‘Stuck in Germany’: Simone Biles and Jonathan Owens hit travel snag on way to Winter Olympics spotlight

Simone Biles’ offseason looks nothing like Jonathan Owens’ game tape, but the pressure is the same. The Chicago Bears safety is in Europe with America’s most decorated gymnast, trading playoff film for figure skating and freezing rinks at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan.The trip did not start smooth. On Friday, Biles posted an Instagram Story from an airport bar with the caption “Stuck in Germany” as she and Owens waited out a delay on their way to Italy. Earlier in the week she had already teased the getaway with a packing video tagged “Packing for Italy”, signaling their plan to hit Milano Cortina 2026 as fans, not athletes.According to a recent piece by Ankita Yadav, Biles shared more from the trip once they finally moved on from Germany and into Olympic mode, dropping a selfie with Owens and a simple caption aimed at the flag on her jacket: “Go Team USA.”Her look matched the moment. She wore a blue T-shirt with white pants and a necklace featuring a goat pendant, a quiet nod to the “greatest of all time” label that has followed her for years. The vibe was relaxed, a sharp contrast to the nights when she dressed in full Chicago colors for Bears games, including a January wild-card showdown against the Green Bay Packers where she showed up in a brown outfit with Owens’ No. 36 stitched across her coat.Owens has earned this reset. Chicago won 11 regular-season games, then beat Green Bay 31-27 in the wild-card round before losing 20-17 to the Los Angeles Rams in the divisional round. Once that run ended, he swapped helmets for hotel keys and joined his wife on a different kind of road trip. Now, instead of watching blitz packages, he is watching quads and step sequences.Per Marca, Friday night at the Milano Ice Skating Arena put Biles in a setting she knows too well, only this time she was on the other side of the cameras. She and Owens watched as Ilia Malinin, the only skater to land a quadruple Axel in competition, finished eighth after two falls in his free skate. Biles stood to applaud, filmed parts of his routine, and shared clips with her followers.When the arena host spotted her in the crowd, Biles was pulled onto the big screen for a quick interview. Asked about the difference between her Summer Games world and this Winter stop, she kept it simple. “I think the difference is the weather and the temperature. I'm used to hot and this is very cool,” she said, before adding, “So, I wish the athletes the absolute best and to stay chill.”The overlap between gymnastics and figure skating is obvious to her. Biles is still the only gymnast performing the Yurchenko double pike at the highest level, while Malinin owns the quad Axel. Both skills live in that tiny window where one mistake erases years of work. She made that respect clear. “I would never do it on ice, so I give them all the props,” Biles said. “I am rooting for them, I'm praying for them and I'm just super exiting to cheer for them.”She even acknowledged a shared ritual between the sports. The “Kiss and Cry” area, where skaters wait for scores on camera, has since been adopted in gymnastics. “We're not huge fans of it, but we're so used to it,” she admitted.According to Marca, Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Shaidorov took gold in the men’s event, with Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama winning silver and Shun Sato claiming bronze. Biles and Owens had no impact on the podium, but that was never the point. After a long NFL season and three Olympic cycles of her own, Biles finally gets to sit in the stands, feel the nerves from a different seat, and cheer while someone else tries to stick the landing.