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When the gymnastics superstar Simone Biles tumbles and dances her way through her third Olympics this month, the choreography she performs in her floor routine will be seen on hundreds of millions of screens around the world.<\/p>\n
Gr\u00e9gory Milan, the man who created it, still shakes his head at its reach. \u201cI can\u2019t quite fathom it,\u201d he said recently at the National Institute of Sport, Expertise and Performance, or Insep, in Vincennes, a suburb of Paris, where he works as a full-time dance instructor for the French national team.<\/p>\n
The Biles effect has brought with it something unexpected for Milan at 51: success.<\/p>\n
Until now, Milan, a dancer and choreographer, has considered his life to be \u201ca series of failures of sorts,\u201d he said wryly. When he turned to gymnastics choreography full-time, in 2017, he was in debt, having started a dance company that never took off, and still reeling from the psychological scars left by a tumultuous career in ballet.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was furious with what I\u2019d experienced in the dance world,\u201d he said. \u201cI loved the art form so much, but the behavior of the people I\u2019d encountered in it disgusted me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Gymnastics has become an unlikely balm. His pure dance background is unusual in the sport: Most choreographers who work with gymnasts are also coaches and former athletes, who have an affinity for dance or have had some dance training on the side.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Alis\u00e9e Dal Santo, a coach and choreographer who works alongside Milan at Insep, said in an interview that \u201cit\u2019s difficult to find choreographers who can fit into this world, because it\u2019s quite restrictive.\u201d She pointed out the need to understand the Code of Points, the rule book that governs gymnastics\u2019 judging system: \u201cYou have to build choreography around all the required elements.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Milan, that was especially true of his routine for Biles, 27, who performs four high-difficulty tumbling lines on floor. \u201cIt means she has to be really at ease,\u201d he said. \u201cShe was on \u2018Dancing With the Stars\u2019<\/a> and I could tell that she moved really well. But when she goes into gymnastics mode, she is more reserved because she is thinking about the acrobatics.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The two first met in 2022, when Milan traveled to the World Champions Center, Biles\u2019s home gym, in Spring, Texas. His assignment was to create a floor routine for the French gymnast M\u00e9lanie De Jesus Dos Santos, who moved to the United States to train with Biles\u2019s French coaches, Cecile and Laurent Landi.<\/p>\n \u201cSimone saw what I was doing, and she liked it,\u201d Milan said. When he returned this past winter to create another routine for De Jesus Dos Santos, Biles asked to work with him, too. He created her Olympic floor routine in just six days.<\/p>\n For the 90-second exercise, which features music by Taylor Swift and Beyonc\u00e9, he was inspired by the choreographer Alvin Ailey.<\/a> \u201cI wanted to give her spare, mature, commanding choreography, because she\u2019s not a little girl anymore. She is the boss, a Black woman who is doing so much for her country, and she shouldn\u2019t be afraid to show it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Biles was an active collaborator. \u201cShe is so levelheaded and normal, but she knows what she wants,\u201d Milan said. \u201cWhen she says no, it means no.\u201d The routine, which she performed twice at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials in Minneapolis in June, helped Biles secure her ticket to the Paris Games.<\/p>\n While Biles\u2019s floor exercise will bring him outsize exposure, Milan said that when he started working with gymnasts in the early 2010s, \u201cthere was no consideration\u201d for choreographers. A coach from his hometown, Saint-\u00c9tienne, a city just west of the Alps, had asked him to come and help at the local national training center. Milan quickly realized that \u201cyou\u2019re basically nothing in this world when you come from dance,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen gymnasts go to dance class, the feeling is that it\u2019s relaxation time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Yet Milan became convinced that dance was crucial to a gymnast\u2019s overall quality of movement: \u201cDance classes help them understand their body, find stability, refine their contact with the floor.\u201d At the World Champions Center, which doesn\u2019t have a permanent dance coach, he had Biles and her teammates working on \u201cmore contemporary diagonals, walking, relaxing the body.