PARIS — When gymnastics superstar Simone Biles does somersaults and pirouettes at her third Olympic Games, the choreography of her floor routine will be seen on hundreds of millions of screens around the world.
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Grégory Milan, creator of the routine, still can’t believe its reach. “I can’t fathom it,” he said recently at the National Institute of Sport, Experience and Performance, or Insep, in Vincennes, a suburb of Paris, where he works as a full-time dance instructor for the French team.
The Biles effect has brought something unexpected for Milan at 51 years old: success.
Until now, Milan, a dancer and choreographer, has considered his life “a series of failures in a way,” he said wryly. When he turned to gymnastics choreography full-time in 2017, he was in debt after founding a dance company that never took off and still recovering from the psychological scars left by a turbulent career in ballet.
“I loved that art form so much, but the behavior of the people I encountered in it disgusted me,” he said.
Milan’s background in dance is unusual in gymnastics: most choreographers who work with gymnasts are also coaches and former athletes.
“It is difficult to find choreographers who can fit into this world because it is quite restrictive,” said Alisée Dal Santo, a coach and choreographer who works with Milan at Insep. He noted the need to understand the Points Code, the rule book that governs judges: “You have to build a choreography around all the required elements.”
For Milan, that was particularly true of her routine for Biles, 27, who performs four sets of high-difficulty somersaults on the floor.
The two met in 2022, when Milan traveled to the World Champions Center, Biles’ home gym, in Spring, Texas. Her task was to create a floor routine for French gymnast Mélanie De Jesus Dos Santos, who moved to the US to train with Cecile and Laurent Landi, Biles’ French coaches.
“Simone saw what I was doing and she liked it,” Milan said. When he returned last winter to create another routine for De Jesus Dos Santos, Biles asked to work with him. He created his Olympic floor routine in just six days.
The 90-second exercise incorporates music from Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. “I wanted to give her a sober, mature and imposing choreography, because she is no longer a little girl,” Milan said.
The routine, which Biles performed twice at the US Olympic trials in June, helped her secure a spot for the Paris Games.
“What I immediately loved about him is that he is authentic,” said De Jesus Dos Santos, a world and European medalist who is one of the stars of the French team. “He says what he thinks.”
Milan was a member of the Víctor Ullate Ballet in Spain for four years. In 1995 he moved to the Ballet de l’Opéra National de Bordeaux, in France.
His career came to an abrupt halt just over a decade later. At that time, Charles Jude, the director of the Bordeaux company, was sued by a soloist for workplace harassment. Milan was one of two company members who testified on her behalf in court. Both dancers were fired when their contracts expired—a form of retaliation in Milan’s opinion, since the same management had promoted him to soloist not long before. (The company declined to comment.)
Milan returned to his hometown of Saint-Étienne, where he spent four years trying to get a dance company off the ground and ended up in debt.
In 2017, he was hired by Insep, where he teaches daily classes to top-level rhythmic and artistic gymnasts, who know him by his nickname, Greguito.
Their floor choreography has helped elevate the French team on the international stage. And while dance may not have given him the recognition he sought, Milan now has a platform that most choreographers can only dream of.
In an Instagram Story in May, Biles wrote: “Your energy is electric! “Everyone needs a Greguito in their life.”
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