Thuc Nhi Nguyen | Los Angeles Times (TNS)
PARIS — Simone Biles had the perfect accessory planned for her second coronation as Olympic all-around champion. It was better than just a gold medal.
Minutes after winning gymnastics’ most coveted title, Biles fastened on a white gold necklace and flashed a diamond-encrusted goat pendant toward the camera.
Janet Heller’s social media pages haven’t been the same since.
The Calabasas, Calif.-based jeweler was the mastermind behind Biles’ viral accessory. Heller designed the piece with the Olympic star and worked with a team of master artisans to hand-drill and hand-set 546 diamonds in white gold shaped like a goat. Janet Heller Fine Jewelry is now taking off like Biles flying through the air on a vault.
“It’s just magical, honestly,” Heller said.
After working with Heller on a diamond Olympic rings necklace following the Tokyo Games, Biles reached out at the end of May about making a new piece. She wanted a necklace fitting for the G.O.A.T. — “Greatest Of All Time.” They went back and forth discussing the design, tweaking the goat figurine’s leg length, trimming the beard shape and adjusting the horn angle. Once they settled on an idea, the work started.
Heller’s team, which includes bench jewelers and craftsmen based in downtown L.A., was working overtime to get the piece made in five weeks. The entire process for an item of this nature would normally take three or four months, Heller said. But they had a time crunch this time.
Winning her ninth Olympic medal last Thursday during the all-around competition, Biles became the first female artistic gymnast to win multiple Olympic titles in the same individual event in nonconsecutive Games. Already the most decorated U.S. Olympic gymnast when she led the United States to gold in the team event, the 27-year-old extended her lead with the all-around crown and added another gold two days later in the vault final. She competed for the last time of these Games on Monday, winning silver in the floor final and failing to medal in the balance beam final.
With 11 Olympic medals and 30 world medals, Biles is the undisputed most decorated gymnast in history, but after her shocking withdrawal from the Tokyo Olympics, some might still contest her reign as the true G.O.A.T.
It didn’t stop Biles from proudly clipping on her necklace.
“Some people love it and some people hate it, so it’s the best of both worlds,” Biles said after the all-around final. “But at the end of the day, it is crazy that I am in the conversation of greatest of all athletes, because I just still think I’m Simone Biles from Spring, Texas, that loves to flip.”
Heller “couldn’t have been happier” with the finished product. Growing up in South Africa, where she admired her grandmother’s and mother’s jewelry, Heller dreamed of this business. Her parents moved the family of five to L.A. when she was 18 to escape apartheid. Now 15 years into running her own business, Janet Heller Fine Jewelry is becoming the go-to jeweler for top Olympians and Paralympians.
It started when long jumper Tara Davis-Woodhall, who went to school with Heller’s daughter, asked for a diamond Olympic rings necklace in advance of the Tokyo Olympics. Biles and U.S. gymnastics teammate Jordan Chiles saw it and needed to know where it came from.
Now Heller has created multiple items for Chiles and a necklace for Davis-Woodhall’s husband Hunter Woodhall, who won a bronze medal at the Tokyo Paralympics in the 400 meters. Heller recently designed a new piece for Davis-Woodhall featuring the two-time Olympian’s silhouette jumping through the air. Heller, a married mother of four, feels like she’s “accomplished the American Dream, for sure,” especially with the country’s top athletes rocking her pieces.
“I’m so proud to have made jewelry that was represented by elite athletes,” Heller said. “The biggest surprise for me was how they’re such mega stars and they are so humble and so down to Earth. … There’s no other words to express how I feel other than I absolutely love them.”
Heller, whose business includes her daughter, two other full-time employees and two part-time assistants, values the personal relationships with her clients. The increased attention from Biles’ necklace has not motivated her to expand operations to maximize production. She wants to be the one speaking to clients. She wants to help design pieces that tell their stories.
That is her true passion.
“It just is a very seeable and sort of touchable representation of achievements, milestones, celebrations,” Heller said. “Whenever I see that goat on Simone and whenever she touches it or looks at it, it’s really going to be so indicative of what she’s accomplished.”
New fans have asked Heller how much a replica of Biles’ necklace would cost, but she declines to share. This goat, much like its owner, will not be duplicated.
“She is the one and only,” Heller said, “so that necklace will represent the one and only as well.”
©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
