Simone Biles is widely acknowledged as the greatest gymnast in the history of the sport. Her competitive record is unmatched, featuring a staggering collection of World Championship and Olympic medals. But in the 2024 Netflix documentary series Simone Biles Rising, director Katie Walsh shifts the focus away from the medal count and onto the human being behind the leotard. The series provides an intimate, unflinching look at the years following the Tokyo Olympics, a period defined not by victory laps, but by a deep, vulnerable, and public reckoning with trauma and self-preservation. More than a sports documentary, Simone Biles Rising serves as a powerful case study in resilience, redefining what it truly means to be a champion in the face of overwhelming pressure.

The Foundation of Greatness: Early Life and the Birth of a Competitor

To understand the weight Biles carried in Tokyo, one must first understand the path she walked to get there. The documentary opens with archival footage of a young Simone in Columbus, Ohio, offering crucial context to her relentless drive. Born in 1997 to a mother struggling with addiction, Biles and her siblings entered the foster care system. Her maternal grandfather, Ron, and his wife, Nellie, eventually stepped in, adopting Simone and her younger sister, Adria. This stable, loving environment became the bedrock of her success.

A Chance Discovery

Biles did not start gymnastics with the intention of becoming a global icon. A daycare field trip to Bannon's Gymnastix at the age of six changed the trajectory of her life. The coaches immediately noticed her natural fearlessness and explosive power. She was not just good; she was different. The documentary does an excellent job of illustrating this early promise through interviews with her first coaches, who describe a child who absorbed skills at an extraordinary rate, often mastering in a single day what took other students weeks to learn.

The Rise to Senior Elite

The transition from a hyperactive child loving the sport to a disciplined elite athlete is a story of sacrifice. Biles and her family made the difficult decision to switch from public school to homeschooling, allowing her to train for up to 32 hours a week. By 2013, at just 16 years old, she won her first all-around title at the U.S. National Championships. The world was about to meet a force of nature. The documentary pieces together her early routines, highlighting the raw, unrefined power that would later be honed into perfection. It was clear that the gymnastics world had never seen a performer with this specific combination of aerial awareness, power, and execution.

The Pinnacle of the Sport: Rio 2016 and the Rise of a Cultural Icon

The 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro served as the official coronation of Simone Biles. The documentary relives this period not just as a highlight reel, but as a complex turning point. Biles entered the Games as the heavy favorite and delivered perhaps the most dominant performance in Olympic gymnastics history. She captured four gold medals (team, individual all-around, vault, and floor exercise) and a bronze on balance beam.

In the series, Biles reflects on the Rio Games with a mix of fondness and detachment. She was 19 years old, performing under immense pressure, but the weight had not yet fully landed on her shoulders. Her floor routine, set to samba music, became an iconic moment of the entire Olympics, not just for its difficulty, but for the pure joy radiating from her performance. The documentary uses this as a stark contrast to the burden she would carry just five years later. Rio made her a household name, but it also placed a target on her back.

The "Biles" Moves

Central to her discussion in the documentary is the legacy of her eponymous skills. She currently has five skills named after her in the Code of Points (two on vault, one on balance beam, and two on floor exercise). The documentary provides breathtaking slow-motion footage of these skills, specifically the Yurchenko double pike vault and the triple-double on floor exercise. These are maneuvers that sports scientists consider to be at the outer limits of human biomechanics. The constant pressure to innovate and push the sport to its absolute limit, while dealing with the mental and physical toll, is a recurring theme throughout the narrative. Biles openly admits that the expectation to perform these death-defying skills contributed to the loss of her spatial awareness in Tokyo.

The Tokyo Turning Point: Redefining Strength on the World's Largest Stage

The emotional and narrative core of Simone Biles Rising is the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, held in 2021. The series dedicates significant time to deconstructing the events of the women's team final, where Biles performed a vault, knew immediately that something was wrong, and made the gut-wrenching decision to withdraw.

The "twisties," a term widely popularized by Biles, is a gymnastics-specific phenomenon where a gymnast loses their sense of space and time in the air. The documentary does not shy away from the technical and psychological terror of this condition. Through voice notes, text messages, and tearful interviews, viewers witness a master athlete grappling with a body and mind that suddenly felt foreign to her. The outside world saw a champion step down; the documentary shows a young woman in a survival battle against her own instincts.

"I literally could not tell up from down. I didn't trust my body anymore. And that’s the scariest feeling in the world, especially when you are flying twenty feet in the air." – Simone Biles, Simone Biles Rising

The documentary powerfully captures the global fallout. While a wave of support came from fellow athletes and mental health advocates, a vicious torrent of criticism labeled her a "quitter." The filmmakers juxtapose these harsh headlines with her internal struggle, forcing the viewer to confront the dehumanization of elite athletes. Her decision to prioritize her life and long-term health over a medal redefined the conversation around sports and mental wellness. An article published by Scientific American on the mechanics of the twisties provides external scientific context to the physical dangers she was facing.

