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. Now, with Biles’s third Olympics behind her and four more Olympic medals in her pocket, the show is back with its two final episodes, covering the lead-up to and aftermath of Paris 2024.
“This time coming back, it’s truly for myself,” Biles says in the series. “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 says she’s “gonna come at” anyone who talks about her husband or family.
Throughout the year, 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.
Later in the series, Biles addresses Owens’s viral comments — namely, that he hadn’t heard of the gymnast prior to dating her — head-on, reiterating that she believes the quotes were “taken out of context.” Clearly frustrated, Biles recalled how some of her biggest fans quickly turned into “Jonathan’s biggest haters.” “Who’s gonna go to somebody’s profile and say who you can or can’t love? That’s just ridiculous,” she says. “They equate our love to the amount of trophies and medals and accolades that I have, and that’s not how you measure love.”
In particular, Biles stresses that comments addressing Owens and their relationship on social media had gotten under her skin, exacerbating the stress she felt preparing for the Paris Olympics.
“I know we signed up to be judged in the gym, but when you guys are gonna talk about him or my family … yeah, I’m gonna come at you guys,” she warns. “Most of the time, I bite my tongue. Now I’m like, ‘Yeah, I have a voice, I’ve always had a voice. Just because you didn’t think I would see it doesn’t mean I’m not obligated to respond.’”
Biles pushes through pain for fear of being called a “quitter” again.
As the series follows Biles preparing for the Olympic trials, she’s forced to contend with several injuries that threaten her Olympic viability. If you watched the 2024 Olympics, you might recall Biles wincing during the women’s gymnastics qualifying day after landing strangely in her floor-warm-up session. Behind the scenes, we see Biles mentally struggling to accept the realities of her calf injury at such an inopportune moment and praying she hasn’t torn her Achilles. “As soon as I took off, I was like, ‘Ooh, oh … That hurt really bad. That didn’t feel right,’” she recalls. “I just felt a weird sensation in my calf muscle.” At one point, Biles is shown approaching her coach, explaining she felt the strain “right where I had that fucking tear.” After being evaluated, Team USA’s trainers ask Biles if she wants to move forward in the competition, which, as we know now, she does.
“Déjà vu. It was … ugh! It was so annoying, and I think that’s what irritated me the most,” she says, laughing and rolling her eyes. “As soon as I got off the floor I was like, ‘People are gonna think I’m quitting again.’”
Biles’s close friend and former Olympic teammate Aly Raisman also recalls the moment Biles chose to push through the injury and continue on with the qualifying round: “It really broke my heart. I asked her, ‘How did you do it when you were in so much pain?’ And she said, ‘I couldn’t have people tell me I was a quitter again.’”
Owens also calls his wife a “freaking warrior” for fighting through injuries and dealing with the mental pressure of the Olympics. “My baby always show up,” he says. “Always.” But as Biles sees it, “once you get [to the Games], that’s what you’re longing for. That takes away the pain of everything, and you’re like, ‘I finally made it.’”
Biles reckons with her age, saying she’s “terrified to be 27.”
On March 14, at 5:30 a.m., Biles is shown celebrating her 27th birthday — which, in her world, means quickly acknowledging the date, handing out a few hugs, then trying to move on as quickly as possible. “I’m so old,” she says with a laugh as she passes teammate Jordan Chiles. “Old as shit.”
“Most people are so happy for their birthday, and for some reason I’m, like, terrified to be 27,” she says. “I felt that all year. It feels old to me, at least for a gymnast.”
While she acknowledges that growing up has made her more confident in the gym, getting older has also made her “a little bit more afraid” for her body, especially in a sport in which youth is seen as the gold standard. At 27, Biles became the oldest American gymnast to qualify for the Olympics since 1952. “You know how I said I was aging like fine wine? I think I’m starting to rot,” Biles says of her piling injuries. “My body is a ticking time bomb, that’s how I feel.”
“As we get older, we used to think that our bodies were kind of rusting. It’s all we knew,” Biles says. “You peak at 16 and after that, you get a woman body, then who knows what’s gonna happen?”
Especially after Tokyo, Biles says most people thought she “was gonna go downhill or be washed up.” Instead, she emphasizes the importance of training smarter, and strengthening her mental fortitude — a tactic that clearly worked out for her.
Biles nails her “redemption tour”: “We fucking did it.”
With renewed mental fortitude, Biles arrives at the Paris Olympics and is determined to make up for her previous Olympics performance. “The redemption tour became a team thing because we were all longing for something that we didn’t get in Tokyo,” she says. “We’d like to go out there and just show them that we can do it. We’re smarter, we’re stronger, we’re older, we’re more mature.”
Perhaps older and wiser, but none of that shielded Biles from the stress of the Games. Leading up to qualifying, Biles is captured in her hotel room bickering with Owens about her flyaways and edges. She quickly apologizes, adding that she’s often the “most anxious and nervous” in the hotel room while getting ready because she just wants to get the meet over with. “You truly feel like you’re gonna throw up, cry, pee yourself,” she adds.
As the Americans battle for team gold, Biles says she leaned on the tools she learned in therapy to avoid getting the twisties again. “This morning, I had therapy, and I did all of my visualizations,” she says. “I have done the work religiously in therapy every Thursday. So I knew that wasn’t gonna happen again.” Coming off the dreaded vault, the gymnast confirms that she didn’t have any “flashbacks or anything.” “I felt a lot of relief, and as soon as I landed vault, I was like, ‘Oh yeah … we’re going to do this.’” Sure enough, they “fucking did it”: Biles and Team USA take home gold in the team event.
Later, during the all-around competition, Biles faces an additional threat: Brazil’s secret weapon and reigning gold medalist on vault, Rebeca Andrade. At every turn, Andrade challenges Biles’s dominance. “Andrade’s giving me a run for my money. It’s stressing me out,” Biles says with a laugh while watching Andrade compete on vault. “Once she stuck that, I was like, ‘Oh, you gotta be kidding me. She’s not human.’ People think I’m not human? She’s not human.” Still, Biles forges ahead, becoming a two-time Olympic all-around champion and re-cementing her status as the GOAT of gymnastics.
Reflecting on her gymnastics career, Biles wonders, “What happens in life now?”
With her third Olympics behind her, Biles says good-bye to Paris, and maybe gymnastics for good. While Biles has said she hasn’t ruled out Los Angeles 2028, it’s likely the Olympian will ease into retirement. “I felt a lot of relief, but I’m like, ‘Oh my God, what happens in life now?’” she says.
What I’ll miss most about gymnastics is the freedom with my body,” Biles adds. “But if I look back on my career, honestly, the thing I’d be most proud of is staying true to myself and never swaying from that.” Amen to that.
This post has been updated.