Courtesy of MSNBC
The greatest athlete of all time, Simone Biles, opened up about her mental health and invited viewers to follow her along through her journey during her third Olympics in her Netflix docuseries Simone Biles Rising.
The four part series allows viewers to understand the experiences Biles experienced on and off the competition floor in her journey to become the most decorated gymnast with 11 Olympic and 30 World medals. The series also humanizes Biles, as she opens up about how she was treated when she stepped away from the Tokyo Olympics and the pressure on her to repeat her 2016 success in Paris even through injury.
The first two episodes, which shared Biles’ experience at the Tokyo Olympics through her own voice, aired in July, while the second two were filmed during the Pairs Olympics and released last month.
Episode 1: Write Me Down in History…
Courtesy of ABC News
Biles opened up about her experience at the 2020 Olympics, and what really happened. Unjustly labeled as a quitter by viewers at home who can’t even do a cartwheel, Biles shares that she had a case of the twisties (the yips), and lost her air awareness. “So, [I’m] having these mental blocks in the gym recently. It’s not been fun. It’s been scary. I’m getting lost on my skills. I just don’t get how. I don’t know if I’m overthinking. I mean, it’s getting to the point where it’s becoming dangerous because I’m getting lost on all of my floor skills. And it’s like it could happen any other time. I don’t get why it happens at the Olympics,” Biles said.
Biles and former Olympians, Betty Okino and Dominique Dawes, speak up about how damaging and abusive it was for gymnasts, who were competing at the Olympics when they were just kids, to be told they needed to push through injury and struggles if they wanted to be champions.
Had Biles not pulled from the competition, with the difficulty of skills she does, she would have gotten seriously hurt or worse. Pulling from the competition was not only the safe thing to do, but the smart and brave thing to do.
Biles’ story, though, of course didn’t end there. She had a fire under her on her journey heading to her next Olympics.
Episode 2: I Will Not Be Broken
Courtesy of SELF Magazine
Biles returned to the international stage for the 2023 World Championships. Biles' return took place in Antwerp, Belgium, the same place she won her first World all-around title 10 years prior.
“The comeback is more personal because I had been fighting my own demons for so long,” Biles said. Her coach Cécile Canqueteau-Landi said, “She’s coming out on the other side.”
While Biles won her sixth World all-around title in Antwerp, this one was different. And while Biles said that was the most nervous she had ever been at a competition, she never looked more relaxed and more herself on the competition floor.
At the Worlds, Biles successfully competed the hardest vault in women’s gymnastics on the international stage for the first time, the Yurchenko double pike, which is now known as the Biles II, the fifth skill to be named after her.
Biles added five more World medals to her collection in 2023. She is the most decorated gymnast of all time with 30 World medals, 23 of them gold.
Episode 3: I Will Defy the Odds
Courtesy of NBC News
Gymnastics is shifting away from being a sport in which athletes retired before they were out of their teens. Biles, who competed in her third Olympics at the age of 27, is one of the few elite gymnasts to have a long career.
Biles’ 2016 teammate and NBC commentator Laurie Hernandez said, “A really big topic of conversation is the age shift that we’re seeing in the sport. The lifespan for gymnastics is really young. We were being fed and told that because our bodies are younger, we can recover better, and there’s a bit of, like, a mental willingness to try new skills, and there’s a lot less fear. Just all of these pros.”
Biles added, “As we get older, our bodies, we used to think that they were kind of, like, rusting. It’s all we knew. It’s like, you peak at 16, and then after that, you get a woman body, and then who knows what’s gonna happen?”
The abnormality of gymnasts retiring as soon as they reach the height of their career has finally come into discussion.
Smart and healthy training allows gymnasts, like Biles, to have elongated careers, something that should be normalized and they should be paced for. This doesn’t mean injuries can’t happen, and at the worst times, too. Biles injured her calf before the 2024 Olympic Trials. During the qualifications round at the Olympics, after competing a beautiful and flawless beam routine that earned smiles from her, Biles tore her lower calf on a tumbling pass while warming up her floor routine. When she left the arena with a trainer to get it examined, the event drew harsh parallels to Biles leaving the arena in Tokyo. With fear of once again being labeled as a quitter, and adrenaline coursing through her veins, Biles completed the competition.
It is important to note that Biles’ decision to continue the competition even through injury was her own decision, and she has since made a recovery. Kerri Strug, who famously competed on a severely sprained ankle and landed her vault on one foot to win the USA’s first team gold in 1996, did not have a choice under abusive coaching and never competed again. In the first episode, Strug’s teammate Dominique Dawes said that looking back on it now, it wasn’t right.
The change in the culture of gymnastics and the implementation of SafeSport, thanks to the bravery of athletes like Biles for speaking up to eliminate the abuse of athletes, opens the door to the discussion of athletes understanding their bodies and what their limits are.
Episode 4: I Will Rise
Courtesy of Forbes
Biles set goals for herself going into her third Olympics: winning team gold and winning her second Olympic all-around title.
The redemption tour for Team USA was a success, and Biles became the third gymnast to win two Olympic all-around titles… but, for the first time, not without some close competition!
Rebeca Andrade, the most decorated Brazilian Olympian, was right on Biles’ heels throughout the entire all-around final. Andrade pushed Biles to do her hardest skills, making the competition nothing short of nail biting and exciting.
Biles won four Olympic medals, three of them gold, in Paris. She is the most decorated gymnast with 41 medals from the Olympics and World Championships.
Biles gave no clear answer on what the future holds for her. She jokes that she is old, but also has not given an answer that rules out her becoming the first American gymnast to compete in four Olympics, and ending her career with an Olympics on home soil.
No matter when Simone Biles retires, or what she does next, I hope she knows she changed the culture of gymnastics for the better, and will forever be an inspiration to gymnasts and women of all ages. And that is why she is the GOAT.
Courtesy of IMDb