Mental Gymnastics

Julissa Gomez didn’t die immediately, although she may have wished that she had. Instead, she was instantly paralyzed from the neck down. Unable to breathe on her own, a subsequent ventilator accident at a Japanese hospital left her in a coma, and she died three years later. She was fifteen at the time of the incident.

Julissa had been practicing the Yurchenko vault, an especially tricky gymnastic maneuver, with which she had been struggling for months. She slammed head-first into the vaulting horse, snapping her neck instantly. She had been training for the 1988 Olympics.

Experts in Armchairs

Gymnastics is second only to horse riding in terms of danger. Lose focus, even for an instant, and you could suffer severe injuries, or die. I say these obvious things because it's striking that I have not heard one critical voice from anyone who has even the slightest inkling of what it is like to compete at any level, let alone compete in a potentially dangerous sport, over Simone Biles’ withdrawal from the Olympics. I’ve heard plenty of voices. More than plenty. Many are from those who think that an afternoon’s charity cricket match makes them a sporting expert, or people who can’t even be described as over the hill, when they were never even on the slope.

But, it’s been striking that all (as far as I can tell) the sporting voices have been supportive of Biles' decision. All sporting folk know of a version of the yips. The yips is where your head is simply not in the game and even (to you) simple actions cease to be second nature. The gymnastic version is called The Twisties, but the essence is much the same. The attentional system, the part of you that models, not just the external world, but the model of the model, has somehow got out of alignment. If you are taking a penalty, this could be very embarrassing. If you are throwing yourself through the air and hoping to catch yourself, this could be fatal.

Consequences

If I asked you to walk along a line a foot wide painted on the floor, you wouldn’t find it difficult. If I put a plank that wide up between two buildings and asked you to cross from one to the other, it's likely you would feel very different. The difference is consequences. Some people live lives pretty much protected from consequences, and good luck to them. But, as a minimum, they should not be surprised if others are unimpressed with their apparent sangfroid in the face of other people’s difficulties.

There are lots of sorts of fear in sport. It can be a very lonely place. Taking a penalty. Serving for the match. Facing some looming brute who has the strength and skill to hospitalize you. It could break any of us. Heavyweight boxing champion, Tyson Fury, recently wrote about the mental health issues that caused him to call off a match with only two weeks to go. He quit boxing completely for three years. For some curious reason no one decided to get in his face and call him a coward, but when it comes to Simon Biles, a certain kind of person feels strangely courageous.

What's the matter? Never mind...

Part of this is that, for all the progress we’ve made, mental health still isn’t real to some people. Failures of empathy and education mean that some folks are incapable of believing in what they can’t themselves see and feel. As one newspaper put it, “We thought she had pulled out because of a medical issue, but it turns out it was mental health”. That is a medical issue, and the casual error here betrays the dualistic mind/body split that is still the default position of many. Bodies can break, people realize, but don't give the same consideration to minds.

There has been some furious back-peddling. Now it has become apparent that Biles has ADHD—a disorder of the attentional system—and was likely in withdrawal from Ritalin, which would be no picnic at the best of times. Do people really think that the world’s leading gymnast, who has overcome sexual abuse, and had to push herself to levels that most of us cannot begin to even think of, dropped out of the sporting pinnacle of her career on some sort of whim? The arrogance of some people feeling entitled to an opinion on this takes the breath away. And to those who are unsympathetic to her not being on the right drugs: as a friend of mine (who has ADHD) put it, “Typical ADHD move, not realizing your drugs are illegal in the Olympics host country, until it's too late to change the formulation.”

But, as I say, in some ways, that is a side issue. The sneering at mention of mental health issues in sport, whether it be the insensitivity of barracking someone who has just lost a match, or the treating of someone who retires due to mental health issues as letting everyone down, shows that we still have a way to go.