That’s just part of cheer: “You have to be positive, one hundred per cent. But for the most part, I’ve definitely kept it positive.” There’s a particular scene in the first episode of Cheer that gives insights into the stakes and celebrities of competitive cheer when a throng of little girls in leotards say “everyone” knows Gabi Butler.īutler is “definitely” conscious of being a role model: “When I was younger, it was easier because I didn’t really think of it … Obviously I’ve grown up, and you know what happens – your patience starts getting a little bit out of whack, you start cursing. “I was known to be this super-flexible little girl who can bend her leg behind her head, and do all this crazy stuff like tumbling that a lot of older people couldn’t do.” “It started to get crazy, and people started to know who I was, when I was 13 years old.
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She became known in the sport by posting tutorials and behind-the-scenes vlogs on social media and starring in the long-running YouTube series Cheerleaders. “I left everything behind – I didn’t really get to grow up with my family.” “I didn’t really get a normal childhood because I basically moved away from home when I was about 14 years old,” she says. As Butler says in one of Cheer’s few scenes to be set in a classroom: “Cheerleading is my major”.
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But if it’s something you love, why not?”īutler was homeschooled for most of her life so as to leave her fully free to pursue cheer, joining teams across the US from her home town of Boca Raton, Florida. She does think about the long-term toll: “You’re putting your body at such a high risk for injury – but I mean, honestly? You could get hurt walking down the street … I feel like life is about taking risks. “I thought at first that the bone was sticking out, it hurt that bad. She says that “probably” her worst incident was two years ago: “I dislocated my elbow, and broke and tore everything in it.” It took her three months to recover. Between the gruelling schedule and the ever-present risk of catastrophic injury, it is no sideshow for those on the mat.Īs both flyer and tumbler in the Navarro team, Butler gets lifted into the air in stunts and does the showpiece gymnastics-style flips and twists. Cheer has shredded stereotypes of cheerleading as a people-pleasing half-time entertainment, and its participants (as one commentator puts it in the series) as akin to “Playboy bunnies: pretty, popular and pleasant”.
Like Last Chance U, Whitley’s four-season study of American football, Cheer is about much more than cheerleading, exploring how hope, fear, work ethic and team spirit guides these young people at a pivotal point in their lives.īut on another level, it is all about what one reviewer called “bone-crunching”. She notes, not without pride, the series’ Rotten Tomatoes ratings of “like one hundred per cent”, from both critics and audiences: “pretty unheard of”. I think just all of us were kind of in shock.” “We didn’t really know that the show was going to be as big of a hit as it was.
You feel a twinge in your inner thigh just to look at it.īut since Cheer hit Netflix in January, Butler has reached a new audience, her Instagram following growing by nearly one million.
She even has an eponymous stunt, the “Gabi Butler needle”: a sort of standing split, with one leg held vertical behind the head. Since starting cheer aged eight (“I was basically cheering out of the womb”), Butler has become a “cheerlebrity”, known throughout the sport of her versatility and flexibility. “I may sometimes be like, ‘Ugh, my body hurts’, but it’s something that keeps me going. “Cheerleading is everything to me,” she says by phone from Corsicana. Cheer tells the story of the tournament, and the Navarro team’s punishing training routine as they prepare to defend their title.ĭirected by Greg Whiteley, the six-part series has won widespread acclaim for its understated, muscly portrayal of the diverse personalities on the team and their feats of gravity-defying athleticism.īutler is described as the squad’s “rock star”, so central to their routine that she seems above the question of whether or not she will “make mat” agonised over by most of her teammates. Last year her cheerleading team, from Navarro College in Corsicana, Texas, won the US national championship – for the 14 th time. Because the win – it just makes it amazing.”īutler is speaking from experience. “And if someone says, ‘Winning isn’t everything’ they’re lying. To win “is the best feeling ever”, says Gabi Butler, one of the break-out stars of the Netflix docuseries Cheer.
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