What many people featured in the series make clear is that when the twisties hit an athlete, the risk is not just that you’ll be embarrassed or lose. As 1992 Olympic medalist Betty Okino says—wwith a little reluctance because she doesn’t want to scare young gymnasts—yyou can die. If you can’t land on your feet and instead land on your head, you can die. If you’ve ever seen baseball players struggle with the yips and keep throwing wildly no matter how many therapies they have attempted, or if you idolize athletes who play hurt in general, think about whether they’d keep doing it if every errant throw was potentially life-threatening.

Biles is also quite open about the fact that the contemptuous and vicious way commentators like Jason Whitlock spoke about her (they still do!) took a toll. She acknowledges at one point that it was a good idea for her to turn off Instagram comments and that she’s removed Twitter (now X) from her phone a couple of times when she needs to.

But perhaps the most useful thing she does in the series is create context for her comeback. Yes, you get to see how she showed up in competition again in 2023 and performed very, very well at 26—an age when she says she thought she’d be retired. But while the timing of an Olympic competition can be brutal—iif you miss your moment, you don’t get another one for years—iit also means that if you need to recover, you have the time. After Tokyo in 2021, Biles and her coach say she didn’t really get underway in the gym again for about a year and a half. The coach says that the only real cure for the twisties is to take time off and try to work on your general well-being, including your mental health. And so, that’s what she did.