Riley McCusker rejuvenated in 2023: “It really took a lot of patience and love.”

University of Florida women’s gymnast Riley McCusker doesn’t watch her teammates go before she competes. So, when she mounted the beam during the NCAA finals in mid-April, she hadn’t seen one of her teammates slip off the apparatus earlier in the rotation.

But she could sense it.

“I knew something happened and that I most likely needed to help my team drop a score,” McCusker said in an exclusive interview with Olympics.com. “I really just had to pull from my intrinsic motivation and know that I just needed to go out there and do what I do every day.

“I’m like, ‘Okay, this is what you need to do. You need to get it done for your team,’” McCusker continued. “It’s not even just you that believes in yourself, I literally had 16, 17 other girls standing there with no doubt in their mind that I was going to get up there and hit a beam routine.”

Her 9.9375 was the highest score of the rotation and kept the Gators from counting a 9.0125 that would have taken them out of the running.

• Riley McCusker: “I love gymnastics again."

Her clutch effort under enormous pressure was a manifestation of sorts of just how far McCusker has come in her two years in Gainesville.

McCusker came to Florida as a top recruit. She was a member of the 2018 U.S. team that struck gold at the Worlds in Doha and, but for an injury sustained at the 2021 U.S. Classic, a major contender to make the U.S. squad for the Tokyo 2020 Games, held in the summer of 2021.

Though McCusker had a productive debutant season, appearing in all but one of Florida’s uneven bars lineups, she never broke 9.9.

As a sophomore, her performances began to take flight.

Her 2023 season saw her hit or surpass that 9.900 mark seven times on the bars, while also recording five scores of 9.900 or better on the beam, including that near flawless performance in the NCAA finals.

“I think for any athlete going through a transition, whether it be from elite to college or college to the pros or transitioning into retirement from your sport, there’s going to be a certain period of uncertainty just trying to figure out where you stand and everything,” said McCusker, who received the most improved gymnast award on her Gator squad. "It’s just like how you feel, how you fit in, especially when you’ve been competing in a certain environment for probably a decade… so I feel like there was a transition period.

“I was also dealing with a lot my freshman year,” she continued, “I had just come off of a full ankle reconstructive surgery that I got right after Olympic trials, so really that entire fall leading up to the competition season, I was mostly doing rehab work for that, so then, it was more difficult than this season, I would say, to pick up gymnastics and jump in with the team when I felt like I had missed a bit of that lead up work.”

McCusker is no stranger to work outside of the gym, either, where she’s a pre-med applied physiology and kinesiology major. She wants to be a surgeon.

And finding her passion in her studies has given her more confidence inside of it.

“I honestly think where I became more certain and more confident in myself in the gym came from outside of the gym. I love my major, I love learning about what I do,” McCusker said. “Just having that passion for something else besides gymnastics and being able to grow in a different area of my life… has really helped me become more confident in who I am.

“And I feel like that’s translated a lot into the gym,” she concluded.

McCusker hasn't shied away from being open to speaking about a two-year period of healing, mentally and physically, on her social media.

In early 2020, accusations of emotional and verbal abuse about McCusker’s former coach began to surface. By February, McCusker had accepted the invitation of her good friend and U.S. national team teammate Jade Carey to train in Arizona.

A year later, she missed out on her dream of going to the Olympics with her ankle injury limiting her to just the uneven bars at the 2021 U.S. Olympic Team Trials.

The 21-year-old alluded to those experiences and a subsequent lawsuit with her former coach in a social media post in August 2022, saying in part that she was in the process of rehabilitating both physically and mentally.

“I was dealing with a lot and kind of struggling with my mental health, for sure,” McCusker said last week of her freshman year. “It was a very difficult time after the Olympic trials. I probably hit the lowest I’ve ever been, and it really took a lot of patience and love from this team and my environment to be able to work on myself.

“I had a lot going on in my outside life, too, with the lawsuit, and I had a ton on my shoulders,” she continued, “Now that that’s all kind of over, I get to see who I am without all of that weighing me down and that is probably one of the biggest [differences from last year]. I feel very free and able to explore myself more and my passion. I don’t feel so weighed down, and I struggled with depression a lot and that has been a really huge thing for me.”

If McCusker’s newfound peace hasn’t come easy, neither has sharing that journey.

“I would say that when you’re in it and you’re struggling, most of the time, you won’t see people putting it out there [on social media], but almost kind of when they’re getting better, getting more tools, talking to someone or doing whatever they need to do for their mental health and learning from it and learning what works best for them, then, they can express that and try to help others. That’s what you normally see on social media,” explained McCusker. “It’s scary to put it out there. It really is.”

Mental health has been a focus at Florida, which helped arrange therapy for her early on in her time at the university.

“I do feel a ton of support here from the Gators,” she said. “They really prioritise it here at the University of Florida. I appreciate that a lot and that made it a lot easier to come out and talk about it now.”

There’s work to be done in the sport as a whole, though: “I still there could be more access and less stigma in some places.”

But she feels the seismic shifts happening in gymnastics and sports, generally.

“It was a thing that you just pushed to the side and you push through, and you push through and you push through,” said McCusker. “Like anything, you need to work on it so that you can grow and develop those skills… but I do see sports, youth sports going in a better direction.”

For now, she's focused on the day-to-day.

"I really do enjoy the little things and I really enjoy the freedom to kind of be myself and express my gymnastics the way that I want to. I really feel like having a team behind me brings me a ton of joy - that was why this past season was such a light in my life," McCusker said. "I love gymnastics. I have for sure found my like intrinsic motivation and love for it again."