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not just about adding choreography to a routine,\u201d he said. \u201cDance should come earlier in their training.\u201d<\/p>\n His exuberant presence is a breath of fresh air for athletes used to highly regimented training. De Jesus Dos Santos, a world and European medalist who is one of the stars of the French national squad, met Milan when she was 12, in Saint-\u00c9tienne. \u201cWhat I immediately loved about him was that he is genuine,\u201d she said. \u201cHe says what he thinks and isn\u2019t afraid to be himself.\u201d<\/p>\n For Milan, dance was a way to express himself as a child who \u201cfelt different\u201d from others. His parents, a fireman and a teacher, were tough, he said, although they supported his passion for ballet. At 11, he was accepted into the prestigious Paris Opera Ballet School, and spent what he called his \u201chappiest years\u201d there, even relishing the iron discipline of the school\u2019s director, Claude Bessy.<\/a> \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t fly now, but I loved her strictness,\u201d he said. \u201cShe was like a mother and confidante to me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He faced a brutal blow to his ballet dreams in 1991, when he finished third in the entrance exam for the Paris Opera Ballet, with only two contracts on offer. \u201cI felt completely abandoned from one day to the next, because the school didn\u2019t prepare you to get into another company,\u201d he said. \u201cThey just dropped you.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n To this day, Milan said, he has \u201ctrouble walking past the Palais Garnier,\u201d where the Paris Opera Ballet performs. \u201cI get a knot in my stomach. The grief has never gone away.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, he kept dancing. For four years, he was a member of Victor Ullate Ballet in Spain, which at the time boasted international stars like \u00c1ngel Corella. In 1995, he moved on to the Ballet de l\u2019Op\u00e9ra National de Bordeaux, in France, where he achieved the rank of soloist.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n His career came to an abrupt halt just over a decade later. At the time, the director of the Bordeaux company, Charles Jude, was sued by a female soloist for workplace harassment. Milan was one of two company members to testify in her favor in court. Both dancers were let go when their contracts came up for renewal \u2014 a form of retaliation in Milan\u2019s eyes, since the same administration had promoted him to soloist not long before. (The company declined to comment.)<\/p>\n Bruised from the experience, Milan ultimately returned to Saint-\u00c9tienne, where he spent four years trying to get a company off the ground. The city promised some funding, and then withdrew. \u201cI poured all my money into that project, got into debt,\u201d Milan said. \u201cI couldn\u2019t go on like that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n And so he turned to gymnastics. In 2017, he was hired at Insep, where he gives daily classes \u2014 a modified ballet barre incorporating gymnastics moves \u2014 to top rhythmic and artistic gymnasts, who know him by his nickname, Greguito.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In a recent class, he doled out praise and corrections with trademark flamboyance, asking his charges to aim for more extension and precision. \u201cDon\u2019t start,\u201d he told one with affection when she looked annoyed. \u201cYou started!\u201d she replied, joking with him.<\/p>\n His floor choreography has helped to lift the French team on the international stage. \u201cHe brings a sense of openness,\u201d Dal Santo, the coach and choreographer, said, \u201cwhereas we can get stuck in a routine because gymnastics requires so much discipline.\u201d For the floor exercise of Morgane Osyssek, 21, a member of the French Olympic squad, Milan found inspiration in a landmark work of contemporary ballet: William Forsythe\u2019s \u201cIn the Middle, Somewhat Elevated,\u201d<\/a> created for the Paris Opera Ballet in 1987.<\/p>\n When Milan first played the ballet\u2019s electronic score \u2014 a crashing, propulsive composition by Thom Willems \u2014 Osyssek \u201cthought he was joking,\u201d she said in an interview. \u201cI had a hard time picturing it as floor music, because it\u2019s not at all what we\u2019re used to.\u201d The first reaction of many in the gymnastics community was also negative, she said. \u201cBut then we started working on the movement, and I realized it worked really well.\u201d<\/p>\n Dance may not have given him the recognition he sought, but Milan now has a platform most choreographers can only dream of. In an Instagram story in May, Biles paid tribute to his singular role in gymnastics. \u201cYour energy is electric!\u201d she wrote. \u201cEveryone needs a Greguito in their life.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n