everything that we have gone through where she has come and belittled all of us. I’ve wanted to stay silent through this because she has a huge platform,” as cited by DailyMail report.
Their relationship took a major hit during the 2024 Paris Olympics. Skinner had started a YouTube channel to comment on Team USA’s performance and questioned the depth of the roster, saying: “Besides Simone, I feel like the talent and the depth just isn’t like what it used to be.”
Biles fired back on Instagram after winning gold, posting a photo with the caption: “lack of talent, lazy, olympic champions.” On Threads, she added: “Not everyone needs a mic and a platform.”
After that, Skinner blocked Biles on Instagram. Biles announced the move on X, and teammate Jordan Chiles shared a photo of Biles holding her phone with proof. Several other gymnasts, including Suni Lee and Jade Carey, also blocked Skinner.
Gymnastics star McKayla Maroney weighed in as well, backing Biles. “It doesn’t get more iconic than this,” she wrote on Instagram. “[Skinner] f’d around n found out fr. Feels like I need to apologize just to redeem my first name.”
Reflecting on the fallout nearly a year later, Skinner says the situation spiraled out of control.
“I had multiple fans reach out that wanted me to go live, publicly live, and wanted me to make a YouTube video commentating Olympic trials because I know gymnastics, I have been to the Olympics, and to share my experiences,” she said. “Everybody had loved it and then during my short 15-minute YT video they had taken a short clip, twisted my words and it had gone viral.”
“Then the bullying had happened, Simone and I had a conversation and I thought things had died down,” she added. “More had started to play into it throughout the Olympic games and I was getting bullied, my publicist was also getting bullied, hateful threats comments, comments on my family and daughter.”
“I reached out to Simone personally, and got no response, no response from the girls. I had reached out to my fellow teammates and friends and got no response from them as well.”
Now, Skinner says she wants to shine a light on cyberbullying.
Asked if Biles’ “belittling behavior” happened throughout her career, Skinner said: “Yes it did. Yes, multiple times throughout. Different moments in my career and it has been very hard and very difficult and this is why I have wanted to speak out. With the Olympics going on that was a major experience that I went through and very difficult and I want to continue to help cyber bullying come to an end.” Simone Biles has not responded to Skinner’s recent claims.
Can A Man Grow A Baby Bump???
The crowd screams and cheers at RG’s good news … and, later on in the event, she referred to her unborn child as a “young girl” — so, it seems there’s no need for a gender-reveal party, ’cause she already knows the sex.
Simone hasn’t responded to the mention in Riley’s pregnancy announcement — she’s actually been off X since she apologized publicly for her back-and-forth with Gaines — but, it seems Riley’s still not over their tiff.
We’ll have to wait and see if Simone’s flipping mad when she hears about Riley’s comments … though it sounds like Riley has bigger issues on her mind.
The Riley Gaines-Simone Biles dust-up seems to be settling down – mainly after Simone babbled through a PR apology after getting wrecked for three straight days – but that doesn’t mean Hollywood hasn’t taken notice.
Rob Schneider – the dude in every single Adam Sandler movie – has thrown his support behind Riley for essentially saving women’s sports.
For those who missed it, in the wake of Riley’s takedown of Simone, USA Gymnastics told Fox News this week that they were re-assessing their transgender policy. Better late than never, I reckon.
Anyway, Schneider – who is a big MAGA guy – took to Elon’s Twitter early Friday morning to praise Riley for taking on #TheMob.
“I am proud to call Riley Gaines my biological female friend,” Schneider wrote. “And an American hero of all girls everywhere!”
Look, I know the Riley-Simone feud is pretty-well simmered at this point – especially in a news cycle now filled with potential WWIII stories – but it’s still important to claim victory whenever we can.
And OutKick has been atop the podium in this case for several years now. Slowly but surely, the #MOB is dying down. They keep trying to work in a couple of sneak-attacks on us, but they usually fail at this point.
That’s what we had last weekend, and earlier this week, with the insufferable Simone Biles. She tried to attack Riley for sticking up for women, and she got dragged through the mud for it. Did anyone, outside of Keith Olbermann and Jemele Hill, agree with her? Not really, and those ain’t folks you want in your corner.
After a few days of some nasty back-and-forth, Simone’s PR team finally waved the white flag and begged for mercy. They cobbled up some rambling social media post for her to hit ‘send’ on, and that was that.
Sure, Rob’s a little late to the party. But the bandwagon has plenty of room for more! Especially for dudes in Hollywood who have the balls to say what the rest of those insufferable elites won’t.
So, welcome to the party, Rob! Can’t wait for Grown Ups 3.