The Green Bay Packers safety also claims he didn’t know who Biles was when they first started dating.
According to Green Bay Packers safety Jonathan Owens, when he first started his romance with now-wife Simone Biles, he’d never actually heard of the four-time Olympic Gold Medalist and record-smashing gymnast who is considered to be one of the greatest athletes of all time.
Owens, 28, and Biles, 26, recently sat down for an interview on The Pivot podcast, and the newlyweds — who got hitched back in April — reflected on how they first met, which is when Owens made his surprising revelation.
“I’m like, ‘Lemme see who this is.’ I never really paid attention to gymnastics,” Owens said, recalling when Biles popped up on Raya back in 2020. “So it piqued my curiosity.”
While it may seem unlikely or even impossible for Owens to have never even heard of Biles, he tried his best to explain how the Olympic hero managed to fly under his radar.
“When she won the Olympics, I was in college, and we didn’t have NBC, we didn’t have Olympics channels, and we were in [training] camp in late July, early August,” he said. “So I’m not paying attention. I never had a moment where I would have watched [her perform].”
Owens added that when she first messaged him, “I didn’t know who she was at the time. But like, the first thing that I saw was that she just had a bunch of followers. So in my mind I’m like, ‘OK, she’s got to be good.'”
That being said, once they connected on Raya, things took off fairly quickly.
“She messaged me Tuesday, and then we were texting back and forth, and then we hung out Friday,” Owens recalled. “We couldn’t do much, because COVID happened and everything was shut down. So she came down to Houston. She lived in the suburbs, so she had to come about 45 minutes to me. Then the rest is history.”
When asked (seemingly as a joke) by host Ryan Clark if that meant Owens considered himself “the catch” in their relationship, Owens quickly — and seemingly genuinely — agreed that he did.
“I always say that the men are the catch,” said Owens — while sitting next to his wife, the single most highly decorated gymnast in the history of the world, and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.