Jordan Chiles is always on. From the moment she enters a room, she’s connected. Even when she’s surrounded by her team (as she often is), Chiles takes time to say hello to everyone, showing up just as lively on an early Sunday morning post-red-eye from Texas as she does on ESPN performing for thousands at UCLA gymnastics meets. At this point, it’s sort of second nature.
She’s a natural entertainer. “[Gymnasts] are known as entertainment,” Chiles tells Teen Vogue. “And I don’t mind it. I’ve been entertaining people my whole entire life. I’ve dedicated my life to this sport.”
Perhaps, then, it’s apt that Chiles, 23, steps onto a stage for this shoot. It’s a warm winter day in Brooklyn when Chiles arrives at a vintage Williamsburg theater that’s being transformed into a rustic gymnastics center. Watching her float across our set is exhilarating, but as much as she’s a ball of energy she’s also a professional, whipping into focus to capture the shot. Her stoicism while holding a bow and arrow pose atop a four-inch-wide stool so the photographer can get the shot magnifies her discipline. The second she’s allowed to rest between camera clicks, she’s back dancing to the rounds of Beyoncé that fill the room. The camera comes back up and again she’s zoned in.
We saw this effortless balance of professionalism and personality in action recently at the Team USA gymnastics trials in Minneapolis, where Chiles secured her spot on the Paris Olympics team. Alongside Chiles are Simone Biles, Sunisa Lee, Jade Carey, and newcomer Hezly Rivera. Chiles is a consistent competitor, but beyond her competitive edge, she’s managed to enchant the crowd during her performances in a way not many can. “For me, the crowd hypes me up and I vibe off the crowd’s energy,” Chiles says. “When my music comes on and the crowd roars, I want to beat the mess out of my routines.” An NBC commentator said it best during trials: “If you’re not having fun yet, you’re about to. I don’t think anyone can work a crowd like Jordan Chiles.”
That ability comes from a lifetime of work, of being told she’s too much or too little, of being doubted. It comes from multiple low points when she nearly quit the sport. And then it comes from realizing that if she doesn’t show up as her full self on the mat, what’s she really doing?
“Around 14 years old, I was like: ‘You know what? I’m not going to listen to anybody,’” Chiles says. “’I’m just going to do me, go out there and have fun, and just live life to the fullest.’ That’s how I overcame people always telling me to dim my light. It’s something that I don’t want to happen ever again.” That her floor routine is set, in part, to an instrumental version of Beyoncé’s “My House,” is a form of poetic justice. “Who they came to see? Me,” Beyoncé sings on the lyricized version of the song. “Who rep like me?”
This arena is Chiles’s house. This moment has been waiting for her. And the best part about it is that with so many wins under her belt, she has nothing to prove. As the many, many fan signs at the trials said: “Jordan Chiles is that girl.”
We first met Chiles at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, where she triumphantly stepped in for Simone Biles when the elite gymnast bowed out of the competition for mental health reasons. Originally set to compete only in the vault and floor events, Chiles ended up competing on the balance beam and uneven bars in Biles’s absence. Those are big shoes to fill, but Chiles proved herself when she helped the US team win a silver medal.
But this whole thing started well before her appearance in Tokyo. Chiles began chasing her Olympic aspirations at the age of seven. She’s been on the US gymnastics national team for more than 11 years, since age 12, something she recognizes as a considerable feat. “Being able to say I didn’t just train for some years, I trained my whole life to become an Olympian, is crazy,” she says.
Training was, of course, the center of Chiles’s young life in Vancouver, Washington. Her days consisted of school, then practice, then dinner, then homework. “When I was younger, all I did was, ‘Bye, Mom. Going off to school. Going to go to practice,’” she says.
Outside of training, church played a big role in Chiles’s youth. Chiles is a P.K. — pastor’s kid— and that is an omnipresent foundation for her. Both of her parents are pastors, along with immediate family members. She’s been trained to believe one should, “Walk by faith, not by sight,” which might just come in handy when you’ve spent your entire life back-flipping onto a springboard, hoping to land on your feet.
“Being able to say I didn’t just train for some years, I trained my whole life to become an Olympian, is crazy.”
