The Olympics are coming, and coming to television, which means that soon we’ll be seeing, along with cute little spots on la vie Parisienne, a panoply of short informational films on (mostly) American athletes, introducing us to their families or childhood dreams or tragedies overcome, in order that we may invest more fully in their quests for gold.
If you are looking for a deeper, more thoughtful, less facile curtainraiser, may I recommend “Simone Biles Rising,” a genuinely inspiring two-part documentary premiering Wednesday on Netflix — to be accurate, this is the first half of what will be a four-part doc, with a yet-to-be written conclusion arriving in the fall. Directed by Katie Walsh, the series comes with drama built in, as Simone Biles returns to the Olympics after having withdrawn from the 2020 Games after her mind disconnected from her body, leaving her literally lost in space — there is a word for it among gymnasts, the twisties. (Teammate Joscelyn Roberson likens it to getting on a roller coaster, closing your eyes and finding yourself on a different roller coaster.)
But there’s more going on here than that obvious, if obviously riveting comeback story. (At 27, Biles will be the oldest American woman to compete in Olympic gymnastics in 72 years.) “Rising” looks at what makes an extraordinarily gifted person an ordinary person, rather than the other way around; it’s a portrait of an articulate, self-possessed, forthright, good-humored young woman, a daughter, sister, teammate, friend and newlywed (to Green Bay Packer Jonathan Owens — they’re cute together and not just because he’s more than a foot taller). Critically, she’s a survivor of sexual abuse, one of the hundreds of victims, and an outspoken one, of the infamous Larry Nassar, the team doctor now spending life in prison. It’s a trauma she relates to her coming apart at Tokyo; therapy, and putting herself back together, is a theme of the film.
Followers of documentaries on female sports superstars may be reminded of 2021‘s similarly intimate “Naomi Osaka,” also on Netflix, about the tennis star who backed out of the French Open and then Wimbledon, citing mental health issues. People who tend to view athletes as something less than human, or more than human, but not exactly human, may not quite credit them with … mentality, or, if they do, may regard the brain merely as an instrument of winning or an obstacle to winning — when the pressure to win may be getting in the way of a life. And as the winningest woman in her sport, Biles has known that pressure.
The series, which follows Biles from her Tokyo breakdown to the doorstep of Paris, is sympathetic to its cooperative subject. What’s not to like? She doesn’t appear to be a person who needs excuses made for her or who makes them for herself. The opening episode, “Write Me Down in History” — “I always knew that I wanted to break boundaries and statistics” — wastes no time in getting to the low point: “Your body can only function for so long before your fuses blow out.” (“Really?” she recalls thinking. “Right now we’re going to do this?”)
She was publicly lambasted afterward, called a quitter by pundits and tweeters “who couldn’t even do a cartwheel”; the ample support she received didn’t register as strongly as the criticism, and the self-criticism. (Her Tokyo souvenirs are packed into a “forbidden” closet in a room she rarely enters.) But “Rising” makes clear what casual watchers of the sport may never consider — that it’s potentially more dangerous than a broken bone. “Most of the time I’m just trying not to die,” Biles says of executing the extremely difficult Yurchenko double pike, not exaggerating. It’s now named for her — the fifth element to bear her name — having landed it at the 2023 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, the first woman to do so.
With commentary from Olympic medalists Aly Raisman, Svetlana Boguinskaia, Betty Okino and Dominique Dawes, it’s also a brief history of women’s gymnastics, Black women’s place in it and the toxic environment that ruled U.S. gymnastics for decades, as created by the strict, severe, autocratic, “military” coaches Béla and Márta Károlyi, along with others who sought to emulate their success. Things have improved by the look of it: Biles’ current coaches, Laurent Landi and Cécile Canqueteau-Landi, seem more concerned with her well-being than with her winning medals.
Biles is so accomplished that one need not have any interest in gymnastics to find her art compelling; it is only a matter of fact that she can twist and turn and flip in combinations no other woman has. There is something akin to magic in what she does, and like magic, it is all the more impressive for being the result of human discipline and ingenuity. She’s extended the range of the possible, and there is a beauty and excitement in her performances that is the equal of any other aesthetic experience.