Team USA Gymnastics: What we learned from the Olympic Trials

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Around 1 a.m., after the conclusion of the 2024 U.S. Olympic Team Trials, I grabbed a drink with Nadia Comaneci.

As the bar was closing down, Comaneci and I debriefed the events of the past week. And there was one headline comment about that evening’s competition she felt compelled to share: “There was wind on the beam today,” Comaneci says with a smirk.  

She was referring to when the top three finishers at the women’s gymnastic trials all fell on the balance beam. Back in her day (around the time Comaneci earned the first ever perfect 10), her teammates would joke that any fall on the apparatus was caused by a sudden gust of wind in their Romanian gym. 

As the beam downfall was happening in real time, I watched in the crowd alongside 11-year-old Brady Butcher. Brady shook his head and muttered, “This is not good; this is very bad.” He and his mom, Kat, invited me to sit with them for a bit. Brady’s dad is Steve Butcher, a former executive leader at the FIG (the International Gymnastics Federation), who used to manage gymnastics at the Olympics. Thanks to his dad’s work, Brady has had a front-row seat to high-level gymnastics competitions throughout his young life and seemed fairly unfazed by the Olympic Trials. The beam falls, however, felt notable to him. After Simone Biles stumbled off the beam, Brady turned to his mom and said the single most concise encapsulation of the Trials:

“It’s hard to look, mom. But even harder to look away.”

The good, the bad and the foreshadowing at podium training 

Officially, the Olympic Trials for women’s gymnastics took place across two days: Friday June 28 and Sunday June 30. Unofficially, they started the Wednesday beforehand with podium training. 

“Podium training” is a run-through practice inside the Trials arena. It’s a day closed to the public where the gymnasts try out their routines and get a feel for the on-site equipment. I watched the training day from the stands with a couple dozen other journalists in the otherwise empty 20,000- seat space. 

Podium training, especially at Olympic Trials, is a good opportunity for gymnasts to test out their newest “upgrades”—i.e. hard skills that increase their score but require them to be at their peak strength to perform. Gymnasts aiming for the Olympics will often wait to debut their upgrades as close as possible to the games. The contenders at Olympic Trials this year included four Olympians, six World Champions and a handful of talented newcomers vying for just five total spots on the U.S. team. The field was as deep and competitive as it’s ever been. For some, making Team USA would be harder than winning a medal at the Olympics Trials, not the Olympics, is the time for the gymnasts to stand out from the pack.

The media wasn’t allowed to film most of the podium training. What we saw, both good and bad, was unforgettable: 

To start, naturally, there were the upgrades. Jade Carey did an Amanar, a two-and-a-half twisting vault, for the first time in three years. Carey, who competed at the last Olympics, hadn’t done the skill since the Tokyo games. That upgrade was somewhat expected, though impressive nonetheless.

A more unexpected moment on vault came from two-time World Champion Leanne Wong. As other gymnasts finished their vault practice one by one, Wong stayed on the apparatus and kept going. She was working on an easy-for-her vault consisting of a half turn on the table followed by a half turn off. Soon, Wong was the only gymnast left. She was doing twice as many vaults as everyone before her, with every attempt looking equally solid. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, boom: she added another full twist. It was a Cheng vault—right up there with the Amanar as one of the hardest in women’s gymnastics. 

She had been working on the Cheng for years, but had never tried it outside of practice. Even in the sparsely populated arena, there was a smattering of applause and at least a few audible gasps. Wong was on the bubble to make the Olympic team. Her path to Paris would likely require her to go big or go home. Bringing out the Cheng vault was about as big as it gets.

Then, in the midst of these successes, came the first big crash of Olympic Trials. Over on the floor exercise was Skye Blakely, a promising young gymnast who finished 2nd at the U.S. Nationals in June, laying on the ground after a tumbling pass gone wrong. Dr. Marci Faustin, one of the U.S. women’s gymnastics team doctors, went over to examine Blakely’s heel and calf. We would later find out that Blakely ruptured her Achilles in that moment. 

