Simone Biles Rising review: Why the gymnast was dropped from Olympics
The Netflix documentary “Simone Biles Rising” examines the gymnast’s life after she has recovered from the 2020 Olympics and gets ready for the 2024 Olympics.
By Robert Lloyd
Jul 17, 2024 08:08 PM
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’re looking for a more thoughtful and more thoughtful, but more engaging curtain-raiser, I suggest “Simone Biles Rising,” an inspirational two-part documentary that premieres on Wednesday on Netflix To be precise, this is the first part of a four-part documentary and a yet to be written finale due to be released in the autumn. Produced by Katie Walsh, the series is filled with drama the way that Simone Biles returns to the Olympics after she been withdrawn from her participation in the 2020 Games after her mind swung away with her body. This left her lost in space. there’s a term for it among gymnasts called “the twisties. (Teammate Joscelyn Roberson likens it as being on an escalator close your eyes and then waking up in a different ride.)
However, there’s more beyond that simple but clearly riveting comeback story. (At 27 years old, Biles becomes the first American woman to take part in Olympic gymnastics for 72 years.) “Rising” looks at what can make an extraordinaryly gifted person an ordinary person, and not the reverse. it’s an account of a confident and confident, confident, honest and jovial young lady, an aunt, a teammate, sister as well as a newlywed (to Green Bay Packers player Jonathan Owens — they’re adorable together, and not just because he’s a bit more than an inch higher). Importantly, she’s a victim of sexual assault and is one of the thousands of survivors, as well as an outspoken survivor of the notorious Larry Nassar who was the team doctor currently serving his life in prison. She relates her trauma to her breaking apart at Tokyo as well as therapy and recovering her self is the theme of the film.
Female fans of documentaries about sports stars could be reminded of the 2021 version of the personal ” Naomi Osaka,” which is also available on Netflix about the tennis pro who quit tennis’s French Open and then Wimbledon due to mental health issues. People who consider athletes to be something other than human, or perhaps more than humans, but not quite human, might not really believe that they possess … mental health or in the event that they do, might view the brain as merely an instrument to win or a barrier to winning, even though the pressure to win could be causing problems in the course of living a full life. Biles is the highest-scoring athlete in the world, Biles has known that pressure.
The story is a follow-up of Biles through her Tokyo breakdown until her return to the streets of Paris it is very tolerant of the subject matter. What’s not to love? She doesn’t seem to be one who requires excuses for herself or creates them for herself. The episode that opens the show, “Write Me Down in History” -“Write Me Down in the History “I always knew that I wanted to break boundaries and statistics” The episode wastes nothing in bringing us to the bottom: “Your body can only function for so long before your fuses blow out.” (“Really?” she thinks. “Right now we’re going to do this?”)
Afterward, she was widely criticized and was branded a quitter by Twitterers and pundits “who couldn’t even do a cartwheel” The overwhelming help that she received didn’t resonate as much as the criticism and self-criticism. (Her Tokyo souvenirs are packed in the “forbidden” closet in a room she doesn’t go into.) However “Rising” makes clear what viewers of the sport would never think of the fact that it’s more hazardous than a fractured bone. “Most of the time I’m just trying not to die,” Biles declares of performing the complicated Yurchenko double pike. She’s not exaggerating. It’s now named in her honor as the fifth element that bears her name, having won it in the 2023 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships and being the first female gymnast to ever do it.
With commentary by Olympic athletes Aly Raisman Svetlana Boguinskaia Betty Okino and Dominique Dawes, it’s also an introduction to gymnastics for women, Black women’s place in it, as well as the toxic atmosphere that governed U.S. gymnastics for decades that was shaped by the harsh, severe and autocratic “military” coaches Bela and Marta Karolyi and others who aimed to emulate their achievements. The situation has improved since the appearance of it: Biles’ current coaches, Laurent Landi and Cecile Canqueteau-Landi seem more concerned about her health more than winning medals.
Biles is so skilled that one doesn’t have any passion for the sport of gymnastics in order to consider her work captivating. It’s just the her ability to spin and turn and flip in ways that which no one else can. There’s a certain magic in her work and, just like magic, it’s an all the more impressive it’s an outcome of effort and inventiveness. She has expanded the scope of possibilities as well as there’s an enthralling and beautiful quality to her performance that is like nothing else you’ve ever experienced in your aesthetic experience.