Green Bay Packers safety Jonathan Owens has confessed that he was unaware of his wife Simone Biles’ athletic successes when they began dating in 2020. The power couple connected on the celebrity dating app Raya. Speaking on “The Pivot Podcast”, Owens said Biles caught his interest, despite his initial lack of attention to gymnastics.
“Literally had been on the app for a couple of days, man, and it’s like she pops up and, I’m like ‘Let me see who this is’. I had never really paid attention to gymnastics, so it piqued my curiosity,” Owens said.
Biles took the initiative by messaging Owens first.
The NFL star, initially skeptical, thought it might be fake. After a workout, he found likes on his Instagram and a message from Biles on the app saying, “Hey.”
“I go do my workout, and I come back and I had some likes on my Instagram,” Owens recalled. “I still waited and then I came back to my phone, and then she messaged me on the app like, ‘Hey’. I didn’t know who she was at the time, but the first thing that I saw was that she just had a bunch of followers so, in my mind, I’m like, ‘OK, she got to be good’,” he added.
Owens revealed that the Olympics wasn’t on his radar during college. While Biles earned medals at the Rio Olympics in 2016, Owens engaged in pre-season camp and lacked access to networks airing the games, preventing him from witnessing her achievements.
“When she won the Olympics, I was in college and we didn’t have NBC, we didn’t have Olympics channels and we’re in camp,” Owens said. “So I’m not paying attention to, I never would have had a moment to where I would have watched.”
Owens remembered hitting it off with Biles when they met outside the dating app, according to the Daily Mail. Despite their quick chemistry, Owens soon realized Biles’ fame when a routine cookie run for the couple became an unexpected photo opportunity for Biles’ fans.
“I think it was like a Sunday we went, it was all these moms and they’re there with their kids and we walked past and everybody stopped,” Owens said. “They asking me, ‘Hey can you take this picture?'”.
Owens was drafted into the NFL in 2018 and met Biles two years into his professional career. The power couple got engaged in February 2022 and exchanged vows this past spring in an intimate ceremony in Cabo, Mexico, attended by 144 guests, despite their celebrity status in their respective fields.