The greatest gymnast of all time reached the Olympics under pressure to expand her medal roster. In Tokyo, the athlete revealed she was going through some kind of difficulty when she jumped and dropped out of four Olympic finals to prioritize looking after her mental health – and opened up a discussion that broke the boundaries of the sport. On the episode O Subject re-run on December 28, Renata Le Pretty had two guests: former Globo reporter Marcos Uchoa and USP Psychologist Vera Iaconelli. “What you do no one else can do,” Ochoa sums up about the Bayles phenomenon. Hu, who has covered the Olympics for more than three decades, describes the pressure that high-performance athletes experience from a very young age, especially in gymnastics. “There is deformity in childhood and adolescence,” he says. Vera, who is also the director of the Gerar de Psicanalysis Institute, analyzes the gymnast’s condition from the point of view of “relationship with our desires.” Describing an athlete’s gesture as a “problem,” she wonders, “Mental health is the ability to say no to certain things that are not acceptable. And not madly trying to adapt to them.”
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The O Subject podcast was produced by: Mônica Mariotti, Isabel Seta, Luiz Felipe Silva, Thiago Kaczuroski and Giovanni Reginato. Gabriel de Campos, Ana Flávia Paula and Victor Paz also collaborated on The Show: Renata Lo Prete.
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