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Simone Biles Defends Husband Jonathan Owens Wearing Her Olympic Gold Medal
Jonathan Owens previously came under fire for claiming he was "the catch" in his relationship with the Olympic gold medalist.
Simone Biles is standing by her man.
The Olympic gold-medalist came to her husband Jonathan Owen's defense after social media users criticized him for sharing a photo of himself wearing the gymnast's gold medal. In the pic, he holds up the hardware as he stands next to his wife in her Nike Team USA gear.
"Witnessing history every time you step on the mat," the Chicago Bears football player captioned the photo. "Congrats baby on becoming the most decorated American gymnast in Olympic history!!!! Just wow!!!! 8 of them!!!!! So thankful i was there to see it."
Instagram users immediately slammed Owens for wearing the medal, with one person commenting, "Why he holding it like he won it?"
Another person jumped in, saying, "Give the medal back bby thats not yours," a remark that racked up more than 12,000 likes.
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But Biles, who has taken home three gold medals at the 2024 Paris Olympics, shut down the chatter over on TikTok, telling one critic, "Crazy thing is, I put my medal on every single one of my family members and took pictures. so don't ever make assumptions ... like y'all are so f-cking miserable. leave us alone."
Influencer Kiera Breaugh's Video on TikTok
Biles' comments were directed at influencer Kiera Breaugh, who waded into the drama on TikTok, where she called Owens out for seemingly making Biles' accomplishment his own. "Was it you, Mr. Simone Biles, who was flying through the air yesterday? Was it you who spun like a top 30 times in the air and landed without stumbling? No," she said.
She further criticized Owens for not anticipating that wearing the medal might rile people up, especially since he's previously experienced the public's ire for saying he didn't know who Biles was when they first met.
"Let her wear the medal for the picture that you post. After everything that's gone on, that could be a pretty simple PR move... [You] already got made fun of by the entire internet for trying to overshadow [your] wife, and undermine her accomplishments," she remarked.
Though Biles called Breaugh "f-cking miserable," the influencer took it all in stride and responded in a separate video, "honored to be told to f-ck off by such a talented woman."
Jonathan Owens' Past Comments
As Breaugh noted, this is not the first time that Owens has been chided by the public.
Owens first ignited controversy when he said that he didn't know who Biles was when they met on the exclusive dating app Raya in 2020. By then, she had already competed in the 2016 Rio Olympics alongside teammates Aly Raisman, Laurie Hernandez, Gabby Douglas, and Madison Kocian. "I just hadn’t heard of her, and when I told her that, that’s one of the things she liked,” he told Texas Monthly in June 2021.
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Then, in a December 2023 episode of The Pivot podcast, the Chicago Bears football player said that he looked her up on Instagram. "The first thing that I saw was that she just had a bunch of [Instagram] followers. So in my mind I'm like, 'Okay, she's gotta be good,' " Owens remarked.
He noted that he was in training camp when the Olympics were happening amidst the coronavirus pandemic so he never really paid much attention to what was happening and therefore had no clue who Biles was.
But Owens caused the most drama when he said that he was "the catch" in their relationship, saying, "I always say that the men are the catch."
Biles' Previous Defense of Owens
When Biles later discussed the controversy with Call Her Daddy podcast host Alex Cooper, the Olympian said that she didn't see anything wrong with what he said. "I was like, 'My man just killed that,'" she joked.
It was once she went on social media and saw the backlash that Biles realized people were upset. She was devastated by the response to his comments because she knows Owens and thinks "he's the sweetest. He praises the ground that I walk on."
"Truly, I've never met a man like him," she said.
Biles' Medals at the Paris Olympics
So far, Biles has won three gold medals at the 2024 Paris Olympics: one in the team finals, one in the individual all-around, and one on the vault. This brings her total medal count to 10, seven of which are gold.
She is officially the most decorated American gymnast in Olympic history.
