Directed by Steven Nye

When top U.S. gymnast Shane Wiskus suffers a dangerous fall in competition, his Olympic dreams hang in the balance.

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SRQ Magazine “Failure to Land” – May 2023

“Failure is pretty much expected in the sport. There’s no two ways about it. In order to get every skill in your routine, you have to try it a million times before you actually get it,” says Shane Wiskus. “It’s really those meets at the end of your competitive season when you’ve gone to multiple competitions and you’ve learned from those failures, is where things start to finally fall in place. So I think a lot of gymnasts are quite comfortable with failure. The problem is that when you fail after a full season of getting your bearings underneath you, that’s when the pressure can really start to mount in your head.” Wiskus, a heralded collegiate gymnast who represented the United States at the 2020 Summer Olympics, is the subject of Losing Grip, a documentary about the decline of men’s collegiate gymnastics told through the lens of Wiskus’ athletic career. The documentary is directed by Steven Nye, a longtime friend of Wiskus who grew up training in gymnastics in the same home gym back in Minnesota. Although Nye eventually stopped competing in high school, he never left the sport.

Local Ties Losing Grip Documentary – July 13, 2021

“My documentary was already following the decline in men’s collegiate gymnastics, but now it became central to my main subject. I realized… I was documenting the final year of a 118 year program. At the least, I was preserving history. But my true goal is to showcase the profound impact gymnastics has had on my life.”