Katelyn Ohashi's perfect 10 reminded America life could be fun again

There’s a reasonably good chance you’ve already seen the video of the American gymnast Katelyn Ohashi’s floor exercise from a quad meet in Anaheim last weekend. The two-minute clip of the UCLA senior tumbling and swaying and launching her 4ft 10in form into the air to a frenetic mashup of 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s hits became a viral smash almost immediately after it was posted to the team’s Twitter feed and has since racked up more than 40m views and counting.

Virality is an unpredictable cocktail and the widespread appeal of the 21-year-old’s routine, which earned the sixth perfect score of her collegiate career and helped the Bruins to a first-place finish over California, Michigan State and UC Davis, is not down to any one ingredient. Her technical skill and extraordinary athleticism are obvious – the double layout with a split is a kicker rarely seen on the college level – but hardly unparalleled. Her charisma and showmanship are palpable but not without precedent, nor are the nostalgia-drizzled musical choices of Ike & Tina Turner and Earth, Wind & Fire along with the Jackson 5 and Michael and Janet Jackson.

The secret sauce, it seems, is the unbridled exuberance on display, both in Ohashi’s performance and the delirious reactions of her teammates watching from the sidelines and hanging on every step and manoeuvre, which altogether offers a welcome advert for a sport that’s been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons over the past two years in the United States: gymnastics is fun.

The pitchwoman could hardly be more appropriate given Ohashi’s particular journey. The one-time prodigy had been earmarked for Olympic stardom as a 14-year-old junior gymnast after capturing four gold medals, including the all-around title, at the US national championships in 2011. But even as she made an apparently seamless transition to the senior level by winning the all-around at the 2013 American Cup – edging no less than future Olympic hero Simone Biles for top of the podium – the Seattle native found herself breaking down both physically and mentally.

She underwent surgery the following month that sidelined her for the rest of the year, followed by another surgery for a fractured back and a warning from doctors that she might never be able to return to competition. Ohashi’s auspicious senior debut wound up being the final meet of her elite career. Her well-documented reflections on her exit while ambivalent are flecked with a sense of relief.

Soon after Ohashi accepted a scholarship offer to compete at UCLA under longtime coach Valorie Kondos Field, the former classical dancer who has transformed the Bruins into one of the nation’s most decorated programs. College gymnastics, which operates under different and far more accessible rules than in the Olympics, is a step down from the elite circuit, but engenders a team-oriented environment where Ohashi has rediscovered the joy of enjoying the sport on her own terms and thrived. She shared the individual national title in the floor exercise at last year’s NCAA women’s gymnastics championships while helping the Bruins to a seventh team crown.

Last week’s clip is not the first collegiate floor routine to go viral. It’s not even Ohashi’s first: her floor exercise from last year’s Pac-12 championships was viewed more than 80m times on Facebook alone. But it’s hard to recall an entry from the surprisingly robust YouTube subgenre of collegiate floor exercises that’s made such a mainstream splash, earning shout-outs from Jesse Jackson, Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ohashi has made the media rounds in the week since and leveraged the occasion to bring attention to the body shaming that she endured during her elite career.

“In the gym, outside of the gym, on the internet, so it’s something that you can never really escape,” Ohashi said Thursday on ABC’s Good Morning America , where she read one of the poems that she wrote to help cope with the pain. “As a 14-year-old, it’s kind of hard to cope with, because you’re still developing as a person, and so everything really impacts you.”

At a time when the US and UK are up against their own depressing maelstroms – and the parochial space of gymnastics in the former hasn’t fared much better – leave it to one of our smallest athletes to give the world the big pick-me-up it so desperately needs.