Laurie Hernandez, the bubbly 5-foot gymnast and youngest U.S. lady to compete within the Rio Olympics, retired with a gold medal in 2016. Why wouldn’t she? In a sport with a notoriously fast lifespan, she’d snagged her suppose at the first exchange (the Olympics had been her first fundamental global meet), did her job (she brought residence a silver medal for her efficiency on beam and, alongside Simone Biles, helped the Closing Five speak residence gold), and walked away on high. It turned into time for Hernandez, correct 16, to love her effectively-earned glory.
“After 2016, I didn’t truly are attempting to construct gymnastics,” she says. “There had been correct all these alternatives that had been coming and I grabbed them because I wished them.” She modified into the youngest competitor to ever glean Dancing With the Stars and wrote now no longer one nonetheless two Unusual York Times finest-promoting books. “There turned into so grand lifestyles abilities out of doors of the sport that I turned into being offered,” she says. “I turned into address, ‘Yes, build me in—that’s what I want.’”
She also began to route of the toll gymnastics had taken on her. While she turned into grabbing alternatives to stipulate herself out of doors of gymnastics, the sport turned into within the course of a reckoning over a documented culture of abuse. (Hernandez shared her possess myth of emotional abuse by a damaged-down coach in 2020.) Within the middle of all that, Hernandez realized in 2018 she wasn’t keen to tear a long way from gymnastics forever—nonetheless she did hold notes. “I thought, If I alternate the environment and I alternate how things are performed, then presumably the consequence will probably be diversified,” she says. “I’m now no longer going to interrupt myself in half of correct to make a decision up [to the Olympics]. My body’s already performed that and it didn’t address it. There turned into masses of nurturing and masses of therapeutic alive to after 2016.”
Even sooner than the pandemic hit, postponing the Tokyo Olympics for a year, the comeback turned into a mountainous concern—this Laurie Hernandez turned into older and additional liable to accidents in a sport designed for prepubescent bodies, with a special form of fitness than her 16-year-extinct competitive self had. But she turned into also in a grand more healthy residence mentally, having began therapy and turning into an point out for psychological health. “Treatment, and opening up about what’s going on in my brain, is truly necessary since the longer I assist something that’s weighing on me to myself, the heavier it gets,” she says. “While you initiate to share with diversified of us, it’s address, Okay, they’re also preserving this heaviness with me.”
Hernandez’s road to Tokyo has been rocky, scheme assist first by the pandemic, and then by accidents as she returned to competitors this February for the first time in almost 5 years. Proper days prior to the U.S. Gymnastics Olympic Trials, scheduled for June 24, Hernandez pulled out of her walk for a suppose on the Olympic crew. Comeback over.
“Going into 2016, there turned into this very heavy weight of feeling address, I truly hold to construct it. Bask in, I want this to happen in a engaging, inhumane capacity,” she says. That turned into in no arrangement the precedence for her return. Hernandez, who is an ambassador for health-focused Team Lilly, is phase of a wave of gymnasts reclaiming joy and prioritizing their possess health. In a sport that for years perpetuated a glean-at-all-costs culture, that’s an intensive act. “To be a healthy human and to hold a mountainous give a enhance to system at the discontinuance of the day, that’s all I want,” she acknowledged after we spoke for the length of the warmth of her practicing earlier this year.
Hernandez won’t be adding from now on Olympic medals to her series this summer. But her comeback is arrangement from a failure—it’s a sport-changing legacy for gymnastics. In coming assist, even at the probability of falling fast on the sector’s stage, Hernandez bought to glean the energy assist—something she shares with damaged-down teammate Biles (with whom she’ll be reuniting in Biles’s post-Olympics Gold Over The united states Tour). She bought to middle females athletes in a sporting culture that’s silenced them. She bought to stipulate glory now no longer by medals for the U.S. or by titles for USA Gymnastics nonetheless by the desires she scheme for herself. “I did a skill that no one’s ever performed sooner than and I truly hold it on video. I’m in a position to’t wait till I pick as a lot as construct a reel of all the abilities I in no arrangement competed, nonetheless that had been new and animated,” she says. “That is going to be fun for me.”
