Gymnasts like Simone Biles know what the slightest mental lapse can do.
The history of women’s gymnastics is full of stories of athletes who sustained life-altering injuries after being pressured to compete when they didn’t feel up to it.
Elena Mukhina on the beam during the 1978 World Championships.
Before Elena Mukhina broke her neck doing the Thomas salto, a skill so dangerous it is now banned, she told her coach she was going to break her neck doing the Thomas salto.
But her coach responded dismissively that people like her did not break their necks, and Mukhina, a 20-year-old Soviet gymnast, didn’t feel she could refuse. Besides, she recalled later in an interview with the Russian magazine Ogoniok, she knew what the public expected of her as the anointed star of the coming Olympic Games.
“I really wanted to justify the trust put in me and be a heroine,” she said.
Less than a month before the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, Mukhina under-rotated the Thomas salto and landed on her chin. She was permanently paralyzed and died in 2006, at the age of 46, from complications of quadriplegia. After her injury, she told Ogoniok, fans wrote to her asking when she would compete again.
