Simone Biles and the Limits of “Work Ethic”
A new documentary examines the gymnast’s difficult decision to exit the 2021 Olympics, and the lessons she’s taking to the upcoming Summer Games.
Three years ago, the celebrated gymnast Simone Biles made a pivotal career choice: She withdrew from competition in the Summer Olympics. Biles cited the “twisties” as her reason for bowing out, but the trivial-sounding term belied the serious risks of the phenomenon, which can make gymnasts lose control of their body. In Simone Biles Rising, a new four-part Netflix docuseries about Biles, another Olympian explains the potential consequences of such a mental disconnect. “You could die,” the retired gymnast Betty Okino says. “It’s the reality of flipping up in the air upside down and having to land on your feet. Your head could hit first.”
At the time, many of the sports pundits and social media users who weighed in on Biles’s exit from the Tokyo competition didn’t care about these dangers. Instead, they framed her choice as a personal failure, accusing the world’s best gymnast of making excuses for quitting when her team—and America itself—needed her: “What happened to fighting through injury, working through stuff you didn’t really wanna do?” one sportscaster asks in a clip shown in the docuseries. The debilitating effect of these judgments is central to Simone Biles Rising, which follows the gymnast’s attempts to reconcile her mental and physical health in recent years. To explain why Biles needed to step away, and why some people were so quick to criticize her for it, the series delves into how modern gymnastics became so grueling.
With Biles poised to make a triumphant return at the Paris Olympics, which begin later this month, these insights feel especially timely. Some of the documentary’s most important scenes describe the climate that encouraged Biles and other young gymnasts to endure painful injuries and accept mistreatment from authority figures. The first two episodes spend considerable time detailing the rise of married couple Márta and Béla Károlyi, the Romanian coaches who are often credited with elevating the sport in the United States. The Károlyis’ training methods, which became commonplace on American teams beginning in the 1980s, subjected hundreds of young girls, including Biles, to brutal conditions in pursuit of athletic excellence. At the Károlyis’ ranch, where gymnasts’ parents were not permitted to accompany them, young athletes were discouraged from expressing themselves at all. “I realized they held our careers in their hands,” Biles says of the Károlyis. “We couldn’t put [ourselves] on a World team or an Olympic team.”
Following a montage of commentators calling Biles a quitter, one of her coaches, Laurent Landi, explains that the only cure for the twisties is taking time away from competition to understand what caused the conflict between the athlete’s mind and body. Usually, Landi notes, the reason is something unrelated to gymnastics. For Biles, a major factor was the aftermath of the abuse she suffered at the hands of former national-team doctor Larry Nassar. Nassar, who preyed on Biles, and hundreds of other preteen and teenage girls, was emboldened partly by the knowledge that gymnasts were already trained not to speak up for themselves. In 2018, he was convicted on multiple counts of sexual assault—and Biles was suddenly tasked with talking about Nassar’s crimes. “When everything came out, that’s all you can think about, because it’s like walking around with ‘survivor’ or something on your forehead,” she says in the documentary. “I don’t think people realize that explaining that story, and being, like, a survivor and an advocate for that, it’s so mentally exhausting.”
[Read: What Simone Biles understands about greatness]
Simone Biles Rising doesn’t belabor specifics of the allegations against Nassar. Instead, it focuses on how the fallout affected Biles—and makes clear that the abuse itself, and the strain of being one of the Nassar story’s most high-profile figures, fundamentally changed her relationship to her own body. At the same time that she was training to compete in Tokyo, Biles had also been preparing to testify in a Senate hearing about the Nassar investigation alongside other gymnasts, who criticized FBI and USA Gymnastics officials for failing to act on their knowledge of his misconduct. The psychological toll of all this was not visible to the disappointed spectators who accused the four-time gold medalist of simply cracking under Olympics pressure. For them, the mental and emotional burdens Biles faced seemed far easier to dismiss than a concrete physical injury like a fractured ankle. Some of Biles’s loudest critics were conservative pundits who already considered young (and typically Black) athletes to be coddled: In one 2021 clip, the former ESPN turned Blaze Media commentator Jason Whitlock insists that he’s “not accepting an excuse of, ‘Oh, the mental stress.’”
Even today, when much more is known about the long-term consequences of injury, the view that athletes should be judged by their willingness to suffer for their sport remains entrenched among the public. The attitude persists even among some athletes themselves: In a recent YouTube video that has since been deleted, Biles’s former teammate MyKayla Skinner said that SafeSport, an independent organization that investigates allegations of abuse within the Olympics, has made it harder for coaches to be as aggressive and intense as they need to be. Skinner added that, aside from Biles, many girls on the U.S. Olympic team “don’t have the work ethic.” But Simone Biles Rising suggests that withdrawing at the height of public interest in her torment was perhaps the greatest evidence of Biles’s dedication to the sport. Sustaining a severe—or fatal—injury by competing would not have made her a better athlete. This argument also echoes the sentiments that other athletes, including fellow gymnasts, shared at the time: Aly Raisman, one of Biles’s former Olympic teammates, referred to Biles’s decision as an act of bravery. Raisman is one of many gymnasts who appear in the new series, offering thoughtful perspectives on the unique hazards of their sport and what it means that Biles acknowledged the trauma of Nassar’s predation and the ensuing investigation.
The retired Team USA gymnast Dominique Dawes, who also trained with the Károlyis, provides valuable historical context: Dawes competed in the 1992 Olympics despite having tendonitis in both ankles and inflammation in her knees; in the documentary, she laments the immense sacrifices that were expected under the Károlyis’ tutelage. At the 1996 Olympics, the Károlyis insisted that Kerri Strug perform a second vault despite having badly injured her ankle. We see the famous shot of Strug landing briefly on both feet, ensuring that the U.S. women’s gymnastic team would win its first-ever gold medal. But almost immediately afterward, Strug collapses to the ground in apparent agony. “When Simone stepped back, I think people started to scrutinize and really think about the pressure that is upon these athletes,” Dawes says in an on-screen interview. “And I think the Kerri Strug moment, people started to look at it, and they were like, ‘Is that too much on a young child?’”
At 27, Biles is wrestling with these kinds of questions, in some cases rewriting the stories of bodily sacrifice that shaped her earliest views of Olympic-level athleticism. Her earnest attempts to contend with what happened in Tokyo, and everything leading up to her withdrawal, make it all the more satisfying to see her dominate competitions ahead of Paris. Reflecting on her journey back to the Olympic stage, Biles notes that this comeback is deeply personal. But Simone Biles Rising proposes that her return represents something much larger than the story of one Olympian: Watching Biles now is an important reminder that professional excellence doesn’t have to come at the cost of an athlete’s health.