In appreciation of MyKayla Skinner, who made the most of every opportunity

MyKayla Skinner had the unfortunate luck of spending her career competing against some of the greatest gymnasts of all time. When she got her chance to shine, she made the most of it.

When the women’s gymnastics qualifying rounds ended last Monday and the dust settled around the results, one outcome that gymnastics fans across the country had feared came true. MyKayla Skinner’s Olympics were finished, and she would return home, barring unforeseen injury or illness, having competed in no individual finals and with no medals at all. She prepared to leave Tokyo empty-handed.

This result was predictable; we’ll get to that later. What did not follow the script: Simone Biles leaving the gymnastics team final after the first rotation, vault, citing mental health concerns. Biles, unable to perform her skills due to a frightening lack of air awareness known as the “twisties,” withdrawing first from the individual all-around final two days later, and then, after one more day, withdrawing from the vault final. The first reserve in the vault final was then called in: Skinner.

Skinner’s selection to the non-nominative individual spot for the United States was controversial from the get-go. Skinner’s strengths in the sport are vault and floor. She’s powerful, a daredevil, given to throwing very difficult tricks to build up her scores. She does a laid-out double twisting double-back somersault on the floor, one of the hardest skills in the sport’s Code of Points, and one she nearly got named after herself earlier in her career (Victoria Moors of Canada beat her to competing it internationally, and it now goes by the Moors). She competes two of the most difficult vaults in the world and won a bronze medal on vault at the 2014 world championships, but otherwise was relatively undecorated in the sport.

MyKayla Skinner had the unfortunate luck of constantly competing against the GOAT

Part of that was that her entire elite career, up to and including the Tokyo Olympics, has been spent alongside Biles, the greatest gymnast in the world, undefeated in major international competition since 2013, who also happened to be the reigning world and Olympic vault and floor champion.

And part of it was that when Skinner returned to elite gymnastics after a three-year layover on the University of Utah’s NCAA gymnastics team, where she won three individual titles, she found that the path she wanted to take back to international competition had an obstacle named Jade Carey smack in the middle of it.

Carey, as a gymnast, also excels in, you guessed it, floor and vault. She was recruited to elite gymnastics on the strength of her vaults from the sport’s college-prep tier, level 10, in 2017. Carey opted to punch her own ticket to Tokyo by competing at a series of World Cup events; she won the vault title in those meets and earned a nominative spot.

Skinner had also been interested in pursuing the World Cup path and becoming a vault specialist in order to get to Tokyo, but was discouraged, she said during episode of the 2021 Peacock documentary “Golden,” by U.S. national team coordinator Tom Forster. Forster allegedly told Skinner to focus on the all-around to make the Olympic team instead.

For years, Skinner, as a national team gymnast, seemed like she was stuck in perpetual fourth place, a perennial alternate to major teams. After she made worlds in 2014, she was alternate for the 2015 team. She famously placed fourth at the 2016 Olympic trials but was made an alternate for the Olympic team.

She retired from elite after the Rio Games and declared her intention to enroll at Utah, compete in college gymnastics, and earn her degree in sports broadcasting. For three years, she did the most difficult gymnastics in the NCAA, including a double-twisted tucked double back somersault on the floor, which she competed in every meet of her college career. She holds an NCAA record for most consecutive hit routines without a fall: 161. She fell off the beam at the end of her junior season, ending her streak.

After that 2019 NCAA season wrapped, Skinner announced she was leaving Utah to pursue the 2020 Olympics, her longtime dream deferred. She rested for all of two days, then headed back to her home gym in Arizona, Desert Lights, with her coach Lisa Spini, who immediately put her to work. Skinner made the 2019 worlds team, qualifying in, you guessed it, fourth place, but was ultimately selected once in Stuttgart, Germany, as the team’s alternate. At this point, many fans said, this is her gymnastics destiny, always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

Skinner did become an actual bride, though, in November 2019. Her husband, Jonas Harmer, can be seen in regular appearances on Skinner’s popular YouTube channel. And she said she wasn’t giving up on the Olympics.

She did not give up after the Olympics were postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She did not give up when she caught COVID-19 herself and was hospitalized with pneumonia. She did not give up when she developed a bone spur in her ankle, which caused her pain on every landing.  And she never stopped saying how much she wanted to be an Olympian.

Then came Olympic Trials. Skinner finished the two-night competition in fifth place, though she had been fourth, again, after the first night. When she was named to the individual spot, she was as surprised as anyone else. Because Carey had already locked up one of the two American individual spots and had the same strengths as Skinner, most in the gymnastics know — including Skinner herself, she has said in a YouTube video — assumed the other spot would go to a gymnast stronger on bars and balance beam.

But to Skinner it went. “Look Mom, I made it!” she yelled into the camera.

In qualifications, Skinner competed all four events, but her chances of qualifying to an individual medal were strongest by far on vault, with a possibility of floor as well. Carey had not competed her full difficulty in either nationals or trials, and many people were giving the edge on both events to Skinner. But it was Carey, in the end, who put up the best-executed routines and edged Skinner out — what gym fans call being “two-per-countried,” due to a rule that restricts competition in the individual all-around and event finals to just two women max from each country. The idea is that the podium will then be more diverse, but in reality, it often excludes a top athlete or two from the countries that are gymnastics powerhouses, and that is exactly what happened to Skinner.

She cried on the floor as her coach, Lisa Spini, hugged her. It looked like her Olympics were over almost as quickly and surprisingly as they began.

Then, Biles was out of the vault final, and Skinner was in. Biles had had her coach, Cecile Landi, text Skinner and Spini, telling them to remain in Tokyo and continue training vault. Skinner had already announced her retirement from elite gymnastics on social media. She hastily added a post saying she would be putting on a competition leotard one final time. She wore the same leotard her teammate Sunisa Lee wore when she won the all-around, blue with sparkly stars on the body, red stripes on the shoulders. She was the first to compete.

Her first of two vaults (the scores are averaged together; the vaults must be from two different entries off the table) was a Cheng, in which she does a roundoff back handspring onto the horse, completes a half twist before blocking off it with her arms, facing the runway, then completes one and a half twists and a back flip laid out in the air. Her second was the Amanar, the same vault that foiled Biles: A Yurchenko entry, the roundoff back handspring onto the horse, then a back flip laid out with two and a half twists in the air.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGA0AMHfK7k

On both, she did some of the cleanest work she has done in the air; her landings were just slightly shy of sticks. Skinner frequently gets nailed for execution flaws; she does some of the most difficult tumbling in the business but does it less cleanly than some of her competition. But here, in her last shot at an Olympic medal and in her final gymnastics competition, she showed the results of her intense training to the best of her ability.

Only Rebeca Andrade of Brazil, doing the same two vaults, bested Skinner’s score, and won the gold. Skinner finished with silver, and beamed so hard from the podium that even her mask couldn’t hide it. “FINISHED,” she wrote on Instagram afterward.