This Must-Watch Olympic Gymnast’s YouTube Diary Reveals How Stressful Tokyo 2020 Really Is

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics were already going to be stressful enough for the athletes competing, but combine a year delay, a global pandemic, and the expectations of the world and they are a whole crucible of tension. Earlier today, American gymnast Simone Biles withdrew from the Team Finals due to an unspecified “medical issue.” Biles is considered the best gymnast of all time, so what happened? Could the stress of the games really have been so damaging? In one word: yes. And if you don’t believe me, you can watch her Olympic teammate MyKayla Skinner’s YouTube diary from Tokyo to see for yourself…

Much like Simone Biles, MyKayla Skinner is a veteran of the sport and the whole Olympics experience. However unlike Biles, Skinner was merely an alternate on the 2016 Rio Olympic team. That means her time in Rio was set apart from the Olympic Village and she didn’t get to compete. Skinner came back from college gymnastics — and a bout of COVID-19! — to make the team as an individual apparatus competitor this year.

Skinner’s YouTube channel takes folks behind-the-scenes of an elite gymnast’s life. We meet her husband Jonas, her cute cat, and her coach. Skinner shows us what it’s like to “do gymnastics when you’re tired” and “the process of making an Olympic Gymnastics floor routine.” So when she posted a video last week titled, “COME TO THE OLYMPICS WITH ME,” thumbnailed with a cute masked selfie with Suni Lee, I assumed it would be a fluffy installment showing off our Olympic gymnasts unwinding in Tokyo. Boy, was I wrong.

MyKayla Skinner’s Olympic diary opens on the stress of packing for the Olympics. She’s got a suitcase full of wraps and bandages, another full of snacks, and toiletries that include Imodium AD. (Which we’ll get to later…) “You look like you’re in pain,” her husband notes, but she says nothing but hmm. “MyKayla’s super stressed today,” Jonas says to the camera. A cut shows us the final packing before she’s up before the crack of dawn to get to the airport. Where things are “rough.”

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. We briefly see her boarding her first class flight to Tokyo with pal and teammate Simone Biles in the background. That glimpse of luxury is then supplanted with the stark waiting room all the Americans traveling to Japan have to wait in to ostensibly be tested for COVID-19.

The next “act” of the video is a mix of fun socializing with the rest of the team, being led around on tours, and some brief tourism at the Olympic Village, where the USA Gymnastics team are not staying, due to fear of COVID-19 infection. Initially, she says they are at a Hilton close to a training facility, before later being transferred to a new, but cramped business hotel. Throughout the fun stuff, though, is the reality of the pandemic. We learn they’ve been relegated to mostly staying locked up in their hotel and tied to a training schedule. Skinner gets a shot of a swimming pool, noting, “There’s the pool, which obviously we can’t use.” So, basically, it sounds like there is absolutely no place for the athletes to safely unwind.

The most important part of the video is the last 13 minutes, though. After a montage of moments that seem light, Skinner gets real. She talks about the stress acne blooming on her chin, noting it happened in Rio, too. She says how exhausted she is, remarking that she’s lost track of the days. She gives an update on alternate Kara Eaker testing positive for COVID and even discusses her stress-related diarrhea. Through it all, Skinner stresses how thankful she is for the opportunity to be an Olympian. There’s actually a moment where she says that Simone Biles herself asked her if the comeback was “worth it,” and Skinner says yes. Nevertheless, it’s hard to watch the whole video and not see an already stressful experience made worse by pressure of the pandemic.

If you watch Skinner’s video and still can’t fathom the enormous pressure that competing in the Olympics might put on a gymnast, there’s also HBO’s The Weight of Gold and Netflix’s Athlete A. The former is a searing documentary about the mental illnesses Olympians overwhelmingly suffer from and the latter a horrifying look at the crimes of former USA Gymnastics head doctor Larry Nassar. (Biles was indeed one of his victims.) The bottom line is the mental toll the Olympics take on athletes is as profound as the physical one. And there is nothing more important — not a nation’s medal count or a perfect score — than making sure athletes prioritize their mental and physical health first.