If you’ve been sleeping on who Jordan Chiles actually is, she’ll give you a pass. She’s used to it.
“People always think I’m mean,” she says, laughing. “I couldn’t tell you why.”
The two-time Olympian and Paris gold medalist has heard some version of this her whole career: people brace for someone guarded and get someone who will talk your ear off in the back of an Uber. “When you see me on social and all the things that I do, you’re going to meet that same person in real life. I’m the same person.”
It took a while to get there. Chiles is 24 and in what she’s calling her peace era, a deliberate choice she made before this year even started. “I told myself going in 2026, I was just going to be at peace this era, making sure that my mental, physical, whatever it may be, is just how I want it to feel.”
That idea of protecting her peace is what made the partnership with Uber make sense. Uber’s Women Preferences feature, now available nationwide, lets women riders and drivers opt to match exclusively with each other. Chiles appears in the campaign’s new Gamechangers social series alongside women who drive for the platform. For her, safety and mental health have always been the same conversation. “Mental health is a huge thing. As big as mental health is, that’s as big as my safety,” she says. “We are women and I think people kind of take us for granted in certain situations.”
These past few years have been, by her own admission, crazy, and very little of it stayed private. But ask her what she’s most proud of right now that has nothing to do with gymnastics. It’s Shero, the athlete collective she founded to mentor young women in sports. “I mentor athletes into understanding that they are more than just their sport and that they have the opportunity to really showcase who they are and just be them,” she says. “I want to be able to help you so you don’t have to go down a really dark hole, and I can help you get out of that before it hits the ground.” She’s been in that hole herself and knows how far down it goes.
The women who kept her from falling are the ones she talks about with the most tenderness. Her mom is at the top of the list, always. “I always thought my mom was a superhero,” she says. “She just was so determined in what she wanted to do, whether it was in her businesses, whether it was just in her parenting.” Her older sisters handled something different, like the early lessons in body and beauty that girls in sports rarely get. “They told me, ‘This is what you’re going to go through, but understand that you’re always going to be beautiful in and out.'”
That same mother is also why, when asked what she wished someone had taught her earlier about money, she laughs and says, “About taxes.”
“My mom was in the business era. She had her own businesses and we learned a lot from my mom in that area. So at a young age, I already knew what taxes were and how to do a W2, a 1099.” What she wishes she’d known sooner was the nuance, “What depreciates and what doesn’t and what you can put on your taxes and what you can’t.” Now she has a business manager and a team around her. But she’s clear that the foundation her mother laid made all of it easier to build on.
She’s also, at nearly 25, still learning to say no. “It took me [almost] 25 years before I figured out that word is okay to say,” she admits. “No one’s going to get mad at you about it.” She’s figuring out how to protect what’s hers, what to share with the world and what to keep sacred, and she’s getting better at both. Her PR team has had to pump the brakes more than once. “I’m an open book,” she says. “I feel like my world, everybody already lives in it. Why not just know everything?”
But she’s not spending much time looking back because there’s too much ahead for her to be looking forward to. LA 2028 is on the horizon, and she’s tight-lipped about whether she’ll be on the floor. But what she will say is what competing on home soil could mean. “When we’re at home, typically you dominate even better. You dominate in a space that you are comfortable in and that you are going to know, look, I’m home, we got this.”
She catches herself and adds the disclaimer: “This also doesn’t confirm whether I’m participating or not participating, so I’m speaking for everybody else who’s going to be there.” Right.