“The Gabby Douglas Story” is not a good movie, but its flaws suggest what a great gymnastics movie would be. The biopic of the Olympic all-around gymnastics champion, which aired on Lifetime on February 1st, was a saccharine, plodding affair that never missed an occasion to remind us of what we had just been told—Gabby’s mother wants her to “believe in her dreams” and, yes, in case you missed it, “believe in her dreams”—while failing to illuminate much about the intricacies of training to become an élite gymnast. That 3.8 million viewers tuned in for the first broadcast—it aired again on February 3rd—suggests just how strong an interest there is in women’s gymnastics. While it would be a mistake to expect a Lifetime biopic to deliver a work of gritty, subtle realism, I wish this one had spent more time on the specifics of being a highly focussed athlete, and less on the fuzzy aspirational self-help talk that can surround it.
The story itself is a potentially interesting one: Douglas is the only Olympic all-around gold medalist who also won a team gold medal. She is a gymnast who combines incredible flexibility with massive power—the height she gets on her release moves on the uneven parallel bars is stunning. She is also one of few African-American gymnasts in a predominantly white sport, and has spoken publicly about the racism that she experienced at her gym in Virginia Beach; she was born with a metabolic disorder that threatened her life; and her mother, Natalie Hawkins, filed for bankruptcy in 2012, after years of raising her children on her own. (Douglas’s father showed up at the Olympics but couldn’t watch any of her events because she had not set tickets aside for him.) Douglas herself left home at the age of fourteen to train more seriously—only to doubt the wisdom of her decision and nearly quit after a terrible performance at the 2011 Visa Championships. But none of this is treated in any depth. In fact, the film seems to focus more on Douglas’s mother than on Douglas—interesting, given that both Douglas and her mother are executive producers.
There is a great film to be made about the special challenges that élite female gymnasts face today, when the sport is continuing to evolve at lightning speed. Women’s gymnastics continues to be a sport of incredible paradoxes—a crucible for both sheer athleticism and delicate grace, in which gymnasts who can do full-twisting double-backs can also be penalized for having messy hair. Today’s élite gymnasts face pressures to learn ever more difficult moves—ones that were routinely considered impossible a few short years ago. (In this way, it’s followed a similar path of danger and renown as the X Games.)
“The Gabby Douglas Story” only touches on these things. After stalling for a while at her gym in Virginia Beach, Douglas (played, in her older years, by Imani Hakim) finally leaves home to train with Liang Chow of Chow’s Gymnastics, in Des Moines, Iowa. When Chow (Brian Tee) is onscreen, the film deepens and gets more specific, and the writing takes off. This is what it will mean to train for the Olympics, he instructs Douglas; this is how you have to open your chest to do this split leap; this is how you have to connect to the equipment in order not to be scared of falling; you should train twenty-eight hours a week rather than thirty-six. All of this material is fantastic grist, but it doesn’t begin to answer the viewer’s curiosity: what is it actually like to want something this much, and to be willing to work this hard for it? How do you learn to stick a blind landing? Does fear ever enter the picture? What if you can’t keep your back leg straight in your split leap? What is it like to have to impress judges in the meets leading up to the biggest ones? We never learn very much about the sacrifices necessary to become an élite gymnast, let alone the institutional politics involved. The film returns repeatedly to the financial stresses of élite training—but shies away from any real numbers, any sense of the grave realities.
There is a broader context, too, that is worth exploring. One of the ironies of American gymnastics is that, in the nineteen-eighties, it essentially adopted the Soviet style of training that it had scorned in the nineteen-seventies. Girls now regularly leave home and school to train intensively for the Olympics, which was rare before Bela and Marta Karolyi, formerly of Romania, defected to the United States and single-handedly changed the shape of American gymnastics. Since 1976, when Nadia Comaneci scored the first perfect ten in Olympic history, gymnastics in the United States has gone from being a somewhat marginal sport to a central one, in part because we’ve started winning Olympic medals. (A 1976 Times article enumerating the “glamour” sports of that year’s Olympics doesn’t name gymnastics; its focus is on track and field and swimming.) In the mid-sixties, according to USA Gymnastics, there were “scarcely seven thousand” gymnasts competing nationally. Today, as the organization puts it, “more than ninety thousand athletes are registered in competitive programs.” And that doesn’t count all the girls participating recreationally after school. Unlike professional football or basketball, élite gymnastics rewards a handful of girls for a shiningly brief moment. (Douglas, right now, is supposedly trying to make a comeback for the 2016 Games, but few gymnasts manage to qualify for the Olympics twice.)
Many parents fail to take the briefness of gymnastics glory into account. The sport’s shiny femininity, coupled with its sheer acrobatic wonder, seems to beckon parents and girls the way the green light beckons Gatsby. With good reason: gymnastics offers, as few other activities do, a unification of discipline, play, performance, grace, and team and individual effort. But, even on this point—the question of how much to gamble—“The Gabby Douglas Story” is vague. At certain moments, the Hawkins character encourages Douglas to dream big about her future; at others, she quashes the idea that she might move to Chow’s gym, a move that would make an Olympic future more possible. In a highly emotional scene after Douglas moves to Chow’s and decides to quit, her angry mother tells her that quitting would be “dishonorable.” As we know, Douglas goes back to the gym and ultimately triumphs—the decision turned out to be the right one for Douglas and her mother both. But, as former national champion Jennifer Sey points out in her memoir, “Chalked Up_,_” sticking it out past the point of enjoyment is often not the right call for élite gymnasts. Many parents—who can’t believe how far they’ve come, how close they seem—push their injured, demoralized, or mentally fragile daughters to stay in gymnastics well beyond the moment they should have quit (or taken a break).
It’s the tension between the magical and the dangerous, the fantastic and the frightening, that is one of the still underacknowledged realities of élite gymnastics. (Even if Joan Ryan’s 1995 book, “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes,” shed a lot of light on the darker aspects of the sport.) We want our sports movies to be triumphant, to remind us of transcendent aspiration—“Rocky” wouldn’t be “Rocky” without its theme song. But the treatment of élite female gymnasts in books and movies often feels gauzier (or more sensationalistic) than necessary, as if the business of being an athlete were primarily a male one, not something that girls and women might be interested in. I’ve always found this frustratingly shortsighted.
In this context, a better movie than “The Gabby Douglas Story” would have gotten at more of the texture of the everyday, the draw of the sport itself. There’s disappointingly little footage of Douglas learning new moves, practicing or perfecting routines, being given the small corrections that lead to mastering a big new skill like an Amanar vault. Anyone who has done gymnastics seriously, at any level—any girl who once had the bug—knows that the delights of competitive gymnastics are unmatched. Nothing approximates the discipline, control, clarity, grace, and focused play that gymnastics can bring into your life when it’s going well. One can dream of a film about an Olympic gymnast that captures some of the focus it took for her to realize her dream.
Image from “The Gabby Douglas Story” by Allen Fraser/ Lifetime.
