A baby name leap may be the one move gymnast Simone Biles can’t pull off

What is Olympic immortality? Is it a gold medal, a world record, or an indelible image? Or could it be a generation of namesakes?

Athletes like gymnast Nadia Comăneci and skier Bode Miller launched their first names into the American mainstream. Their Olympic legacies now live on in thousands of family trees. When I asked which athletes at the Paris games could spark a similar name trend, the overwhelming response was Simone Biles.

The gymnastics champion may be the single most talked-about athlete in Paris, yet I don’t see a wave of little Simones in America’s future. For her name, it’s both too early and too late.

The Name Trend Challenge

2024 is too late for a Simone surge because Biles first took the world by storm at the Rio Olympics in 2016. What’s more, swimmer Simone Manuel also won four medals for America in Rio. That would have been the moment for a transformative Simone trend, and it just didn’t happen.

2024 is too early for a Simone surge because the name’s previous surge was too recent. It ran for about 30 years starting in 1988. That places the name in a perilous fashion position: yep, it’s a mom name.

Why Simone?

Simone is the French feminine form of the biblical name Simon. It first became modestly common in the US in the 1930s, in the same French trend that brought us names like Claudette and Yvonne. Then in 1959, singer Eunice Waymon scored her first radio hit under her stage name, Nina Simone.

Cut to the 1980s. Nina Simone has become a cultural icon, both for her voice and her ground-breaking civil rights activism. French names like Dominique, Nicole and Désirée are red-hot for African-American girls. And toy company Hasbro is making yet another attempt to launch a fashion doll line to rival Mattel’s Barbie.

Hasbro haplessly named their new (White) doll Maxie, in anachronistic imitation of Barbie. When it came time to give Maxie a Black friend, though, they read the zeitgeist perfectly with the Simone doll.

The whole Maxie toy line was soon discontinued, but the name Simone lived on in Black America for decades. Here’s the full Simone story in baby name popularity terms.

With that history, the name Simone isn’t likely to be a winner at this year’s Olympic Games. That’s because, with standard bearers like Simone Biles, it already won. Congratulations to a name that’s had a heck of a run.