How Simone Biles Rebuilt Everything After Tokyo
Our new series, 'Simone Biles Rising' is out now on Netflix
At the start of our new Netflix series Simone Biles Rising, we see the four-time gold medalist and her husband, Chicago Bears safety Jonathan Owens, as they walk through the house they are building together in Houston. It’s as perfect as metaphors come. Simone Biles is here, on the brink of the 2024 Paris Olympics, only because she had to tear her life down to the studs. At the Tokyo Olympics three years ago, she had to back out of competition when she got “the twisties,” where mentally she couldn’t perform her routine. “Everything that has happened in my career…we’ve shoved down into a box,” she says in the film, “and your body can only function so long before your fuses blow out.”
Paris will be Biles’ third Olympics. Even competing in two Olympic cycles was close to unprecedented before Biles. After Tokyo, most assumed that Biles was finished, that her ability to come back and help her team win a bronze medal would be the final image of her career. In the series, even Biles reveals she thought the same. “I thought we would’ve been retired after 2020,” she said.
Ah, yes. 2020. For Simone, the Tokyo Olympics—scheduled for 2020 but actually held in 2021—were nothing less than a perfect storm of pressure. As she boarded a plane for the games, she found ads featuring herself smiling back in the airport. Due to COVID restrictions, family couldn’t make the trip. If she won a medal, she’d have to put it around her own neck. The fun wasn’t anywhere to be found. “You know that statue, the one with the guy holding his world on his back?” Simone asks at one point in the first episode. Yeah—that’s what it felt like.
We all saw the results. She broke down. Her brain couldn’t connect with the rest of her body.
“After Tokyo, I literally had not one ounce of belief in myself,” she said. Then Simone remembered a line of Maya Angelou’s. And still I rise. “When kids come and ask me for advice, when they have a mental block or they’re scared, I’m like, ‘We’ll go all the way down to the basics, then we’ll build your way back up.’”
She continued, “That’s sort of where we started from: square one.”
Which brings us back to the house. The first thing builders do is make plans. Then they clear the land. And then, piece by piece, they start to construct something new, something better, something unique.
When you do it that way, going all the way down to the foundation, you can build something that lasts. You gain newfound strength. As Simone says, “I get to write my own ending.”
🎾 When you’re done watching Simone Biles’ story, don’t forget to catch our show In the Arena: Serena Williams on ESPN+ and ESPN every Tuesday evening. Episode two is out now, and it explores Serena’s relationship with her sister Venus. Did you know that from 2002-2003, Serena and Venus met in four straight Grand Slam championship matches? The sisters break down why that was, in their opinion, the toughest stretch of their careers. Watch now!
⚾ And our latest film for FS1, Welcome to the J-Rod Show, about Julio Rodriguez debuted last week. Check out the trailer here!
👏 This is pretty cool. Mallory Weggemann, a five-time Paralympic medalist, will become NBC’s first disabled host of the Olympics when they start later this month in Paris. “After I was paralyzed I yearned to turn on the TV and see someone I saw myself in, someone who could show me a path forward for what was possible in this world,” Weggemann wrote on Instagram while announcing the news. “And everywhere I turned, I came up empty handed.” Not anymore! Bravo, Mallory.
🧱 Czech player Barbora Krejcikova won Wimbledon last weekend. Some of her fans? Czech LEGO enthusiasts. Look what they made her!
