This Girl Is DESTROYING World Records – Even Simone Biles Is STUNNED! – Reese Esponda

From a Living Room in Helena to Beating an Olympic Champion: The Unlikely Rise of Reese Esponda

On July 18, 2026, inside a competition arena in Hartford, Connecticut, a 17-year-old gymnast from Montana did something that still feels almost improbable when you write it down. Reese Esponda defeated two-time Olympic gold medalist Jade Carey by 0.85 points to claim the all-around title at the U.S. Classic. She posted a career-best 54.9. Carey scored 54.05. The margin was decisive enough, the field strong enough, and the circumstances difficult enough that the result immediately registered as one of the more compelling upsets of the elite season.

Esponda had been sick the day before flying to Connecticut. She was still working her way back from a foot ligament injury that, only a year earlier, had left her in a walking boot and on crutches. That injury had cost her roughly two months of training in the heart of the 2025 competitive season and contributed to a 16th-place finish at the U.S. Championships—the kind of result that can quietly end the conversation around a young gymnast. None of it showed in Hartford. She delivered the highest floor exercise score of the night, a 13.95, earned bronze on balance beam with a 13.75, and put together the most complete all-around performance of her career.

That alone would have been a strong sports story. What makes it stranger—and more revealing—is where Esponda trains every day. She works at World Champions Centre in Texas, the family gym of Simone Biles. Biles trains there. The facility is partly owned by Biles’s mother and stepfather. Esponda shares the same coaching staff, the same equipment, and the same training floor as the most decorated gymnast in the history of the sport. She has spoken openly about what that access means. The gap between watching Gabby Douglas on television from a living room in Helena, Montana, and sharing a training floor with Simone Biles in Texas is the entire arc of this story condensed into one sentence.

A Three-Year-Old Watching the Olympics

Reese Esponda was born on October 28, 2008, in Helena, Montana, to Mark and Lindsay Esponda. She has three siblings: Kendall, Josie, and Drew. Montana is not a gymnastics powerhouse. There is no deep state pipeline, no famous regional academy, and nothing resembling the training infrastructure of Texas, California, or Oklahoma—the states that routinely produce the country’s top elite gymnasts. In the summer of 2012, a three-year-old named Reese sat with her family watching the London Olympics. She was captivated by Gabby Douglas.

“I was watching Gabby Douglas in the 2012 Olympics and I was doing like headstands,” Esponda later recalled. “I was like, ‘Mom, I want to do that.’” That fall her parents enrolled her in classes at Gym 406 in Helena, the only serious gymnastics facility anywhere near their home. There was no larger plan. No talent scout had spotted her. No five-year strategy had been mapped out in advance. It was simply a toddler copying an Olympic gymnast off a television screen and parents willing to sign her up for the local gym down the road—the same decision millions of families make every Olympic cycle, most of which never turn into anything more than a childhood hobby.

Esponda’s early results at Gym 406 were promising enough that by 2020 it was clear she had outgrown what Helena could offer. That year, in the middle of a global pandemic that disrupted gymnastics programs across the country, Reese and her mother Lindsay relocated to Missoula so she could train at Roots Gymnastics and Dance. The drive was about two and a half hours from the rest of the family. Her father and three siblings stayed behind in Helena, keeping jobs and schools intact. By the family’s own account it was a challenging dynamic—the household split across two cities so that one daughter could keep training at a higher level. They used weekends and holidays to stay connected. They made it work because they had already decided her potential was worth the disruption, even without any guarantee it would lead anywhere beyond a strong regional career.

The Breakout Year

2023 was the year Reese Esponda stopped being a promising regional name and became a nationally recognized one. The results finally matched the ambition that had been building since she was three. She won bronze on vault and gold on floor exercise at the Vegas Cup National Qualifier. At the WOGA Classic—a meet held at one of the country’s most storied clubs, the gym that once produced Olympic champion Nastia Liukin—she took bronze on balance beam, floor exercise, and in the all-around. She won gold on floor at both the American Classic and the U.S. National Championships, a senior-caliber result at a meet packed with the country’s best gymnasts, many of them training at programs with far larger budgets and longer track records of producing elite talent. She also competed at the U.S. Classic and the Winter Cup that year, gaining valuable experience against athletes years older and more established than she was.

By the end of 2023, Esponda had earned her first selection to the United States Women’s National Gymnastics Team. A Montana kid was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with athletes from the exact states she had once had to travel to just to compete. The trajectory looked steep and clean.

The Setback

Elite gymnastics progress is rarely a straight line. 2025 delivered the proof. In late March of that year, Esponda suffered a foot ligament injury serious enough to put her in a walking boot and on crutches. The injury affected her training for roughly two months, right in the heart of the competitive season, at the precise point when consistency matters most. Other gymnasts were logging the exact repetitions she was missing as the summer’s biggest meets approached. She competed through the lingering effects at the 2025 U.S. Championships and finished 16th in the all-around—a brutal result for a gymnast who, less than two years earlier, had been winning gold medals on the national stage and had already earned a senior national team spot.

