When gymnastics superstar Simone Biles tumbles and dances at her third Olympics this month, the choreography she plays in her floor routine will be shown on hundreds of millions of screens around the world.
Grégory Milan, the man who created it, still shakes his head when he reaches it. “I can’t quite understand it,” he said recently at the National Institute of Sport, Specialization and Performance, or Insep, in Vincennes, a suburb of Paris, where he works as a full-time dance teacher for the French national team.
The Biles phenomenon has brought with it something unexpected for Milan at 51: success.
Until now, Milan, a dancer and choreographer, considered his life “a series of failures,” he quipped. 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 ballet career.
“I was furious with what I had experienced in the dance world,” he said. “I loved the art form so much, but the behavior of the people I had encountered in it disgusted me.”
Exercise has become an incredible 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 training on the side.
Alisée Dal Santo, a coach and choreographer who works alongside Milan at Insep, said in an interview that “it’s hard to find choreographers who can fit into this world because it’s quite restrictive.” He pointed to the need to understand the Code of Points, the rule book that governs the gymnastics judging system: “You have to build the choreography around all the required elements.”
For Milan, that was especially true of his routine for Biles, 27, who performs four high-difficulty lines on floor. “It means she has to be really comfortable,” he said. “It was open ‘Dancing with the Stars’ and I could tell he moved very well. But when she gets into gymnastics, she’s more reserved because she’s thinking about acrobatics.”
The two met for the first time in 2022, when Milan traveled to the World Champions Center, Biles’ gym, in Spring, Texas. His assignment was to create a floor routine for French gymnast Mélanie De Jesus Dos Santos, who moved to the United States to train with Biles’ French coaches Cecile and Laurent Landi.
“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 also asked to work with him. She created her Olympic routine in just six days.
For the 90-second workout, which features music from Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, she was inspired by the choreographer Alvin Ailey. “I wanted to give her spare, mature, commanding choreography, because she’s not a little girl anymore. She’s the boss, a black woman who does so much for her country and she shouldn’t be afraid to show it.”
Biles was an active contributor. “She’s so humble and normal, but she knows what she wants,” Milan said. “When he says no, he means no.” The routine, which she performed twice at the US Olympic team trials in Minneapolis in June, helped Biles punch her ticket to the Paris Games.
While Biles’ floor routine will bring him a lot of exposure, Milan said that when he started working with gymnasts in the early 2010s, choreographers were “not paid attention to.” A coach from his hometown of Saint-Étienne, a town just west of the Alps, had asked him to come help out at the local national training center. Milan quickly realized that “you’re basically nothing in this world when you come from dance,” he said. “When gymnasts go to dance class, the feeling is that it’s time to relax.”
However, Milan was convinced that dance was vital to an athlete’s overall movement quality: “Dance classes help them understand their bodies, find stability, improve their contact with the floor.” At the World Champions Center, which doesn’t have a full-time dance coach, she had Biles and her teammates work on “more modern diagonals, walking, body relaxation.”
“It’s not just about adding choreography to a routine,” she said. “Dance should come earlier in their training.”
His exuberant presence is a breath of fresh air for athletes accustomed to highly organized training. De Jesus Dos Santos, a world and European medalist who is one of the stars of the French national team, met Milan when she was 12, in Saint-Étienne. “What I immediately loved about him was that he’s genuine,” she said. He speaks his mind and isn’t afraid to be himself.
For Milan, dance was a way to express himself as a child who “felt different” from others. His parents, a firefighter and a teacher, were tough, he said, although they supported his passion for ballet. At the age of 11, he was admitted to the famous School of Ballet of the Paris Opera and spent there, as he called, his “happiest years”, even enjoying the iron discipline of the director of the school. Claude Bassey. “It wouldn’t fly now, but I liked her strictness,” he said. “She was like a mother and confidant to me.”
He suffered a brutal blow to his ballet dreams in 1991 when he finished third in the entrance exams for the Paris Opera Ballet, with only two contracts on offer. “I felt completely left out overnight, because school didn’t prepare you to go into another company,” he said. “They just dropped you.”
To this day, Milan said, he “has trouble getting past the Palais Garnier,” where the Paris Opera Ballet performs. “I have a knot in my stomach. The sadness is never gone.”
However, she continued to dance. For four years, he was a member of the Victor Ullate Ballet in Spain, which at the time boasted international stars such as Ángel Corella. In 1995, he moved to the Ballet de l’Opéra National de Bordeaux, France, where he received the rank of soloist.
His career came to an abrupt halt just over a decade later. At the time, Bordeaux company director Charles Jude sued a female soloist for workplace harassment. Milan was one of two members of the company who testified on her behalf in court. Both dancers were let go when their contracts came up for renewal – a form of revenge in Milan’s eyes, after the same management had promoted him to soloist not long ago. (The company declined to comment.)
Bruised by the experience, Milan eventually returned to Saint-Étienne, where he spent four years trying to get a company off the ground. The city promised some funding and then backed out. “I put all my money into this project, I got paid,” Milan said. “I couldn’t go on like this.”
And so he turned to gymnastics. In 2017, he was hired by Insep, where he teaches daily classes – a modified ballet barre that incorporates gymnastics moves – to top rhythmic and artistic gymnasts, who know him by his nickname, Gregito.
In a recent lesson, he delivered praise and correction with trademark flamboyance, asking his classes to aim for greater expansion and precision. “Don’t start,” she told one affectionately when she looked annoyed. “You started it!” she replied, joking with him.
His floor choreography helped propel the French team onto the international stage. “It brings a sense of openness,” said Dal Santo, the coach and choreographer, “whereas we can get stuck in a routine because gymnastics requires so much discipline.” For the floor exercise of Morgane Osyssek, 21, a member of the French Olympic team, Milan found inspiration in a landmark work of modern ballet: William Forsythe’s “In the middle, somewhat elevated”, created for the Paris Opera Ballet in 1987.
When Milan first played the ballet’s electronic score — a rousing, propulsive composition by Thom Willems — Osyssek “thought he was joking,” she said in an interview. “I had a hard time imagining it as floor music, because it’s not what we’re used to at all.” The initial reaction of many in the fitness community was also negative, she said. “But then we started working on the movement and I realized it worked really well.”
Dance may not have brought 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 her unique role in gymnastics. “Your energy is electric!” she wrote “Everyone needs a Gregito in their life.”
