Olympics coverage opens up conversations on mental health in gymnastics; increased interest in sport
Aug. 5—Inside Aiken Gymnastics , about 12 students are starting to warm up for a four-hour practice.
They are all decked out in red, white and blue leotards, in honor of Team USA having dominating performances in artistic gymnastics at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.
What normally follows the Olympic coverage every four years, like clockwork, is a bump in gymnastics enrollment. That's true for even a city the size of Aiken.
Aiken Gymnastics owner Draha Kriz, originally from the Czech Republic, competed in the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games against famed Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci. Kriz and her husband, Radek, went on to coach the Czech Republic National team.
Once communism fell, they immigrated to the U.S. and started Aiken Gymnastics in 1993. Along with their daughters, Sabina Jokulis and Kayas Stone, they coach between 200 and 300 students.
The gym usually experiences a slight bump in enrollment each Olympic cycle, with the largest increase being in 1996. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Kriz and Jokulis said they have had to cut some of their classes and maintained sanitization protocols to keep their students safe.
Increased interest in gymnastics due to the Tokyo Games opened up conversations about mental health with students. Team USA powerhouse Simone Biles had to withdraw from several competitions due to mental health.
Biles experienced the "twisties," a mental block that disconnects the brain from the body, causing zero air awareness while performing difficult twisting and flipping skills. She returned to competition earlier this week and took home the bronze medal for her performance on the balance beam.
"I think a lot of our teenagers have a hard time, in any sport, communicating with the coaches. There is nothing wrong with saying, 'Hey right now, I just don't know where I am and I can't do it.' They are just like I just want to make it, I just want to try. No, these skills are too hard to try," Jokulis said. "There is nothing wrong with saying I am tired today, I am having a hard time today and ask for help and ask for the questions."
"The showing people on the team when she walked out, so many negative things were said about her (Biles) and I think after the peak of what she showed, it showed it wasn't fair what so many people say and what people say she gave up on the team and she doesn't work ... but now I think people now understand," Kriz said.
Jokulis said it inspired her gymnasts to persevere.
"Everyone struggles no matter how good you are." Jokulis said. "...We've been talking about it and we would watch finals in the mornings and that is the one thing we said was even the (Greatest of All Time) struggles. It's OK to struggle. You learn by struggling."
Seeing gymnastics dissected in relation to mental health also helps parents of gymnasts better understand the sport.
"I think this is good for all gymnast parents," Kriz said. "See this and sometimes they get upset and they do bad form or something and we keep her out of it and then they compete and a lot of times parents don't like that decision. But now when they see it now, they understand."
The Olympic coverage from Tokyo helped normalize the process of training, something that Kriz and Jokulis try to use as life lessons.
"At some point in life, you can train to be the best but it's OK to struggle," Jokulis said. "... They don't see the struggles of getting up there. They just see it when it is up there. They don't understand how much of a struggle it is to get there, so this really opened their eyes, I think, and all of us in the gymnastics community that the world sees that this is not an easy sport."