She practices a sport where there is no room for gray or error. Either you hit the mat perfectly or you don’t. The majority of her life has been defined by perfection — even if the tough days have to be overlooked. Chiles’s childhood was spent in the gym after her mom signed her up for the sport because she was constantly cartwheeling and dancing around the house. As her talent quickly emerged, Chile’s training took up not just her time, but her family’s. “My family had to sacrifice a lot of things, especially my siblings, taking me to the gym and doing all these things for me,” Chiles says. “It’s been like that my whole life. But now, I try to shy away from all of that attention. I was that center when I was younger and I want to give everybody else that attention now.” Chiles, a champion with numerous brand deals, has given back to her family. One of her proudest times, she says, was buying her parents a house.
The tight-knit group that brought Chiles to her success today was tested in 2021, when her mother, Gina, who accompanied her to this photo shoot, was sentenced to one year and one day in federal prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud. She was scheduled to report to prison the same day Chiles competed in the Tokyo Olympics, but a judge delayed her sentence so she could watch her daughter compete. Gina Chiles was released from prison four months early. When asked how her mom’s legal troubles have impacted her emotionally and professionally, Chiles declined to comment.
The family was tested again in 2023 when Chiles’s aunt and grandfather both died. The losses hit Chiles hard. “I don’t really know where I am in my healing process,” she says about her grief. “Some days I feel great, and then on days like making my second Olympics, I was so happy and then I was sad that they weren’t there to witness it. They were both my biggest supporters and they are my why. They wanted this for me and I wanted to do it for them.” The memory of her grandfather motivates her through a tattoo on her forearm that reads, “Where you are, I have been. Where I am, you will be.”
Now, Gina Chiles stands with Jordan’s sister, Jazmin (who is also Jordan’s makeup artist), nervously swaying in the Brooklyn theater, watching her daughter’s every movement and wanting to interject. Her team holds their breath when Chiles pretends to stumble off the beam. Her safety is their top concern, but sometimes Chiles jokingly plays into that. In some ways, her existence is bubble-wrapped by the ones who love her most, those who know how long and hard they’ve all worked for her to get to this point.
“It’s funny, I always joke with them because I am a gymnast,” she says. “I always am like, ‘You know I flip on a four-inch piece of wood? Come on now.’ I am falling out of the sky, landing on my feet somehow. I joke with them a lot. But knowing that they’re always on their 10 toes with me, keeping their eyes open 24/7, really helps because they’re not just there to make sure I’m getting my stuff done. They’re also protecting me.”
In fact, without her support system and their careful watch, Chiles likely wouldn’t be in this position at all. In 2018, she nearly quit gymnastics after finishing 11th in all-around competition at nationals. After years of body shaming, Chiles had stopped adhering to the strict diet that she says had been suggested to her, and started enjoying her youth. She left a coach that she said crushed her confidence. But these successes were tempered by her loss at nationals. “I didn’t think the sport wanted me anymore,” Chiles told the New York Times about that time. “So I went in the opposite direction.”
But thanks to a talk with Biles, and thanks to the support of her family, Chiles returned to gymnastics reinvigorated, and able to find some levity in the sport that had previously represented a strict and regimented schedule. And since that time, Biles tells Teen Vogue she’s watched her friend blossom: “Seeing Jordan’s growth has been exciting,” she says. “You always want to see your friends thriving and leveling up. So to watch her from her younger years into her early adulthood has been a privilege.”
And that Chiles was able to find joy in gymnastics becomes apparent through her trademark boisterousness. The way that Biles lifted her up, Chiles is known for supporting her teammates, for hyping up the crowd, and for making competitions a little less scary. “Jordan’s bubbly personality is one of the greatest qualities she has,” Biles says. “Always wanting to pump the crowd up and embrace the energy in the arena.”
Still, Chiles says she didn’t walk away from that time unscathed. “Early on in my gymnastics career, I was shamed into thinking I wasn’t fit enough and that I should just consume clear-based soups,” Chiles told People. “At that time, I had no body fat and abs for days.” This, she said, resulted in “a very unhealthy relationship with food.”
“I was traumatized when I was younger,” she tells Teen Vogue. “I was getting weighed. I was told I could only eat certain things. There were a lot of things that I was told because I had to ‘look a certain way.’ But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized we’re human. Our bodies go through different changes. I’m a woman, so obviously, when it comes to hormonal situations or my cycle, I can’t control that.”
“I feel more confident in myself and I’m able to be the Jordan that I’ve always wanted to be when I first started gymnastics.”
