“It was so, so brave”: Simone Biles’ doc director on the gymnast pulling out of Tokyo Olympics.
Netflix doc director Katie Walsh on showing the “full human” side of Biles and following her to the Paris Games
It’s not the word you would expect to be associated with one of the greatest athletes of all time. And yet, in the summer of 2020, it was uttered across the country.
After suffering from a bout of “the twisties” — a disorienting sensation in which one’s brain and body don’t align during a mid-air move — during the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, Simone Biles, the most decorated Olympic gymnast of all time, elected to bow out of the competition. Rather than receiving support amid her troubles, however, Biles became the subject of a vitriolic campaign of media mudslinging. A barrage of tweets, podcast episodes, and opinion pieces about her Tokyo experience circulated, many of them dedicated to scrutinizing her performance at the 2020 Games and her “abandonment” of her teammates.
Simone Biles should be praised, not punished for achieving a feat that was deemed impossible
Then came Biles’ 2021 testimony before the U.S. Senate, in which she and her former teammates recounted the sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of former team doctor, Larry Nassar, as part of an examination into the shortcomings of the FBI’s investigation of the disgraced physician. “To be clear, I blame Larry Nassar and I also blame an entire system that enabled and perpetrated his abuse,” Biles told the Senate at the time, per CNN. “USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic and Paralympic committee knew that I was abused by their official team doctor long before I was ever made aware of their knowledge.” In “Simone Biles: Rising,” Netflix’s docuseries about Biles’ life and career, she explicitly refers to her twisties at Tokyo as a “trauma response” to the abuse she endured and its subsequent fallout.
Though Tokyo has faded in the background somewhat as the world readies for the upcoming summer games in Paris, a number of Biles’ naysayers have lingered. At 27, she will become the oldest female gymnast the U.S. has sent to the Olympics since the 1950s. And yet, the standout talent remains undeterred. After winning the Olympic trials last month, Biles told the Associated Press that her haters will “still say like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re going to quit again? Or are you going to quit again?’ And like, and ‘If I did, what are you going to do about it? Tweet me some more?’”
“Like I’ve already dealt with it for three years,” she added. “But yeah, they want to see us fail.”
“She’s got more tools in her toolkit now for handling those challenges,” Katie Walsh, director of “Simone Biles: Rising,” told Salon. “And I think it’s the process she’s gone through in the last couple of years that will allow her to rise above all of that criticism this time around.”
For Walsh, the series wasn’t merely about underscoring Biles’ uncontested athleticism — she wanted to show the “human being” who holds the weight of all the medals.
“I know for her [Simone], she wants to be looked at and viewed as a full human and not just this amazing gymnast you’ve come to really expect to be perfect at all times,” Walsh said.
Check out the full interview with Walsh, in which she shares the importance of giving the audience a sense of Simone’s “entire self,” how she tried to put Simone’s needs first when it came to talking about the Nassar ordeal, and her excitement about accompanying the Olympian to Paris this summer.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did the conversations to make a docuseries about Simone begin, and what made you want to tell her story in the first place?
Well, I mean, she’s such a compelling human to take a longer and deeper look at just because not only her abilities as an athlete and what she’s able to accomplish on the floor, but also what she’s accomplished outside of competition, both as an advocate for mental health, for survivors of sexual abuse, even for children that have been raised in the foster care system. She has used the experiences in her life to create a positive message for people who are going through similar experiences in their own lives.
And how did those conversations start? Did you approach Simone at first or did it evolve in a different way?
“She wants to be looked at and viewed as a full human and not just this amazing gymnast you’ve come to really expect to be perfect at all times.”
Yeah, so Simone and I have been working together in various projects for the last five years. So we already had a relationship and a rapport established, which benefited this project so much because we weren’t starting from square one. When she decided to come back last summer, the conversations began there. And, you know, I know it was something she really had to think about because it takes a lot of time and a lot of emotional and mental energy in a year that’s very busy already. But it was important to her to give people a window into her entire self. We all see her on the floor as the G.O.A.T. and the greatest ever. But we all don’t get to see and have the privilege of getting to know Simone, the human being. And I know for her, she wants to be looked at and viewed as a full human and not just this amazing gymnast you’ve come to really expect to be perfect at all times.
