The Simone Biles Story: Courage to Soar

I came across this movie on Lifetime free streaming. As a sports fan in general, and as a close observer living near Houston, I watched this with interest.

I suppose it is accurate but don't really know. It tells the story of Simone Biles who had a rough start with a mother unable to take care of her. So she was adopted by her grandparents and grew up in the Houston area. She is depicted as a very talented girl with often a bad attitude but her parents stuck with her and encouraged her. She wasn't always the best on the floor at various ages, as I had assumed, but had to work hard, mentored by her dedicated coach from 6 years of age.

The movie is well made and uses an actress that has a reasonable resemblance to Simone. They also use archive footage of actual competitions, spliced into the movie footage, to give it a mostly real look.

As history witnesses Simone Biles became multiple world champion and Olympic champion in 2016 Rio. She has a natural athletic ability to jump very high with allows additional time in the air to perform difficult tricks many of her peers cannot. Today, in 2022, she is generally considered the best of all time, through lots of natural talent but more so, lots of hard work.

Good movie. Roughly 90 minutes long.

As docu-dramas go, not bad. It is very hard to find 'region 2' DVDs of any US athletic champion's biopic, even to stream.

I barely knew anything about Simone Biles (I've since seen the Gabby Douglas story and was impressed by both films). I was interested to see how a bonafide mega-champion came to be. The story is well told with lots of impressive gymnastics. You have to admire her, her parents and her coach. The practical challenges, discouragements and whole psychological journey are as interesting as the physical development. And I liked how the gradual improvement was so well shown: The final scenes showing Ms Biles' olympic performances surprise, as a spectacular step-up from all that went before; delightful. The journey though all the build up this film offers, earns the viewer a much deeper understanding of what those final amazing feats really took to achieve. I've not been in such awe since Nadia Comaneci (and she had less height and complexity in her moves)

I really like sports movies, so this was right up my alley. Everyone knows who Simone Biles is and what she's achieved. But I didn't know much at all about her journey. This was a dramatized movie, so I'm not sure which parts of the plot were fictionalized. However, I was surprised that her gymnastics path wasn't so easy, aside from the abuse of the team doctor that was uncovered after the 2020 Olympics. I had kind of assumed that was the only gymnastics-related obstacle.

Assuming this aspect is accurately portrayed in the movie, I didn't know that she struggled for awhile with gymnastics itself in training and competitions, that the mental aspect was hard for her, and that she really had a hard time with the sacrifices she had to make to pursue gymnastics. In a way, it was reassuring that she's human - the media portrays her as larger than life, and it's helpful to think of her as someone just like you and me, who had an extraordinary talent, but who also suffered and worked incredibly hard to get to where she is. Her success wasn't just handed to her, and she wasn't born just being able to do all of this, and this movie does a good job showing what she had to give up and that she wasn't always sure and confident. She grew a lot, and it's motivating to see that challenges can be overcome. Another theme that was important to me was the importance of keeping what you do fun, even as you work as hard as you can at it. If it isn't fun anymore, then all of that work is meaningless and it's so much harder to succeed.