Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Simone Biles: Rising’ on Netflix, a Four-Part Documentary Look At The All-Time Gymnastics Great

Simone Biles is an Olympian without peer, a gymnast so great that moves previously thought impossible now bear her name. Being great isn’t easy, though. On the eve of the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics , Simone Biles: Rising , a new four-part documentary on Netflix, gives us a look into the American star’s success and struggles.

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The Gist: The pressure to be great can be crushing. That’s a through-line in Simone Biles: Rising , a four-part documentary that gives tremendous access into Biles’ life. Interviews with Biles, those close to her, and figures from around the sport are mixed with competition footage. Together, they tell the story of her rise and her struggle with the demands one faces at the top of the sporting world.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Netflix is gearing up their sports-documentary content in advance of the Paris games, and a recent comp is their excellent track-and-field-focused Sprint . Where that series focuses on a collection of top athletes, however, Simone Biles: Rising is–as you’d expect–all about one.

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Performance Worth Watching: Are you really watching anyone else when Simone Biles is performing? C’mon. Get your head in the game.

Memorable Dialogue: “I knew it wasn’t just like, ‘oh, oops, sorry’,” Biles recalls thinking after her first failed vault attempt in Tokyo. “I was like, ‘how am I supposed to tell them that this is bad bad?”

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Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Simone Biles is among the most-decorated gymnasts of all time, and arguably (or even inarguably) the greatest performer the sport has ever seen. There are currently five different moves in the women’s artistic gymnastics scoring system named after her. She’s the kind of athlete that other athletes stand in awe of, and a mainstay on magazine covers, cereal boxes and record books. “I don’t think anyone in any other sport has been that dominant, ever,” marvels Biles’ US Olympic teammate Joscelyn Roberson. “It’s like an NFL team never losing the Super Bowl.”

Simone Biles: Rising doesn’t open with a triumph, though.

The specter of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (held in 2021, due to COVID) looms over Biles’ present. Expected to dominate the Games much as she had five years earlier in Rio de Janeiro, Biles instead introduced many viewers to the dreaded-in-gymnastics notion of “the twisties” – a suddenly inability to orient oneself in midair that can prove devastating to a gymnast’s performance and even dangerous to their well-being. She pulled out of the Tokyo games, shocking the sports world while citing mental health concerns.

The tension in that moment provides a leaping-off point for the real story of Simone Biles: Rising –that of the immense pressures placed on high-level athletes, pressures that have begun long before we see them step onto the floor at the Olympics. Those pressures were only heightened under the COVID restrictions during the Tokyo games. As former gymnast Onnie Willis recalls, “I immediately said, ‘she’s alone’. Like, the fact that the athletes have to travel without family, without friends, without their network, and it grossly underestimates the importance of connection and community to our physical performance and possibilities.” In this moment, the years of intense, militaristic training that future Olympians go through truly came to a head.

Simone Biles: Rising isn’t a story of victimization, though; it’s a story of an athlete taking back their narrative. In the wake of her withdrawal from the Tokyo games, she faced a deluge of criticism from commentators and fans, with some accusing her of quitting on her team. It wasn’t fair or right then, but Biles has the stature to fight back. This documentary is a great look inside a tremendous athlete’s life, but it’s also a statement; she will not let others tell her story. She’s here to give the full picture.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Not every athlete is worthy of a documentary, but Simone Biles isn’t just any athlete. Simone Biles: Rising is a well-crafted document of one of the best to ever do it.

Scott Hines, publisher of the widely-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter , is an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky.

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