The series begins at a difficult time in Simone’s career after she pulls out of the Tokyo Olympics. Why did you decide to start there?
So that, to me, is really the springboard into the series. And it’s her “why,” you know, this next chapter in her career that I don’t think she necessarily thought was going to be part of her career — going into Tokyo. That was likely what she was projecting to be the end of her career. And then when she developed the twisties and had so many struggles with her mental health in Tokyo, it really reshaped both her message and her “why.”And the way that she continued on with her career was because of that and because she wanted to prove to herself, that she could come back and she could do it again.
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I think for an athlete who is so good at and used to being in control of her own body, not having that control is very disorienting. And I think regardless of whether she wins a bunch of medals in Paris, for her just to be there and showing up and proving to herself that she can do it again was really the big goal. So starting in Tokyo, where everything kind of unraveled was really also the beginning of this next chapter for us. And then with the series and the two episodes you’ve seen, what we’re trying to do is peel back the layers to her story and further develop the experiences in her life that have led and shaped her into the person she is and how all of those experiences create context for what happened in Tokyo. And I think when you have a broader understanding of her past and all of the things that she has been through in her life, it shines a different light on what happened in Tokyo and makes you have just a much more like kind of full 360 view of what that experience was and why it happened.
Absolutely. There are scenes that show Simone’s family rooting for her at home while she struggles in Tokyo because of the COVID-19 restrictions. How important was it for you to show the importance of the connection between community to an athlete’s physical performance? Because I think that’s something that people who maybe aren’t in the athletic community don’t understand.
Yeah. And for Simone personally, it’s such a big part of her success. I mean, she has this wonderful support system that goes with her to every competition. I mean, when she travels, she rolls deep. Like, there’s 15, 16 people there. It’s not just her mom and dad. And I think it’s one of the many things that we learned about humanity during COVID, was the importance of connection and community. It’s easy to just look at what’s happening on the field of play through — just sort of with blinders on, just seeing that one experience in isolation.
At one point we see the video of Kerri Strug from the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta when she performs a vault despite being severely injured. Why was it important to hear from other voices in gymnastics — like former Olympians Dominique Dawes and Betty Okino — specifically regarding the way certain harsh attitudes in the sport have evolved? What do you feel those voices brought to the conversation?
So I’m a big fan of history. And I think bringing little history pods to this film provides context for someone’s experience. You know, [Simone’s] life is not in a vacuum. Her experience in gymnastics is not in a vacuum. It’s all built on the building blocks of what came before her. And so whether that’s the culture of gymnastics or the way that injuries were looked at or viewed in the past versus the way they are now or the history of women of color in the sport, I think all of these experiences and all of these moments just provide greater context for understanding Simone’s experience and how she’s moving through her career. And the decisions she makes and the experiences she’s had have shaped her career, but also been part of the broader culture of gymnastics.
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This series touches on the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal, which Simone was unfortunately a survivor of. She notably calls what happened in Tokyo a “trauma response” to that experience, to the abuse. What were the challenges in asking Simone about such a deeply traumatic experience?
Yeah, so I was very mindful of how we talked about that and when we talked about it. And I’ve worked with a number of survivors specifically in the Larry Nassar case, going back to 2018. So I’m aware of how triggering and how emotionally taxing having that conversation truly is. We collaborated and spoke together about the best times to have that conversation. The benefit of this project is we’ve been working on it for a whole year. And so having a good understanding of her schedule and the rhythm of the gymnastics competitive season, we tried to do those bigger, emotional, heavy-lift conversations earlier in our time together, before she was really in the thick of competing. And that way, we’re not trying to have those kinds of conversations and then she’s having to go compete two weeks later. So it was a lot of paying attention to the timing and just communicating and working together to make sure that we find the right space and that if she needs her own support system there, she has that. So just working with her and putting her needs first.
“Simone Biles: Rising” emphasizes the extremely dangerous side of having the twisties like Simone did in Tokyo. How important was it to you to emphasize the precariousness of the sport?