A handful of people were on the floor exercise when it happened, spread out across the four corners:

At one end was Dr. Faustin, who held Blakely’s face in her hands as they waited for a wheelchair. Faustin is well-known as a source of not just physical care but also emotional support for many of the female gymnasts in the field. Counterclockwise was Suni Lee and Kaliya Lincoln, both of whom paced around trying not to look. Lee, the reigning Olympic all-around champion, had with her fingers interlaced in a prayer-like position. Lincoln, Blakely’s training teammate, was rubbing her temples and taking deep, controlled breaths. At the next corner over was Leanne Wong, who watched head-on while Blakely was taken off the floor. 

And finally, in the last corner, was Shilese Jones and Kayla DiCello. Both of them kept stretching, DiCello standing and Jones on the ground. They were the next ones up to try their full routines.In the weeks leading up to the Olympic Trials, Jones, DiCello and Blakely were seen as some of the top frontrunners to make the US team. 

Jones and DiCello would have their own season-ending injuries just two days later. 

Is the difficulty at the Olympic level too much to bear?

Throughout the weekend, while talking with fans, retired collegiate gymnasts, volunteers, corporate sponsors and Lyft drivers, everyone wanted to speculate about the three injuries. Were they interconnected? Was there a bigger story here in terms of their training and USA gymnastics? 

In a box suite populated by a group of former Olympians, one person tossed out a theory others were quick to second: That even with good training, the level of difficulty it takes to be at the top of women’s gymnastics nowadays is inevitably too much strain for most bodies to handle. The context for that hypothesis was greater than just the Trials injuries—in the past year, the best female gymnasts from the UK, Italy, Japan, Hungary, Australia, Germany and Uzbekistan have all had ACL or Achilles tears. 

I asked the group of Olympians how they’d explain Simone Biles, who’s been competing for over a decade at this level and remained injury free, or the three other returning gymnasts from the Tokyo games competing at the 2024 Trials (Suni Lee, Jade Carey and Jordan Chiles). One person suggested that the Tokyo women were the exception to the rule—the rule being that Achilles tendons, in particular, have a shelf life for bearing the wear and tear that comes with gymnastics. The theory was that Simone and the other returning Olympians weren’t built like the rest of the field, but rather more like Oksana Chusovitina, the 49-year-old who’s gone to eight Olympics. There were no scientific studies they pointed to, just their own gut feelings as athletes who once reached the top ranks in the sport.

On the other side of the box suite, I talked with two people who might also be considered exceptions to the rule: Mohini Bhardwaj and Annia Hatch. Bhardwaj and Hatch made the 2004 Olympic team when they were in their mid-20s, in the pre-Biles era when the sport was still dominated by teenagers. 

Neither commented on the injuries directly, but both suggested that age wasn’t a product or liability for the returning Olympians’ success at Trials. They saw it as an asset. “In a lot of the other Olympic sports, this is when athletes peak and when they have the mental capabilities,” Bhardwaj noted. “It is amazing to see these ladies out here that are like 25. Annia and I can kind of feel like we were [partly] the ones who started this trend.” From their perspective, it was exciting to see so many other women competing in their 20s. Inside the arena, it really did seem like the Tokyo foursome were all hitting their peak again at Trials, if not surpassing their past performance levels.

Back in the stands, I ran into Dr. Bill Sands. This is a man who knows more about the sports science behind gymnastics than just about anyone else on earth. I interviewed Sands a few years ago for an investigation I did about equipment safety in gymnastics, but this was our first time meeting in real life. Sands, in all his wisdom, had the definitive take on the Trials injuries: It could all be a coincidence or  there could be a unifying factor at play, but there’s no way of knowing until someone does an assessment of the collective injuries. As we parted ways, Sands muttered “Of course, I have my own theories about it…”

After the competition concluded, a reporter asked Li Li Leung, the CEO of USA Gymnastics, if it gave her pause to see three of the top contenders get injured. “Of course,” Leung says. “How could it not?” According to Leung, USA Gymnastics is planning to do a review of the injuries as well as look at the national team training model to make sure they’re prioritizing the health of the athletes. Leung says that analysis will happen sometime after the Paris Olympics.

