Local gymnasts and coaches commend Simone Biles for shining a light on mental health

At 3:30 on Tuesday morning, Petaluma gymnast Athena Koehler and her mother, Maureen, got up and turned on their television to watch the live-feed of the U.S. Women’s Olympic Gymnastics Team compete in the finals.

As they watched Simone Biles warm up, they noticed her get “lost in the air” on the vault.

And then, suddenly Biles was gone. One of the world’s greatest and most recognizable athletes had withdrawn from the team finals, citing the need to protect her health.

“People fail to realize that this is a dangerous sport, and I commend her for saying something is not right today,” said Maureen Koehler, who is head coach and a judge at at Redwood Empire Gymnastics in Petaluma.

Athena, 18, is a level 10 gymnast, (just below elite, Olympic-level status) and has been doing gymnastics her entire life. She said she was shocked Biles withdrew, but she herself has experienced the roadblocks, both physical and mental, that young gymnasts face.

“I definitely think the gymnastics community has a lack of understanding of mental health,” she said.

The Koehlers say their gym has a healthy culture, but not all gyms do.

Many of Athena’s friends in the sport face intense pressure from their coaches. But it also comes from within, making them afraid to talk about their mental health struggles and physical pain.

Rebecca Smith, a high-performance sports specialist in gymnastics, said adolescents face expectations, obligations, physical and mental strain as they are pushed to perform at their best constantly in an incredibly dangerous sport.

Smith, CEO of Complete Performance Coaching, works with young gymnasts around the world on overcoming anxiety and building confidence in their sport so they can perform well under pressure.

After watching news clips of Biles’ withdrawal, the first word that came to Smith’s mind was “expectation.”

High expectations can create self doubt in an athlete and undermine both their training and their confidence. It also creates stress and tension in the body, breaks flow and leads to injuries, “no matter how many years you’ve been training,“ Smith said.

“I see this all the time with adolescents when they really want to please their coaches, their parents and their team,” Smith said.

Jennifer Fetzer, 18, a level 8 gymnast at Santa Rosa Gymnastics, looks up to Biles and applauded what she did to shine a light on mental health and prioritize her own safety and mental health above winning a medal.

Fetzer has also struggled to overcome the mental aspect of competing and the constant pressure to do better. One time she was performing her vault and upon landing, she rolled her ankle. She was recovering from a non-gymnastics-related concussion but still felt the pressure to get back to training.

In that moment, “it freaked me out because I got kind of lost in the air and when I landed my ankle suffered, and it was really difficult to come back and do that vault again,” Fetzer said.

Her coach, Darcia Fellows, said people don’t realize how dangerous those skills are. In addition, every athlete has their own backstory and human struggles, which often get overlooked.

She said her priority as a coach is to allow gymnasts to grow as an athlete and a person, with mental health at the forefront.

She said Biles’ decision was the right thing to do, considering how dangerous the routines are and how easily a mistake can happen if an athlete is not in the right mental state.

For the girls on the U.S. National Team, competition under pressure is their life.

“Can you imagine your parents have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on training, some of them have relocated to train, and they’ve gone to the Olympics? At that point, is it fun anymore?” Fellows asked.

“It feels like you’re trying to pay back all of what your parents have put into it, all of what your coaches have put into it,” Fetzer said. “You want to show that it was all worth it.”

The old-school mentality that gymnastics should be about winning at all costs and medals above mental health, “is the reason why Simone backed out of the competition,“ said Smith, the performance coach.

She added that more gyms are putting mental health first and medals second.

Biles will "100%“ be used as a good example in Smith’s training, Smith said. “Because she’s already been an example of confidence for so long that this is so valuable to be able to show these young athletes that even the greatest of all time is not perfect all the time.”

Maureen Koehler, the Redwood coach, agreed.

“Before, it was a win-at-all-costs situation,” Koehler said. “I think what we witnessed today was really amazing. We still got silver, and those young women should be really proud of that.”

You can reach Staff Writer Alana Minkler at 707-521-5224 or alana.minkler@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @alana_minkler.