Medal-hungry like Michael Phelps and cool like Usain Bolt, meet Rio 2016 Olympics rising star Simone Biles

There aren’t many inside or outside of Olympics who will tweet that about the world’s most recognised athlete. But Simone Biles, 19, did — just a few days before she wowed actor and American heartthrob Zac Efron with her routine. She also told Kim Kardashian to buy for her daughter a little Simone leotard so that “she could be my mini-me” and roll around the bed.

America’s teen gymnastics sensation — already a three-time world champion before heading to Rio — won her first gold of the Games a few hours before Michael Phelps picked up his 21st gold and his 25th overall medal Tuesday.

Biles isn’t a physical specimen like Phelps or Bolt. But the Simone spectacle, the Biles ballet has taken off, and is set to take Rio by storm, even as the two modern-day legends of Olympics wrap up their respective careers.

Rio desperately needs a star for these Games, who will not be seen through the prism of farewells and final goodbyes.

Biles is Rio’s rising star, a once-in-a-generation athlete who can dominate her sport, like swimming and athletics were taken forward by Phelps and Bolt. Biles is spoken of in the same breath as Nadia Comaneci — such is her skill, poise and rhythm when she slides into the leotard, flings herself into the air and flies about, sticking her landings as if gravity had been mastered and puppeteered by humans.

Biles is nothing in the Nadia mould though — not east European, not Caucasian, not a cherub with elastic bands for limbs either. She is 4 feet-8 inches, an African American whose gymnastics isn’t dainty but dazzling, isn’t petite but powerful, isn’t slender but incredibly strong. She won the team gold with her USA mates on Tuesday with almost 10 points over the silver medallists, and is a favourite for the all-round individual apart from a clutch of apparatus finals. With a Phelpsian appetite for medals and Bolt’s air of cool confidence, Olympics has a new star.

After land and water, she’s the air queen who is set to rule. She’s good on the vault and grand on the floor, where she has an eponymous landing, ‘the Biles’ — there’s two tumbles going forward and then she does a half turn pivot mid-air to achieve a forward landing. It looks spectacular — a skill for which thousands have been lining up for two evenings now, in qualification and the team event, at the gymnastics centre in Barra. Both times, they returned floored.

Biles, one of the opponents India’s Dipa Karmakar will be facing in the individual vault finals, is also extremely self-assured in pulling off routines that push the boundaries — some of her routines boast the same difficulty and skill set as men’s, and she’s not averse to picking high D-scores across four apparatus. “We’re so well prepared that we know what to expect of ourselves and our gymnastics once we go out there on the competition floor. So nothing has wowed me or is anything I haven’t expected,” she would say right after her first gold, two days before she guns for the all-round individual title. The Texan has 14 medals — 10 golds from World Championships — and that ball of energy is putting a lot of Chinese and Russians into a mental frame where they’ve started believing that in Simone Biles’s times, only a silver is possible.

She’s picked Samba as the music for her floors routine and there’s a heavy influence of Latin dance forms to her floor craft. She achieves an incredible height in her tumbles, she’s air-borne longer than most and she sticks her landings with surety.

Her 10 medals at the World Championships are the best by any woman, and she’s expected to pick five gold medals here in Rio, the first of which was tick-marked on Tuesday.

Biles, a Texan now, was born in Ohio and adopted by her grandparents after her mother’s alcohol and drug habit put her in jeopardy as a kid.

There’s aesthetics in her clean lines, and there’s beauty of a gleaming sword in how she slashes the air with her limbs. More than anything else, she goes about her stuff looking effortless. “We’re here for only one reason, we’re one of the best in the world. You just have to kind of keep that to yourself and have fun with it whenever you’re competing,” she says.

So she’s treating it like just another USA national championships. “If you think about it being Olympics all the time, your brain’s going to fall out, you’re going to freak out.” While the body does the bulk of the routines — sometimes on auto pilot, and out of habit from thousands of repetitions — Biles reckons that routines should not be over-analysed by the gymnast. “You try not to think about the routine, try not to overthink. Sometimes after a routine, I forget what I did . I’m just like, ‘OK, onto the next’.”