The fifth ticket to Paris 

As surprising as the beam-pocalypse was to witness, it didn’t seem to impact the results. In part, that’s because it was the top three all-arounders—Biles, Lee and Chiles—who fell. They had already put enough distance between themselves and the rest of the pack to absorb a fall and still retain their top three ranking. 

But hypothetically, even if the falls brought them down a few spots, it still likely wouldn’t have affected the team selection. By that point, the pool of gymnasts had already whittled down from 16 women to 13. Half of those left were never seen as plausible contenders, lacking the experience, routine difficulty and consistency that made the injured trio of Blakely, Jones and DiCello such strong frontrunners. 

A week prior, it seemed like picking this team would be an impossible decision for the selection committee. There were simply too many good choices. After the injuries, it was clear that Chiles, Biles, Lee and Carey were the only viable choices for four of the five slots. 

The fifth spot ultimately went to Hezly Rivera, the reigning junior national champion who turned 16 earlier this summer. Rivera is the only non-returning Olympian on the team. She’s more than a decade younger than Biles and, at the time of publication, the youngest U.S. Olympian in any sport this year. To say that Rivera’s path to the team was an unexpected turn of events would be a severe understatement.

Earlier this summer, after finishing 24th at U.S. Classics, it wasn’t a given that Rivera would even be able to qualify for Trials. Just five days before the team selection, Rivera was widely seen as a possible option…for one of the alternate spots. No one imagined that she’d be in this position—least of all Rivera and her coach. 

“2028 was the goal,” Rivera says after the competition. She was thinking the 2024 Trials would be a stepping stone to the 2028 games, not one that would end with her scoring a ticket to Paris. Maybe that was the secret to her success. “I'm like the underdog,” Rivera says. “I don't think there was so much pressure on me.” 

The Olympic-level mental fortitude

Rivera’s quote reminded me of something that Vanessa Atler, a 1997 co-national champion, told me earlier that same day. “I loved being an underdog,” says Atler, “[because] nobody expected anything.” 

Expectations, or the idea of them, were often a root cause of routines gone wrong throughout Atler’s career. “I had a really hard time thinking, Everything's going to come true for Vanessa. Atler recalled her rocky time as an elite gymnast. “Like if everyone thinks I'm going to make this bar routine and win, [I’d think], That can't happen because that's what everybody wants.” 

Such are the convoluted mind games you can start playing with yourself, Atler says. It worked the other way, too. “The funny part is whenever I fell on something, I would kick ass [after] because it was like nobody was expecting me to come back.” 

A gymnast’s mental state is just as impactful on what happens out on the floor as their physical state. This is a concept that surely everyone now understands after watching Simone Biles deal with the twisties at the last Olympics. Every contender, even the greatest of all time, can have their gymnastics affected by their mental state. 

To that end, one could argue that the most impressive skill on display this week wasn’t the Cheng vault from Leanne Wong or the many jaw-dropping namesake from Simone Biles, but the mental fortitude it takes to compete at this level. Especially in the face of witnessing others get injured. Especially when it comes to Suni Lee.

It’s possible that Lee was the only person to witness all three injuries happen live: Lee was on the floor near Skye Blakely when she sustained the Achilles rupture. Lee watched as Shilese Jones hurt her knee during the warm-ups of night one. Lee had to vault right after Kayla DiCello, one her best friends, got injured during the very first event of Trials. Lee and DiCello were rooming together at Trials, posting TikToks throughout the week; after watching DiCello go down, Lee vaulted with tears in her eyes. “Having all the injuries happen was really hard on my mental health,” Lee says after the competition. 