Chiles works every day to unlearn those bad habits. She still has times when she sees food as good or bad, but she also prioritizes moderation over restriction. She can have a burger if she wants; she can enjoy ice cream without it being seen as a “cheat meal.” “Sometimes I’ll eat it, but I won’t eat the whole thing,” she says. “Because that’s kind of where that trauma comes into play. It’s like you feel somebody’s always looking at you.”
Chiles started seeing the Women’s National Team sports psychologist to help her recenter her relationship with eating and to make sure she prioritizes herself and her health. “There’d be times when I would sit at the dinner table and if somebody, like my parents or siblings, told me something, my whole appetite would go away. It would just shut off and I wouldn’t eat anything.”
Now, Chiles sees bettering her mental health as a way to not only help herself but also to remind other athletes, professional or aspiring, that it’s okay to have struggles. “It took me a while to actually ask for help because my sport does teach us to be independent,” she says. “But when I finally did, I was at ease with my mental health and being able to say, ‘It’s okay to ask for help.’ I feel more confident in myself and I’m able to be the Jordan that I’ve always wanted to be when I first started gymnastics.”
Still, body-shaming wasn’t the only thing that made Chiles feel unwelcome in her sport. Chiles earned her spot in the elite gymnastics inner circle, but as a Black woman in a sport once dominated by white athletes, she’s no stranger to feeling like an outsider. Looking at the current roster of gymnasts, including Biles and Lee, gymnastics appears to be diversifying. But this change has come in the last few years.
“Some lady in the crowd basically was like, ‘She doesn’t deserve to be on the floor. She doesn’t even look like anybody else,’” Chiles says of an incident when she was competing as a child. “People were racially attacking me without me even really knowing. I’m young, so I only know the story because my mom told me. Security had to come and say, ‘Ma’am, she’s doing everything just like everybody else.’ I’ve gotten medals taken away from me. I’ve been told that my mom wasn’t my mom. I’ve gotten told that I wasn’t Black.”
While Team USA is predominantly composed of women of color, gymnastics is still a largely white sport. According to data from the 2022-2023 school year, only 8% of NCAA female gymnasts were Black. That number rose slightly in the last decade, up from 6% in 2014. The number of female gymnasts who check the “other” box on forms has gone from 22% in 2014 to 28% in 2024.
At first, Chiles didn’t recognize that her race would play into how she was treated, inside or outside of gymnastics. When she was growing up and attending a predominantly white school, Chiles says of course she knew she was Black, but she didn’t really know her identity. As the years went on, Chiles says she experienced more microaggressions in the gym related to her hair and her body and it made her feel again like she wasn’t wanted in the sport. “I wanted to be done because I didn’t think the sport wanted me. I didn’t think people around me wanted to see a beautiful Black girl in a [leotard] anymore,” she said on the My New Favorite Olympian podcast.
Along with the optics of being Black on the mat, her performance music has also been scrutinized. Before leaving to train for the Olympics, Chiles competed for UCLA in 2022 and 2023, winning NCAA titles on the uneven bars and floor exercise and earning six All-American honors. She was named the WCGA West Region Gymnast of the Year and the College Gym News Sportswoman of the Year. She did so while performing to “nontraditional” instrumental songs, like, “Let Me Clear My Throat” by DJ Kool and “Push It” and “Shoop” by Salt-N-Pepa. Her song choices spoke to many, who praised Chiles for uplifting Black culture.
But in a podcast from the National Team Camp, Chiles said that she was asked to change her floor routine music, which she thought was because of “the culture and diversity that I had within my music.” In the My New Favorite Olympian podcast, Derrin Moore, founder of Brown Girls Do Gymnastics, a nonprofit Chiles has worked with, spoke generally about music styles across different levels of gymnastics. She didn’t address Chiles’s music, but Moore said that elite gymnastics typically features more classical, ballet-inspired music, while collegiate gymnastics allows more leeway with music choice. Chiles clarified in the podcast that her new routine allows her to balance the collegiate and elite worlds, but added that music shouldn’t influence scoring.
“I can tell the younger generation, ‘Look, if this ever happens, use your voice, say what you need to say. And if you get kicked out of the gym, you get kicked out of the gym,’” she says about racism generally. “’But at least you were able to stand up for yourself. At least you were able to tell them how you truly feel.’”