Sixteenth place is the kind of finish that quietly ends the conversation. It gets buried in a results page while other names dominate the headlines and highlight reels. For Esponda it became the low point she would have to climb out of with a body that had not fully healed and a season that had already gotten away from her. She was training every day next to gymnasts who, by contrast, were peaking at exactly the right moment.

The Comeback in Hartford

The 2026 U.S. Classic in Hartford on July 17–18 was the last qualifying meet before the Xfinity U.S. Championships in Phoenix. It was the meet every gymnast on the bubble needed to nail to keep a season alive. The field included Jade Carey, a two-time Olympic gold medalist competing in just her second elite meet since winning gold at the Paris Games, working her way back into form with an eye on Los Angeles 2028. It also included Leanne Wong (referred to in some coverage contexts around the event as a strong contender) and others, with Skye Blakely (noted in the broader narrative of the weekend) going on to strong apparatus results. Reese Esponda walked into the same arena that had hosted three Olympic all-around champions together only two years earlier, less than a year removed from that 16th-place nationals finish.

She had gotten sick the day before flying out. The injury history still lingered. None of it appeared in her scores. The 13.95 on floor was the best of the night. The 13.75 on beam earned bronze. The 54.9 all-around total was the highest of her career to that point. Carey finished second at 54.05. The 0.85-point margin was clear.

Here it is worth being completely honest. There is no verified quote, post, or public statement from Simone Biles reacting to Esponda’s U.S. Classic win. If Biles said something privately at the gym they share, it is not documented in any public source that can be verified. Manufacturing a reaction quote simply because a title might promise one would undercut the actual story. What is known—and what is arguably more meaningful than a single congratulatory post—is that Biles and Esponda see each other on the training floor essentially every day of the year. They are not rivals who meet once at a championship. They are gym mates working under the exact same coaching staff inside the exact same building on the exact same equipment.

Esponda has been direct about what that access means to her development: being able to walk over and ask questions of Biles and other top athletes, watching how they train up close in a way she had never been able to do when she was still a kid in Montana chasing an Olympian she had only ever seen on television. Biles has shown up in person to support younger World Champions Centre gymnasts before, appearing at the 2025 U.S. Classic specifically to cheer on training partners from the stands even while not competing herself that day. Whether she was in Hartford for Esponda’s win is not something that can be verified either way, so it will not be claimed. What is certain is that Esponda now trains inside the same walls, under the same coaches, as the gymnast whose name is often used as a shorthand for excellence in the sport. That alone is a more unusual and more real connection than most young athletes ever receive.

What Comes Next

Esponda’s win in Hartford set up a return trip to the Xfinity U.S. Gymnastics Championships, August 6–9 in Phoenix, Arizona—Jade Carey’s actual hometown. A rematch on Carey’s home turf, with a berth on that year’s national team on the line, is set up almost too perfectly. The dynamic between them is closer to a friendly training-floor relationship than a grudge match, given how much time these gymnasts already spend around each other at meets and camps.

Beyond this season, Esponda has already made her next major decision public. She is committed to LSU, joining the Tigers program as part of its incoming class in the coming years. That path is one plenty of elite gymnasts now use as a stepping stone rather than an ending point—competing collegiately while still keeping an Olympic door open. Her own stated goal has never wavered since she was a toddler doing headstands in front of a television in Helena. “My biggest goal is to make the Olympics. Hopefully in 2028,” she said as a young teenager, “but we’ll see.”

A gymnast who finished 16th at nationals one year and beat an Olympic champion outright the next has already shown exactly the kind of swing her career is capable of in either direction. The only question left is which version of Reese Esponda shows up when Los Angeles actually arrives. Does the kid from Helena, Montana, make it all the way to the 2028 Olympics while training every day beside the most decorated gymnast in history?

The story that began with a three-year-old copying Gabby Douglas on a living-room floor in a state with almost no elite gymnastics history has already carried her farther than most people would have thought possible. The family split between Helena and Missoula, the outgrown local gym, the national-team selection, the injury that nearly derailed a season, the sickness the day before a major meet, and the all-around title over a two-time Olympic gold medalist—all of it happened. The next chapters will be written in Phoenix, in Baton Rouge, and, if the trajectory holds, in Los Angeles. For now, the most striking fact remains the simplest one: a gymnast who once had to leave Montana just to find better training now shares a floor every day with Simone Biles, and on one July afternoon in Connecticut she was the best all-around gymnast in the building.

This Girl Is DESTROYING World Records – Even Simon...