Few people know what it’s like to watch your peers have their careers derailed by an ill-timed injury and have to compete just moments later. Vanessa Atler, the former national champion, does.

During the 1998 Goodwill Games, Atler was next in line to vault when a Chinese gymnast named Sang Lan landed head first. Atler saw it happen and knew it was bad, but she kept her focus on the job at hand. Atler won the vault event. It wasn’t until she went to the press conference afterwards that a journalist told her Lang was paralyzed. 

Atler spent so many years compartmentalizing memories like this and didn’t process all that happened until later in life. “You pull it inside, and you wait until you're 40 for it all to come out,” she says, while letting out a cathartic, self-aware chuckle. 

Compartmentalizing isn’t inherently a bad thing. For most athletes, it’s an essential tool during competition. While suppressing emotions long term can lead to mental injury, feeling too much in the moment can up the risk of physical injury. A distraction while flipping and twisting can be life or death. “That's why she is who she is,” Atler says about Lee. “What sometimes makes a great athlete is they have to have those qualities to be able to block it out and just move it. But it doesn't mean it's not affecting her.”

In the press conference that evening, Lee noted as much. “I had to meet with my therapist yesterday and kind of try and get my mind right,” Lee explained, “because it was just so devastating to see a couple of my friends get taken out of this huge competition.”

How Team USA is prioritizing mental health

By winning Olympic Trials, Simone Biles automatically guaranteed her spot on the team. As the rest of the contenders waited for the selection committee to reveal who would be joining her, Biles stayed on the floor to answer a few questions. She was asked about what led her to mount a comeback. Biles’ answer: “Seeing my therapist every Thursday.” The crowd roared in applause.

“We're always going to prioritize mental health,” Biles said at the press conference later that evening. “Tokyo gave us that opportunity to open up that stage for that talk.”

In recent years, there’s been a lot of discussion about how to create a healthier environment for gymnasts. In February, Biles told Vanity Fair that she thinks USA Gymnastics is heading in a positive direction. 

The most apparent example might be the degree to which Suni Lee was virtually connected at the hip with Dr. Faustin throughout the last day of competition. Faustin was the one who tended to Blakely during podium training and the other women who suffered injuries during Trials. Faustin, along with Dr. Ellen Casey, now fills the post once held by Larry Nassar. When Lee was asked who had been the biggest source of support to help her stay in the sport in spite of myriad challenges, Faustin was the first person that came to mind. “She was constantly checking up on me, making sure that I was OK, reminding me of my worth,” Lee says. All week long, you could see Faustin providing both physical check-ups along with that same emotional support to a number of gymnasts, often at the same time. 

One of the more illuminating conversations I had around mental health in the sport wasn’t with a gymnast or coach or doctor—it was with Matt Cowen, the CEO of the leotard manufacturer GK Elite. Part of the company’s latest contract with USA Gymnastics involves GK Elite funding therapy for the gymnasts (along with their coaches, too). Cowen said that the majority of the current national team members have sought therapeutic services through the program.

The future of USA Gymnastics

At the hotel bar with Nadia Comenaci, she started telling me about the differences between her two Olympic runs. She was a 14-year-old at the 1976 Olympics, an 18-year-old during the next one—and grew four inches in between. Comaneci had to adopt a new approach to gymnastics due to her new height. “The technique changes—you can’t accommodate the same things,” Comaneci says. She had to throw out the old playbook that worked for her when she was younger. “You have to recreate it.”

All the aforementioned interventions to support better health at USA Gymnastics are in the infancy stage. Some might work in the long run. Some might not. And, of course, if the injuries at Trials turn out to be interconnected, the response will require yet another pivot for USA Gymnastics. In recent years, people have questioned whether or not the organization’s promises of reform in the post-Nassar era have actually manifested into measurable action. It seems that we now know there has, at least to some degree, been meaningful change.

The question to ask now is whether they’re willing to keep changing, like Comaneci did, through the growing pains they’re experiencing and the ones that are still to come.