Bouncing Back

 

I haven't been paying all that much attention to the Paris Olympics, but gymnast Simone Biles has managed to make inroads into my consciousness. Turns out we have something in common, and not simply United States citizenship: we've both been to a mental health professional. The similarity ends there, I'm afraid. I did it very quietly, and didn't tell people I'd gone to one until years later. Back in 2020, Biles perhaps would have liked to have done it quietly, too. Unfortunately, all eyes were on her at the Tokyo Olympics when she suddenly dropped out due to "the twisties." A colloquial rather than a medical term, there's nevertheless some real psychology behind it, as it has to do with what a gymnast experiences when they encounter a disconnect between their body and mind while performing skills, like twists, in competition. While executing a routine, a gymnast may lose their sense of space and air awareness, do more or fewer twists or flips than intended, possibly preventing a gymnast from landing safely on the mat. Biles herself had this to say:

"I say put mental health first. Because if you don't, then you're not going to enjoy your sport and you're not going to succeed as much as you want to. So it's OK sometimes to even sit out the big competitions to focus on yourself, because it shows how strong of a competitor and person that you really are — rather than just battle through it."

Biles was slammed in some corners for being a "quitter", as well as "letting her country down", but multiple other gymnasts came forth and told of their own experiences with the twisties, and in the end it created a greater awareness of the role mental health plays in sports.

Since then, Biles has made a Olympic comeback, winning two gold medals in Paris (for Team and All-Around), and may win a few more in the next few days. Even if she doesn't she's already made Olympics history, having won four won earlier golds at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, six altogether, more than any other U.S. gymnast.

None of this means that the mental health issues have been forgotten, as Biles will tell you in this talk with the media not long after she won her sixth gold: 

Now let's see Simone Biles in action. Unfortunately, NBC Sports has put the kibosh on showing any part of their Olympics coverage on a mere blog like this. However, a YouTube site that goes by the name "Zennie62 You Live Oakland News Now NFL Draft Vegas" did have this video, which look to have been taped from a distance by somebody sitting in the stands. \

OK, I give up. Now Zennie62whateverthehellyoucallit took its video away. Man, this Olympic coverage must be worth its weight in, well, gold medals.  

I'm sending you right to YouTube post itself:

Simone Biles' AWE-INSPIRING floor routine clinches a record SIXTH gymnastics gold | Paris Olympics (youtube.com) 

 

No mental health issues there. Not even a Freudian slip.

                                                                           UPDATE

She just won a third gold in the Vault. That's seven Olympic golds altogether. Lest we forget, she's also won a silver in Tokyo and bronze each in Rio and Tokyo, so that's ten Olympic medals of any cast.

 

 

 

Someone Turned the Lights Out There in Memphis

 

I've read several biographies of Elvis Presley, and one thing that all these books make clear is that at some point the King of Rock and Roll eventually came to see his throng of admirers as something of a burden. Oh, sure, he liked that they loved him--who doesn't like being loved? --but he found himself overwhelmed by fans whenever he went out in public, a situation he could only rectify by turning day into night, renting movie theaters and even amusement parks after closing hours, when the regular patrons of such places were at home in bed. Elvis' daughter Lisa-Marie, a celebrity in her own right but not so much so that she couldn't go out when the sun was still up, never felt she had to run away from her father's fans, at least not on what would have been his 88th birthday, telling the crowd at Graceland "you're the only people that can get me out of my house," and, after the official ceremony was done with, staying to mingle a bit. Two days later she was back in Hollywood at the Golden Globes, flanked by her mother Priscella and Jerry Schilling, a member of her father's fabled Memphis Mafia, i.e., his entourage. Two days after that she died of what's being reported in the media as a cardiac arrest. I remember seeing Lisa-Marie on talk shows some fifteen years ago promoting her first album, and thinking she had a kind of melancholic air about her. Call me weird, but that actually made me like this young woman when I was prepared not to, as it had seemed like she may had made this particular career choice only because, well, because she was Elvis Presley's daughter (in fact, the song I heard on the radio turned out to be pretty good.) Nevertheless, you may wonder exactly what someone born in the lap of luxury would have to feel melancholic about. Well, Lisa-Marie took a few nasty falls from that lap. The first came when she was nine years old and saw her cardiac-arrested father face down on the bathroom floor. That's the melancholy that informed those talk show appearances I spoke of. The second fall came just two years ago when Lisa-Marie's 28-year-old son, Benjamin Keough (who, had he died his hair black and combed it into a ducktail, would have looked just like his grandfather), put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. At the risk of jumping to conclusions, it would seem depression runs in this family (it runs even in the extended family, as an ex-husband of Lisa-Marie's, one Michael Jackson, died from too much chemicals in his system, just like the posthumous father-in-law he often emulated.) Of course, these kinds of things happen to poor and working- and middle-class people too. But because they're not celebrities, it happens anonymously, lending a cloak of invisibility to a mental health crisis. I wish Lisa-Marie and Elvis and Benjamin and Michael hadn't died at the young ages they did, but at least it removes, however temporarily, that cloak.