One of the biggest changes in gymnastics over the past few decades has been the diminishing prowess of the gymnastics coach as the gymnasts themselves have gained more agency over their careers, their reputations, and their earnings. For years, we saw coaches (mostly male, but not always) who assumed credit for the achievements of the athletes they worked with. Often, they made money off the names of those athletes while the athletes faded into the collective memory of the gymternet. And too often, we lost the coach’s story too, because the coach put all of their story into the athlete.
Aimee Boorman, who coached Simone Biles from the time Biles was 6 until the Rio Olympics in 2016, is exceedingly careful in her new book, “The Balance: My Years Coaching Simone Biles,” to note that Biles is a natural talent and a big personality on her own, but that with Boorman’s assistance and training methods, was able to harness her power and become the GOAT as we know her. It is a fine line, and she knows it.
To Boorman’s credit, writing a book about being a good and positive coach is a fraught thing in the post-Larry Nassar, post-#metoo, post-#gymnasticsalliance world, and she does manage to stay on the right side of that fine line throughout. She seems to understand that her readers are going to be skeptical of her claims. She also acknowledges upfront that she talks about several people in the book who have been accused of abusing athletes, and that she can only vouch for seeing the side of them that she interacted with personally.
That said, Boorman takes pride in her coaching, and that’s actually a great thing to see; it’s rare to see a woman in a male-dominated (well, male-dominated as far as the media is historically concerned) profession stand up for herself and vociferously defend the work that she has done, both figuratively and literally, as much as Boorman does throughout her narrative.
It’s easy to look at Biles and think that Boorman is the One Great Coach in gymnastics. But if we’ve learned anything over the last 10 years, it’s that lionizing a gymnastics coach is dangerous business. Over and over we’ve seen coaches mentioned as exceptions to the abusive rule only to have them called out by their athletes in the wake of the Nassar scandal, reputations rightfully ruined. Boorman mentions some of these people as colleagues and friends, and clearly feels conflicted about what has emerged about how they treated athletes in their care.
Still, there’s a persistent thread throughout Boorman’s book that she did not feel quite appreciated enough for the work she did, and she’s probably right. She raised a giant of the sport who ultimately overshadowed her (but has also always given credit where credit is due). Boorman makes it clear that her style of coaching is rare to the point of unheard of in elite gymnastics, and that that has not changed since she stopped coaching Biles in 2016.
But Boorman did, by all accounts, flout gymnastics norms simply by not seeking to control Biles but letting Biles retain control over her own career and her own story. Boorman also recounts standing up to Martha Karolyi regarding her coaching methods; by Boorman’s account, Karolyi on several occasions thought Biles was lazy and undisciplined and that Boorman was too permissive. Boorman mentions many times insisting that Biles and other gymnasts on international assignments needed more rest and downtime when Karolyi insisted on training right up to competitions.
Indeed, the book’s title comes from Boorman’s belief that a coach cannot focus on winning, nor on the potential greatness of the athlete. Maintaining perspective and ceding control of the athlete’s trajectory to the athlete create the balance needed to be a healthy top-level athlete (whatever “top-level” means to a particular athlete).
“The Balance” almost feels sheepish, as though Boorman is worried that people won’t take her seriously, or will think she is trying to take credit for Biles’s career or legacy. That is not the case. Boorman comes off as someone who truly loves the sport and wants gymnasts to achieve their individual best, whether that is as a rec gymnast or a college gymnast or an Olympic gymnast. Her coaching style sounds intense, but it also seems that she takes athletes’ personalities into account when developing training plans and career trajectories. She also is not imposing (as I think some elite coaches do) her own disappointments in the sport on those she coaches; Boorman seems happy with her own gymnastics career and where it took her. Even when she talks candidly about not being able to share the spotlight that found Biles as much as she would have liked, I did not get the sense that she wanted to steal it. If that was the case, I doubt she would have waited nine years, two Olympic cycles, and a global pandemic to put it out into the world. Rather, I think Boorman knows that she is often lionized as “the good coach” and wanted to show us that she did not become that way overnight, just as Biles did not suddenly emerge as an Olympic gold-medalist throwing triple-doubles without a lot of blood, sweat, and twisties. In many ways, it seems that Boorman grew up as a coach just as Biles grew up as a gymnast, and they worked out their growing pains on each other. That may well keep Boorman’s methods from being duplicated. But it also keeps this book from leaning too heavily into a how-to manual about elite gymnastics coaching — it stays purely Boorman’s story.
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Article by Lela Moore
