When Simone Biles withdrew from the finals of the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo, saying she was experiencing the “twisties” and needed to focus on her mental health, she was called a quitter and accused of abandoning her teammates. Despite Biles’s best attempts at explaining that the twisties — a phenomenon where gymnasts lose sense of where they are in the air and don’t know how they’ll land — could be dangerous, her critics wouldn’t let up. Many disregarded the silver medal she earned in the team event and the bronze medal she got for the balance beam, claiming she wouldn’t compete again.
After a two-year break from the sport, Biles, the most decorated gymnast in history, announced that she was gunning for a spot on this year’s Olympic team. She locked in her place on the team when she came in first in the all-around competition at the 2024 Olympic trials in June. Ahead of the Paris Olympics, Netflix released the first two episodes of Simone Biles Rising, a docuseries directed by Katie Walsh chronicling Biles’s life over the past three years and her road back to the Olympics.
“This time coming back, it’s truly for myself,” Biles says in the series. “Nobody is forcing me in the gym. I’m 26 years old. It’s truly for myself. I never want to look back in ten years and say, ‘What if I could have done another Olympic cycle?’ I at least tried. I didn’t want to be afraid of the sport anymore because you know so much has happened in this sport, so much has scared the living shit out of me that I couldn’t have it take that one last thing from me.”
Here’s what we learned from the docuseries.
Biles felt “ashamed” for withdrawing from the finals in Tokyo.
In the docuseries, Biles recalls the pressure she felt going into the Tokyo Games from the media, fans, and herself. The docuseries highlights the isolation of the COVID Games as a factor that contributed to Biles struggling in the competition. Without family, friends, or any fans in the stands, things felt uneasy from the start.
Biles says that when she first felt the twisties, she knew something was off but wanted to play it cool. After it happened again, she knew she had to drop out. “If I could’ve ran out of that stadium I would have, but I was like, ‘Keep it cool, calm, collected; don’t freak anybody out,’” she says.
After withdrawing from the finals, “I kinda felt like I was in jail with my own brain and body,” Biles says, adding that she felt “so ashamed.” Biles also says that the moment happened because she could no longer suppress trauma from her past, saying, “Your body can only function for so long before your fuses blow out.”
Biles describes what happened in Tokyo as a “trauma response.”
In September 2021, Biles, along with gymnasts McKayla Maroney, Aly Raisman, and Maggie Nichols, testified about the abuse they suffered at the hands of former trainer Larry Nassar, who is currently serving up to 175 years in prison for various sexual-assault convictions.
Biles says her “meltdown” at the Games was a trauma response related to the abuse. “Everything that has happened, I’ve just like, ‘I’ll push it down, shove it down, wait until my career’s done, go fix it,” she says. “Then something like this happens — and unfortunately, to me, it happened at the Olympics.”
Since 2021, Biles has become an advocate for mental health and is open about the fact that she regularly goes to therapy and influenced her husband, NFL player Jonathan Owens, to do the same. “I didn’t get the proper care before because I thought I was okay. But your mind and body’s the first to say, ‘Actually, no.’ You just never know how you’ll react when you start talking about that stuff.”
Biles says the past year of competing has been hard and she hasn’t been as confident, so her coaches are trying “a different approach” that includes not talking to the media, “staying in my zone, following up with my therapist.” She says she also turned off the comments on her Instagram to limit outside noise. “I don’t care if you want to comment good or bad, you’re not going to be allowed,” she says.
Biles sees the comments about her hair.
Biles has faced criticism over her appearance since her earliest days in gymnastics. “People hate my hair for meet days. ‘Her hair is all over the place! Look at it, it’s crazy!’ But then again, we do it by ourselves, we’re not professionals. You just can’t win,” she says. She says that she knows what it’s like to be the only Black girl on a team, explaining why Gabby Douglas’s victory as the first Black all-around Olympic champion in London in 2012 was important to her. She expresses frustration over the cruel commentary about Douglas’s hair during those Games. “She just won the Olympics and you guys are talking about her hair?” she says, adding that “people are way too comfortable commenting things.”
The docuseries also includes appearances from Black Olympic gymnasts Dominique Dawes and Betty Okino, who talk about their experiences competing in the ’90s and feeling like they were judged differently because they weren’t white with straight, blonde hair.
Biles’s husband has been “ a shoulder to lean on.”
In recent months, Biles’s husband has faced ridicule after saying he was the “catch” in his relationship. Biles has repeatedly defended Owens, saying people misunderstood him, and the docuseries presents a picture of their marriage as one of mutual respect and support. Biles says that Owens has been “a shoulder to lean on because he saw those dark times after Tokyo.”
“He’s like, ‘You’ll get back to where you were,’ and made sure I was staying on top of my training. He was making sure I was going to my therapy sessions and trying to do as much as he could without kind of being bossy,” she says.
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