As America grapples with conversations about representation and equity in sports, the story of Clareesa Shields begins in Flint, Michigan. In the city that became synonymous over the last decade with crisis, the young Black woman, who became the first American to win back to back gold medals in the Olympics for boxing, was reared.

Yet even Olympic gold couldn’t guarantee equal treatment. In one scene from the new film The Fire Inside, Shields stares sorrowfully at cereal plastered with images of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps as she’s buying diapers for her nephew. Despite her historic achievement, Shields struggled to gain sponsorships after her Olympic win. “It’s just much harder with women athletes,” one potential sponsor tells Jason. “Then you amplify that when they excel in a sport that people don’t expect to see women in.”

This disparity reflects a broader reality for Black women in sports. The forthcoming film, the directorial debut of Fruitvale Station’s cinematographer Rachel Morrison with a script by Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, makes no explicit reference to the water crisis, but it looms large over the film along with the systemic barriers she faces.  “You ever wonder why they call it Flint?” Shields’ coach Jason (Brian Tyree Henry) asks Shields (Ryan Destiny). “…It’s a tough stone Flint, and it’s strong as hell. That remind you of anybody?”

Shields’ life, in the film, is marred by poverty, abuse, and homelessness with boxing becoming her only refuge. As more success came with boxing however, so did the problems. The film’s third act is dedicated to showing how Shields struggled financially despite winning her first Olympic gold medal in 2012.

The conversation around pay inequality in women’s sports extends far beyond boxing. In an interview from 2023, Shields highlighting how even as she made $1 million, becoming the first woman to achieve such a feat, it was still only a third of the $3 million that the male boxers typically make.

In The Fire Inside, Shields’ fights for a three thousand dollar monthly stipend, an increase from the meager monthly thousand dollars that USA Boxing offered while she trained in their facilities. “This isn’t just about me,” Shields tells USA Boxing over the phone, “y’all need to boost the stipend for all the women.”

The struggle extends beyond compensation into representation itself. Shields expresses her frustastions to a USA Boxing representative about expectations to maintain a pristine image, after being shown another female boxer who was dressed provocatively during a photoshoot. “I won that gold medal by being me,” she says. “Now to get endorsements and sh*t you saying I got to be somebody else?!”

Even in the telling of Shields’ story, the pressure to make Black women athletes more palatable for mainstream audiences persists. Very little on screen time is given to Shields’ athleticism. Destiny as Shields is a bloodless, unbruised fighter, emerging from every fight with nothing more than unkempt hair and the glow of just a few sweat beads. Scenes of Shields’ boxing are over with such quickness one wonders if you as the audience member might have been KO’D.

Instead, the story induldges in the cliches of an athlete’s humble beginnings to a burdensome degree. This familiar framing—focusing on trauma and adversity rather than her athletic prowess —reflects how Black athletes’ stories are often packaged for mainstream consumption. When the film touches on deeper complexities, like when Shields’ reconciliation with her mother after  being kicked out, or her father return from an unexplained jail stay, these moments remain unexplored, suggesting a reluctance to engage with a fuller nuanced reality beyond familiar tropes of adversity and redemption.

It’s easy to understand why the film was originally titled Flint Strong. Much like the Michigan city it’s set in, Shields’ legacy risks being reduced to a story of her trauma, stripping her of vibrancy and nuance. The film show glimpses of this complexity in the father-daughter dynamic between Henry and Destiny, their warmth buoying the film. It’s the love and care between Jason and Shields that repeatedly gives her the strength to continue on.

The film ends as they share one last conversation before she gets on a bus to the Olympic training facility. “That first gold medal, that was for Flint,” Jason tells her. “But your next one, that one’s for you.” The question remains: in a system still struggling with equity, will individual excellence ever be enough?

Hanna Phifer is a journalist and critic based in Charlotte, North Carolina.