So when it comes to competing at the Olympic level, being herself, being that girl is the name of the game for Chiles this time around. She’s showing up and doing what she’s trained to do and she’s going to have fun doing it. “I’ve been through that cycle once before. My brain now is like, Okay, you’ve done it, so let’s do it again. You don’t have anything to prove,” she says. “I’m going out there for myself…because at the end of the day, I’ll always be proud.”
Gymnastics is as much a mental game as it is physical and Chiles’s attitude has clearly served her. In the last few years, she has become known for her consistency as an all-arounder, which is vital when building an Olympic medal team. But her calm, cool outlook was learned under pressure. “I didn’t know how consistent I was or how trustworthy I was until Tokyo and me being able to step in for such an amazing person, stepping into some huge shoes, it definitely gave me more confidence in knowing that, Okay, no matter what’s thrown at me, I will be able to be trusted,” she says. “Now I can relax and not get too much in my head because I know I can go up and hit a routine or go up there and be me.”
“I do my best gymnastics when I am out there relaxed and helping others feel supported.”
Being her means letting that bubbly personality pour out both on the mat and off. Ahead of her routines, Chiles bops around, dancing and smiling as she gets in the zone. When she’s done, she hugs her teammates, waves to her fans, and cheers on the athlete up next. Chiles describes herself as a natural hype person, someone who really, genuinely wants everyone to win. “I may be competing for a spot too, but I want everyone to win,” she says. “I do my best gymnastics when I am out there relaxed and helping others feel supported.”
Throughout this interview, too, Chiles is chatty, intentionally keeping eye contact as she shares an anecdote. She’s always dancing, even at the slightest hint of bass flowing through the room. It goes back to that idea of athletes as entertainers, that Chiles’s life takes place, in part, onstage. So it’s easy to assume that there must be an extinguished, behind-the-scenes Jordan—a Jordan beyond the spotlight. That, Chiles says, just isn’t the case: “I’m going to be the person that I need to be because I was put on this earth for a reason,” she says. “I wasn’t taught to change my personality,” she adds, emphatically. “I wasn’t taught to change the person I am because that’s not being the authentic girl that grew up to have these big dreams.”
On Instagram, Chiles showcases her love of fashion in a bevy of hot girl outfits, striking poses, and making goofy faces at the camera. She’s a big fan of the Megan Thee Stallion tongue-out face and, because Chiles is a world-famous gymnast, she even posted herself striking a pose with Thee Hot Girl herself.
The gymnast, who is named after Michael Jordan, just celebrated her “Jordan year” birthday (referring to the basketball star’s number, 23) with a detail that distills how she’s showing up exactly as herself this year: She and her party guests got diamond tooth gems.
Some, she says, have called her antics dramatic, but that’s not it. “I’m not being dramatic. I’m being myself,” she says. “This is the personality that was given to me. I’m outgoing. How are you going to take something that was gifted to me? My mom always tells me: ‘Be the best Jordan you can be. Don’t try to be the next person, just be you.’”
As it turns out, people really love it when Chiles is, as she says, that girl. Her teammates often turn to her for comfort or words of encouragement, clearly finding solace in her high spirits, as Biles described. And the crowd goes absolutely wild when Chiles steps on the mat, waving their signs and screaming when the gymnast turns her gaze to the stands. As she did during our shoot, Chiles acknowledges her fans, hyping them up after a solid performance, blowing kisses, and waving.
With Paris very near, Chiles is at the top of her game in sports and in life. She’s self-assured, she’s having fun, and she’s ready for whatever comes, including what comes after gymnastics. Competing at a high level the way Olympians do isn’t something that can be maintained forever. As the sport continues to expand and the age timeline evolves with each Olympics cycle, Chiles is focused on having fun with it. She knows that while her whole world has revolved around gymnastics for so many years, it isn’t the only thing she’ll ever do. Chiles loves fashion, real estate, and giving back to her community. In the near future, she wants to gel these and create an organization of her own.
And that’s where Chiles having nothing to lose comes in. She has a full life, one in which a gold medal is worth a lot, but not everything. “I like knowing that I am 23 and I’ve accomplished so much,” she says. “It’s just the beginning of my life story. I have so much life to live. I know what my passion and my worth are on this earth and I will continue to do everything I need to fulfill every dream I have.”
Original Post: Jordan Chiles
