Olympic champion Simone Biles's celebrity crush Zac Efron shows her love on Twitter in playful exchange
Winning a gold medal as an Olympic gymnast brings, as one would imagine, a mountain of perks.
During this year's games in Rio de Janeiro, Team USA's Simone Biles got to add a particularly thrilling one to her list.
This week, her longtime celebrity crush Zac Efron heaped her with praise on Twitter, both when she qualified for the final and when she snagged the medal.
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'Dominate the floor': This week, Zac Efron heaped praise on Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, who won a gold medal along with the rest of Team USA in Rio de Janeiro
On Monday, when the three-time world champion qualified for the all-around final, the Neighbors star quoted NBC's tweet announcing the news and wrote, 'So phenomenal a skill's named after her. Congrats on sticking the Biles and qualifying for the finals @Simone_Biles!'
That skill is a double layout followed by a half-turn, a move she told Fox Sports she developed with a coach in 2013 to contend with a partially torn calf muscle.
That night, she replied to the We Are Your Friends actor's tweet, 'Thanks Zac! I hope you can watch Team Final tomorrow night.'
Tuesday, the night the 19-year-old and her team got the gold, Efron answered back. The 28-year-old posted a photo of himself to Twitter in which he stood in front of a screen with the team on, curving his hands into a heart shape.
'Of course I'm watching the #FinalFive,' he wrote, followed by five gold medal emojis, 'dominate the floor!' A winking emoji preceded '#Rio16,' and '#TeamUSA' was bookended by the emojis for the host city and the team.
'Congrats on sticking the Biles': In 2013, the 19-year-old and her coach developed a move that has since been named after her
The four-time national champion has, naturally for an American her age, carried a torch for the High School Musical star for quite a while.
When she toured NBC Nightly News through her house in a segment aired earlier this week, she revealed a life-sized cardboard cutout of the Charlie St Cloud actor in her bedroom.'Sometimes I used to...used to kiss him on the cheek,' she told Stephanie Gosk slightly sheepishly.
Efron's ebullience on Twitter was, of course, not lost on the Ohioan, who quickly retweeted it amid a flood of celebrity congratulations, one of which came from none other than Taylor Swift.
The Bad Blood singer wrote, 'Sending my biggest congratulations to Simone, Aly, Laurie, Gabby and Madison! YOU DID IT GIRLS!! ���� #FinalFive'.
USA!: Biles (second from right) posed with her teammates and fellow gold medalists (from left) Alexandra Raisman, Madison Kocian, Lauren Herhandez and Gabby Douglas
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