It’s 30 minutes into the first episode of the new Netflix docuseries Simone Biles Rising, and the greatest gymnast in the history of the sport is showing us her favorite place to cry. In a guest room she seldom visits, wearing a black hoodie and jeans with a simple low ponytail—nary an elaborate updo or Swarovski crystal in sight—Biles opens what she calls her “forbidden Olympic closet.” There, haphazardly stuffed together, are hundreds of untouched swag-mementos of the Tokyo Games, that eerie, audience-less, pandemic-miserable, accursed spectacle of three years past.
There’s a formidable Team USA–issued pandemic mask Biles calls the “COVID dog muzzle”; Team USA trading pins, forever untraded (“because I was in a bad mood”); Ralph Lauren outfits for the opening and closing ceremonies, presumably hideous but still in their garment bags; a boarding pass from LAX to Tokyo. And perhaps most painful of all: her competition bib (No. 392), the paper kind that international elite gymnasts still, in the 2020s, must affix with safety pins to the backs of shimmering $5,000 custom leotards. This is the number (and the leotard) Biles was wearing in the Tokyo team finals when she did the vault that changed everything. “I used to just sit here and cry and cry and cry,” Biles says in the show, “ask God why this happened to me.”
I’m the kind of person who covers my eyes and yells NOOOO when sports broadcasts replay the agonies of defeat in the name of relevant journalism, and this is exactly what I did when Rising opened with That Goddamned Vault, in beautifully shot, multiangle, soundtracked slow motion. It was supposed to be one of Biles’ trademarks: a difficult Amanar, with a roundoff entry, one and a half flips off the table, two and a half twists. She’d aced it many, many, many times before. You know what happened next, but in case you have blocked this trauma out: Biles opened out of the twists early, got obviously lost in midair, but still landed on two feet somehow, her face betraying open fear.
After a brief, impassioned pep talk to her three teammates (Jordan Chiles, Grace McCallum, and Suni Lee), Biles quickly withdrew from the rest of the competition, ultimately competing in just one remaining meet in Tokyo. Rising details the aftermath of this moment, but it is only tangentially a documentary about gymnastics. What it reveals, more than anything else, is a surprisingly universal portrait of an unparalleled athlete—and, more importantly, a human being—forced to endure a mental health crisis in front of the entire world. Biles’ dominant return to competition last year (about to culminate in another Olympics) was already impressive even without this glimpse into her head. Now, however, the work it took to get to Biles’ current healthy state is illuminated like never before.
The camera crew that has been following the GOAT since before Tokyo caught an incredible amount of high-quality, revealing audio and video. It got that pep talk (“I love you guys, but you’re going to be just fine”) and Biles’ admission immediately after That Vault that the dangerous vertigo deceptively called the “twisties” meant she could no longer compete (“I don’t want to do something stupid”). It also captured the heartbreaking footage of Biles’ family, at home in Texas, watching her dream shatter in real time.
But the documentary’s main strength is that it makes plain what Biles’ return to the Olympics really means. Once we understand the extent to which the run-up to, and fallout from, Tokyo broke her down, her rise since then becomes more than a gymnastics miracle for those of us who enjoy watching a prodigious athlete. Biles’ story in the series is a forceful advertisement for comprehensive mental health care, and a reminder that invisible illnesses and disabilities still carry a stigma powerful enough to shake the best of us. (This may be why, for example, even today she seems unable to let mean tweets go.)
In her postmortem of the twisties episode in Rising, Biles explains that in that moment “the sound went out” and that after she landed, she would have run out of the Ariake Sports Center if she could have. (Instead, she white-knuckled through both the team’s silver-medal ceremony and a press conference at which she displayed remarkable composure. She also cheered loudly from the stands for her teammates and rivals. Then she returned to the balance beam final and won a bronze medal.) The entire time, Biles says, she felt as if she were imprisoned by her own brain and body—an imprisonment corroborated by new footage from a private Tokyo gym, where, attempting to train the twisties out, she lands multiple dismounts straight onto her back.
Meanwhile, Biles felt as if the entirety of the internet was calling her names.
Quitter. The word appears superimposed over Biles’ face as an earful of male podcasters yammer and a screen full of assholish headlines—none from this magazine, mind you!—float in: “Simone Biles and the Cult of the Quitter”; “Opt Out or Dropout?”; “Simone Biles Is No Hero.” And in her anguish, it is these voices Biles hears “the loudest,” despite what we on the outside remember as an unmitigated outpouring of support. Sure, Biles is the youngest person ever to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom—but after those Olympics, she felt “not one ounce of self-worth.” It’s a classic trope that’s oddly relatable: Even amid a globe’s worth of kind words, we can hear only the worst possible criticism because, alas, those sentences echo our worst fears about ourselves.
As Biles pushes forward in real time, the series flashes back to the multigenerational roots of the trauma that came to a head on that Tokyo vault runway. Olympic veterans, including Dominique Dawes, Aly Raisman, and Betty Okino offer perspective on the authoritarian environs of the former national team program run under the iron fists of the now-infamous Bela and Marta Karolyi. (Raisman points out that gymnasts were not allowed to laugh at practice.) This backdrop of repression provided the perfect breeding ground for Larry Nassar, the worst sports predator in history, whose unspeakable crimes came to light only after the 2016 Olympics, and only thanks to the courage of his former teenage victims (and not, at any point, the adults charged with protecting them). Those survivors included Biles.
As Biles trained with single-minded focus for 2020, she spent far too much of her precious nongymnastics time reliving the worst horrors of her life in front of Congress and the world. Add the pandemic and Olympics’ yearlong postponement to this mix, and you have a perfect equation for an unprecedented crisis. As much as Biles tried to take everything that had happened, “push it down, shove it down, wait till my career’s done, go fix it”—well, instead, “it” decided it was un-pushdownable. “And then something like this happens—and unfortunately, it happened to me at the Olympics,” she says.
Worse yet, unlike the other infamous That Vault—the “heroic” 1996 Yurchenko 1.5 that Kerri Strug absolutely should not have been pressured to complete on a severely injured leg—Biles had an injury that nobody could see. And so it was easy for much of the world to misunderstand. When the “fuse box” of her life decided to burn out at the worst possible moment, Biles initially felt the instinct to be “ashamed” of herself. “Maybe if my ankle was fractured,” Biles says, “I would have still [competed], but that wasn’t the case.” (Another NOOOO.) But, she continues, “where I was, mentally and physically—it could have been more than an ankle.”
Back home, not far from the forbidden Olympic closet, Biles shows us the line of text she now has tattooed under her collarbone, the same line from the Maya Angelou poem that she sometimes wears on the back of her leotards: And still I rise. If the only way to go was up after Tokyo, then at present Biles heads into Paris in a decidedly elevated state, both mentally and physically. I’ve followed her her whole career; her gymnastics and her mental state appear better than they have ever been.
Still, though, Biles demonstrates that even at the lows—whose depths she has now opened the closet to show us—she was causing a necessary shift in the perception of what it means to be a great elite athlete. It is largely because of the reckoning that she has helped force, from 2016 to the present, that USA Gymnastics is now openly attempting to strike a balance between dominance and humanity. “I would have rather had some big, world global meltdown some other time,” she says. “But it opened up the conversation to a lot of the world. And a lot of people got the chance to be heard and be seen and to get the proper help. So,” she says with a quiet chuckle, “thank God for that vault.”
