Kelly Ripa Says Simone Biles Didn’t Know What A Cartwheel Was When She Appeared On ‘Live’

With four Olympic gold medals and six all-around titles at the world championships, Simone Biles is officially the most decorated gymnast in the world. But according to Kelly Ripa, the famed athlete didn’t know what a cartwheel was when she appeared on a previous episode of Live.

During this morning’s opening chat, Ripa told Mark Consuelos about the time Biles stopped by the show — which, at the time, was titled Live with Kelly and Ryan. While it was shortly after she “first stormed the Olympics,” she allegedly struggled to remember a basic gymnastics move.

“She was here,” Ripa said. “And this is when you know somebody’s skill set is so developed and so advanced. We wanted her to teach us how to do a cartwheel and she looked at us and said, ‘What’s a cartwheel?'”

She continued, “Because that’s like so far in the rearview mirror of what she does that she had to stop and think about what it means — like, what a cartwheel means to somebody like us. To her, that’s just a connective movement into a tumbling path.”

When Consuelos asked if she ended up remembering how to do a cartwheel, Ripa joked that she did “advanced stuff” instead.

“But we were like, ‘Just teach us how to do a cartwheel,'” the longtime host said. “And she was going back to her preschool brain or her three-year-old brain because that’s when that lesson was.”

Meanwhile, Consuelos praised Biles as a success story two years after she was forced to pull out of several competitions at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics due to a bad case of the twisties — a mental block that caused her to suddenly lose air awareness during her routine.

“You know what I love about this story?” he asked. “She had that horrible thing that came over her during the last Olympics — the twisties, right? She came back and she fought through it. I love that.”

Live with Kelly and Mark airs on weekdays. Check their website for local listings.