Gymnastics—like diving and determine skating—is an Olympic sport the place artistry and aesthetics are intertwined with athleticism. As Simone Biles and her teammates catapult and contort their our bodies this month in Paris, they’ll be doing so in leotards embellished with roughly 10,000 diamond-shaped Swarovski crystals. (That’s almost 2,000 greater than Staff USA wore again in Tokyo in 2021.) Sporting the uniforms to compete is the final step in a course of that took 4 years and greater than 50 individuals to finish.
“After I opened up the Olympic leotards, my first thought was that they had been completely gorgeous,” Jade Carey, an Olympic gold medalist and 2024 Paris Staff USA gymnast, tells SELF. Carey, Biles, Jordan Chiles, Sunisa Lee, and Hezley Rivera unboxed their new leotards, which had been made by gymnastics attire firm GK Elite, earlier this month. “They’re filled with crystals, tremendous patriotic, and actually stunning,” Carey says. “I can’t wait to see how they shine below the lights within the enviornment.”
GK Elite
For Jeanne Diaz (GK Elite’s director of design) and Erica Schnebel (the corporate’s director of selling), it was a strong second. “I’m getting chills nonetheless fascinated with it,” Schnebel tells SELF. “As they began opening it, I’m watching their faces, I’m watching their reactions, and I feel, exterior of their pleasure, one factor that struck me was Jeanne’s response—I seemed over and he or she’s bawling comfortable tears as a result of that’s her work coming to life,” Schnebel says. “It is a workforce of athletes we all know rather well, and [we] couldn’t have been prouder of every of them.”
The way to make a leotard with 10,000 crystals for the perfect gymnasts on this planet
Diaz notes that every leotard is crafted, firstly, with performance in thoughts, which begins with intel from the consultants themselves. She says that GK Elite polls USA Gymnastics members on what options—from necklines to materials to the quantity of glitz—they’ve most loved, or maybe disliked, in earlier uniforms. Nonetheless, as Diaz says, there aren’t normally many surprises. That’s as a result of the corporate has suited up Olympic gymnasts since 1996, so after nearly three a long time, they’ve a fairly good concept of what works and what doesn’t.
GK Elite
GK Elite
One other approach to make sure the leotards assist quite than hinder efficiency? They’re every custom-made. “We make a leotard for each athlete that was competing on the Olympic trials, and we have now all their sizing forward of time,” Diaz explains, including that every garment is laser-cut for tremendous exact measurements. (Mainly, they’re meant to really feel like a second pores and skin.)
