"Simone Biles Rising" Part Two: Out Now
Watch the Gold Medal Conclusion of our Series, Now on Netflix
Today, part two of our series “Simone Biles Rising” debuts on Netflix. In it, our team follows Biles to Paris, as she chases (and—spoiler alert—gets!) gold at the 2024 Olympics. You’ll see a level of intimacy that few athletes have ever revealed at the Olympics.
On the occasion of part two’s release, here’s a reminder of the journey Biles took to get to Paris—and just how much of her world she let us see.
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 found herself there, 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 prior, she had to back out of competition when she got “the twisties,” where 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 figured the same thing. “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,” Biles said, “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.”
🧢 Dave Roberts and Aaron Boone know a thing or two about rivalries. They played against each other in college, Roberts on UCLA and Boone at USC. In the MLB, Roberts played a key role in the 2004 ALCS for the Red Sox over the Yankees, and Boone hit the game-winning home run in Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS for the Yankees over the Red Sox. Now? Roberts will manage the Dodgers and Boone will manage the Yankees in the World Series. At least they know the stakes.
😵💫 This week in the Wide World of Sports: Check out footage from the “Space-Out” Championships in Tokyo. Competitors attempted to “zone out” for 90 minutes, and could not laugh, smile, or fall asleep.
✡️ One of the great stories in college football this year is the emergence of undefeated BYU and their star quarterback Jake Retzlaff. There’s one particularly interesting thing about Retzlaff: he’s not Mormon. BYU’s quarterback is Jewish (and in the process, has earned the incredible nickname ‘BYJew’). The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins examines.
👶 Complex introduces us to the next great basketball prodigy: an Australian kid named Jordan Rulach…who’s all of 12 years-old.