“I give her a ton of credit.”
Yeah, I mean there’s so much judgment after what happened to her in Tokyo and so much judgment that was based on not fully understanding the gravity of the situation and how the sport works. And so we really wanted to set that record straight and make sure that the audience had an understanding of really just how intense that was, because when you’re watching it — if you don’t know a ton about gymnastics, even if you do, she still lands on her feet. You’re like, “OK, she made a mistake.” But the reality is that the reason she landed on her feet is because she is just so good that she was able to find her feet in that moment, whereas 99% of gymnasts probably wouldn’t have landed on their feet and would have been hurt much worse physically in that moment.
So I think trying to explain and unpack what the twisties is and why it is so dangerous was really important. I give her a ton of credit. She knows her body so well to be able to make that decision in the heat of the moment to withdraw from a competition that is as big as the Olympic Games. It takes someone with an intensely strong sense of character and understanding of their own body to be able to do that in the moment and not just like go off the adrenaline of the event. It’s when you understand what was really going on and how dangerous it could have been — I think you develop a greater appreciation and admiration for what she was able to do in that moment and the decision she made because it was so, so brave.
At one point participant and journalist Céline Nony talks about how the twisties almost bring about a greater stigma because they’re invisible. It can’t be seen like you can’t see it the same way you can see a broken leg or a fractured leg or something like that. So I think that sort of clarification was very, very useful for the viewer.
The series and you just touched on this briefly, but it discusses the pressures that Black women gymnasts have faced in the sport. How did you decide sort of which things to show in regard to that conversation and how much of this narrative you wanted to really bring into the series itself?
It’s to contextualize her experience. Simone has done so much to open doors and create spaces for future generations of young girls of color in this sport. And she is part of a lineage of other gymnasts who have done that and did that for her. And I felt it was important to not just honor that and showcase and shed a light on those women that came before her.
Some of the earlier women mentioned like Lucy Collins and Diane Durham — they never got their view in the sport and the accolades that they deserved. And I wanted to make sure that they were a part of this. And then Dominique Dawes and Betty Okino, both, who played such an important role in showing young athletes like Simone what’s possible for them. And obviously, then that continues to Gabby Douglas, who, as the first Olympic all-around champion and a woman of color — just such an incredible history that she made in that day, but also showing the struggles and the criticism that she faced, I think helps create a greater context for what Simone’s also gone through.
Simone talks about how her parents, who are technically her biological grandparents, helped repair her and her sister’s trauma after being in the foster care system and how that experience of having the odds sort of be against her as a kid in the foster care system almost inspired her to do some of the big things that she’s done. What were the conversations that led to including that aspect of Simone’s life, and what specifically did you want to say about it?
Well, families come in all shapes and sizes, right? And for Simone, she’s certainly had different experiences, different family struggles along the way. And the experiences that she had in foster care, those experiences of not really knowing what was coming next and what to expect as a young child — that’s something that stays with you. And I think it’s part of her story. It’s also, I think, part of her motivation. You know, she said in the film, “When people question if you can succeed when you come out of the foster care system, I wanted to prove that you could.”
That’s how she approaches so many challenges in her life, with like the, “You don’t think I can do this? Watch me,” kind of attitude, which is what makes her this great athlete and champion that she is. So I felt like it was an important part of her story to understand, just in building and understanding her character and the strength of her character and why she approaches the challenges of today the way she does. I think it all routes back to those early childhood experiences.
When Simone dropped out of Tokyo, as we’ve already discussed, she faced a litany of naysayers who accused her of abandoning her team and being a quitter. This series shows her actually reading some of those nasty tweets out loud. Simone — who won the Olympic trials — recently stated that she moved past Tokyo three years ago, and if her critics haven’t, that’s on them. How do you feel about this still lingering tension after having directed this series and now ahead of Paris?
Well, I think especially for Simone and all young athletes, social media has become a voice that’s constantly in your head. It’s really impossible to avoid. And a lot of people are account critics, right? And they’re at home just tapping away.
