‘Simone Biles Rising’ Team Shares How to Make a Sports Documentary That Goes for the Gold
In the first episode of Netflix’s Simone Biles Rising, the titular sports icon details her approach to the 2023 World Championships.
“Not talking to media,” Biles says. “Staying in my zone. Still following up with my therapist. I turned off my comments on Instagram… Twitter I have actually deleted a couple times off my phone.”
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Later that same week, Biles became the first-ever woman to land a Yurchenko double-pike at the competition, earning her a 5th skill named after her. Onscreen, gymnastics commentators swoon over the historicism of Biles’ feat, emphasizing how much the athlete has done for the sport. But in the documentary, the now-27-year-old is is clear: She stuck the landing of this one all for herself.
Simone Biles Rising director Katie Walsh, along with the team at production company Religion of Sports, began working with Biles in 2019 — their first project with the gymnastics legend was 2021’s Simone vs. Herself, a seven-episode series on Facebook Watch. Five years later, they are now the same team behind the Netflix series, which released Part One on Thursday.
“There’s been a lot of living that’s happened in these five years,” Walsh says. Biles competed at her second Olympics, Tokyo 2020 (held 2021), where she subsequently and shockingly dropped out from most events after battling mental blocks. She then took several years off from the sport, undecided if she’d ever return, before announcing in 2023 that she had her eyes set on Paris 2024 (the Yurchenko double-pike moment was her first international event in two years). Also in that time, she became an adult, got married and began building a home with husband Jonathan Owens.
As all this unfolded, Walsh and her team were watching. “The conversation never really stopped between the first series and this one,” says executive producer Giselle Parets.
But Walsh’s philosophy has never been about pushing subjects beyond their comfort zone, and if Biles hadn’t ever come back, that would have been fine. “Our filming and our approach to filming has matured alongside her,” Walsh says.
But come back Biles did, and with excellent poetic flair — the series’ title, Simone Biles Rising, is based on the gymnast’s tattoo of the famous Maya Angelou line, “And still I rise.” In a trailer for the series, Viola Davis reads the poem.
Part One follows Biles from Tokyo until early 2024, as she navigates her break from and eventual return to the sport. The two hourlong episodes delve into gymnastics’ recent and not-so-recent histories, catching the viewer up on stories good and bad of Kerri Strug’s one-leg landing at the 1996 Olympics, the infamous Marta and Bela Karolyi training camps, Gabby Douglas’ all-around gold in 2012 and the 2017 prosecution of Larry Nassar, the former USA Gymnastics doctor now in prison for sexually abusing hundreds of his young patients (Biles has been open about the fact that she was one of them).
“It was important for understanding the culture of gymnastics and the experiences of people who came before [Simone],” Walsh says of how she managed to balance the personal and the systemic for Netflix’s doc. “We’ve heard the Larry Nasser story before, but this is strictly Simone’s experience,” she says.
Part Two — set for release this fall — will follow Biles’ journey at the Paris Olympics, and Walsh spoke to The Hollywood Reporter several days before she hopped on a France-bound plane. The director spoke about what it’s like to be in charge of a project without knowing how this will all end.
“I have many outlines,” she says with a smile. “Whether the episodes will look like my outlines is to be decided.”
Parets says the uncertainty means the crew does their own version of gymnastics, planning and re-planning as Biles’ writes her story. “Our teams are pretty small,” Parets says. “So that allows you to have more shoot days, the ability to hop on a plane and go film something that initially you weren’t planning on.”
But that’s what makes these documentaries so delicious, isn’t it? “There’s something mythic about sports,” Gotham Chopra, series ep and co-founder of Religion Of Sports, says. “We’re always trying to figure out, What’s the underlying myth? Can we find something classical, whether it’s from The Iliad or The Odyssey, or even more diverse kind of myths — what is the story really about?”
Walsh says Part One was “Simone’s ‘Why'” — why gymnastics, why drop out of the Olympics, why come back?
The other ‘Why’ for her would be: Why say yes to a documentary? Biles has spoken many times since Tokyo about the invisible mental health battles all athletes endure. “There’s how the outside world looks in, and then there’s the way the [Simone] on the inside is perceiving the world around her,” Walsh says. “It was important to her that people see more than just the side we see on the competitive floor,”
Walsh has covered gymnastics since 2007 — in the words of Chopra, she “knows everything” about the sport, including an understanding of how the schedule ebbs and flows throughout the season, which left the director equipped to make a filming schedule that worked for Biles.
“Especially when it came to interviews that were more sensitive, subjects about Larry Nassar or mental health — you don’t want to be asking those questions one week before she’s going to compete,” Walsh says. “As a team, we were very mindful of not just what we asked but when we asked it.”
Beyond Biles’ interviews, the series is peppered with other perspectives, including fellow teammates, coaches, an international assortment of sports journalists and commentators and Dr. Onnie Willis Rogers, a former gymnast-turned-psychologist. Walsh says she selected sources that could further contextualize Biles’ personal experience within the sport.
“Whether it was the Kerri Strug moment or the Gabby Douglas all-around moment, hearing from Simone, how she perceived those moments and took them in, how she processed what they were going through is how it stays true to her,” she says.
All of that context now converges as Biles heads to Paris, and Walsh will be there to capture it. Many expect the gymnast to dominate again, but Walsh knows all to well how dangerous it can be to expect the expected. Still, she isn’t worried. “[Simone is] this mature woman who knows what she wants and is really doing this for herself in a way that you don’t always see, especially in gymnastics,” she says. “It would be wonderful for her to win all the gold medals, but I think the showing up and putting herself out there has been the greatest achievement.”
Simone Biles Rising Part One is now streaming on Netflix.
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