The Role of Therapy and Support Systems

A significant portion of the series focuses on the period after Tokyo. This is where Simone Biles Rising separates itself from a typical sports recap. It follows her to therapy sessions, shows her navigating her relationship with her now-husband, NFL player Jonathan Owens, and captures the quiet, lonely hours of self-reflection. The support of her parents, Ron and Nellie, is highlighted as a critical factor in her healing. The documentary makes it clear that the decision to step back was not a sign of weakness, but a demonstration of profound self-awareness. She had to learn to say "no" to a sport that had taken everything from her. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), her openness led to a measurable increase in public discourse about the pressures facing high-performers.

The Long Road Back: Training, Trust, and the 2023 World Championships

The second half of the documentary series tracks the grueling process of Biles’s return to elite gymnastics. It is not a triumphant montage set to rock music; it is a slow, methodical, and often painful reconstruction of trust. The training footage is raw. We see her landing on mats, crashing on skills she has performed thousands of times, and the frustrating process of re-learning the spatial awareness that was lost in Tokyo.

Rebuilding the Mental Connection

Cecile and Laurent Landi, her coaches since 2017, are portrayed as the steady, patient anchors she needed. The documentary highlights how they shifted from a coach-athlete dynamic focused on winning to one focused on mental safety. They removed the pressure. They gave her permission to be a gymnast again for her own sake. This journey culminates in her return to competition at the 2023 US Classic, where she performed a modified routine that still defied physics. The eruption of the crowd when she nailed her beam routine is one of the most poignant moments in the series.

A New Kind of Victory

The 2023 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Antwerp, Belgium, was the site of Biles’s official comeback. The symbolism was potent: Antwerp is where she won her first World title ten years earlier. The documentary captures her performance, but focuses more intently on her demeanor. The joy was back. She was smiling, not just from the adrenaline of winning, but from the sheer relief of being able to compete on her own terms. She led the USA to gold and won individual gold in the all-around, balance beam, and floor exercise. It was a triumphant statement, but the series insists that the real victory was the journey itself, not the medals.

Standing Up for a Safer Sport: The Broader Context of Gymnastics

Simone Biles Rising is notably careful to contextualize Biles’s story within the larger, darker history of USA Gymnastics. It is impossible to tell the story of a survivor in this sport without addressing the systemic abuse that was allowed to fester for decades. The documentary touches on the Larry Nassar scandal and the subsequent failures of the governing bodies to protect their athletes.

Biles is one of the hundreds of survivors who came forward publicly. Her advocacy for athlete safety is portrayed as a natural extension of her character. She has repeatedly called for accountability and transparency from USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee. The documentary argues that her decision to step down in Tokyo was also a political act—a refusal to be a cog in a machine that had historically valued medals over human well-being. For those unfamiliar with the depth of the scandal, major news outlets like ESPN's timeline of the Larry Nassar case provides essential background on why this context is so vital. Biles’s legacy is inextricably tied to this fight for institutional change.

Legacy Beyond the Medal Count: A New Blueprint for Athletes

As the series concludes, it sets the stage for the 2024 Paris Olympics. But the narrative refuses to define her success by the number of medals she might win there. Instead, the documentary emphasizes the legacy she has already cemented. She has fundamentally altered the conversation around mental health in sports. Athletes like Naomi Osaka, Michael Phelps, and Novak Djokovic have spoken out about mental health, but Biles’s stand in Tokyo was a watershed moment that signaled a permanent shift in the culture.

Younger gymnasts entering the sport now do so in a world where speaking up about mental struggles is no longer completely taboo. The next generation of the U.S. women's gymnastics team, including stars like Suni Lee and Jordan Chiles, cite Biles not just for her athletic prowess, but for her advocacy. Simone Biles Rising argues that her greatest contribution to the sport is not a move named after her in the Code of Points, but the courage to be vulnerable in front of the entire world. She proved that stepping away can be a sign of strength, that self-care is more important than a gold medal, and that an athlete's value is not measured solely by their wins and losses.

Conclusion: The Courage to Rise

Simone Biles Rising is essential viewing, not just for sports fans, but for anyone who has ever faced a moment of profound fear or self-doubt. It strips away the superhuman aura surrounding one of the world's greatest athletes and reveals a deeply resilient, relatable human being. The documentary thoroughly explores her past triumphs, her devastating setback in Tokyo, and her slow, deliberate return to the sport she loves. It frames her story as a continuous process of growth. As Biles prepared for the Paris 2024 Olympics, the question was never whether she could win another medal. The question was whether she could do it on her own terms, with her mental and physical health intact. The documentary provides a resounding answer: she can, and she will, precisely because she learned that true resilience is not about never falling, but about having the strength to chart your own path back up. Her journey remains a powerful blueprint for navigating personal trauma within a high-pressure world, forever changing what it means to be a champion.