Simone Biles has announced that she is engaged to her boyfriend Jonathan Owens. The gymnast disclosed this on Instagram on Tuesday.
“THE EASIEST YES. I can’t wait to spend forever & ever with you, you’re everything I dreamed of and more! let’s get married FIANCÉ”, she wrote. The 24-year-old also shared photos on social media of Owens popping the question and a video of her three-carat diamond engagement ring.
Owens proposed on Valentine’s Day in Houston, Texas, where Biles grew up and where Owens, who is in the NFL, plays for the Houston Texans.
“Ready for forever with you,” Owens commented on the Instagram post announcing their engagement.
The two met on the celebrity dating app Raya in March 2020, just before the pandemic. “I saw that he was in the Houston area, so we started chatting a little bit, and then we went to hang out a week or two later,” Biles told The Wall Street Journal. “He would say I slid into his DMs,” she said.
The gold medalist also told the Today show how easy it was to fall in love with Owens. “Our personalities match right up. We have the same sense of humour. And he’s just great. He’s an athlete, too, so we really understand each other and I think that’s why our relationship has been seamless.”
Owens, in an interview with Texas Monthly last year, said that the pandemic enabled them to have time to get to know each other better.
“It was one of the few times in her life where everything was just shut off and she couldn’t do anything,” he said. “So we used it to get to know each other—really get to know each other. It created our bond and made it stronger. Now I’m so thankful.”
Biles was recently named among the top four highest-paid female athletes of 2021. She is arguably the most accomplished gymnast in U.S. history with 32 Olympic and world medals. Forbes estimates that Biles made $0.1 million on the field and $10 million off the field.
She partnered with Autograph to release NFTs starting in August and joined mental-health startup Cerebral as “chief impact officer” in October, Forbes said. She was also the face of a cross-country post-Olympics gymnastics tour, the Gold Over America Tour.
