“No, not everything. We finally get to have that serious conversation.”
“I hate to break this to you, Audrey Lee, but I think maybe we’ve been having it this whole time,” he says, smiling down at me.
I snuggle closer. “Of course we have.”
The door to the suite opens, just a crack, and Chelsea’s voice calls inside. “Everyone decent?”
I roll my eyes and then stand up to stick my tongue out at her. But really, they’ve been great since yesterday, giving me my space. They all have gold medals now, and I don’t. It’s not a good look to be jealous of your friends’ success, but clearly, they get it. They get me.
“What’s up, Chels?” I ask, pulling my hair up into a ponytail, feeling Leo stand behind me.
“There was a news conference back home,” she says, walking into the room with Dani. Emma, Mrs. Jackson, and Janet come through the door behind her. She turns on the TV and swipes a video from her phone to the larger screen.
A reporter is speaking into a mic with a large courthouse behind him. “… I can confirm that though he maintained his innocence after his arrest and in a live interview as the Tokyo Olympic Games began, Christopher Gibson, the former head coach of USA women’s gymnastics, has today pled guilty both to charges related to tampering with an athlete’s drug test and to a variety of offenses related to sexual assault.”
Immediately, my thoughts go to Dani and Emma, who are silently staring at the screen, and my ridiculous nickname and not having a gold medal are suddenly the least important things in the world. That monster is going to jail, and we’re still here, despite everything, untarnished by it all; in fact, maybe we shine a little brighter for it.
Dani takes a deep breath and releases it. “Good,” she says and looks away from the TV.
“Damn right,” Emma says.
It doesn’t seem like either wants to talk about it. I meet Chelsea’s eyes behind their backs, and she shakes her head just once. We’re on the same page, and we let it go. When they’re ready to talk, they will. Or not. We’re good with either.
“Okay, ladies,” Mrs. Jackson says, turning off the TV. “It’s time to go.”
Our last day of competition. The beam final and the floor final: one last chance for each of us to medal.
One more routine, and that’s it: I’m done.
Okay, Audrey, finish strong.
–
The arena is comforting in its consistent tundra-like temperatures and the slightly stale taste of recycled air. It’s the sixth day in a row I’ve stepped into this massive structure, and part of me has a weird sense of affection for it. It’s the last place I’ll ever do competitive gymnastics. Today, I even love the stupid frigid air, because it means that I get to be a gymnast.
There aren’t many girls left in the warm-up gym. There’s a lot of overlap in these finals. Beam and floor tend to be complementary strengths in our sport. Beam’s first, though, so anyone not competing in it, like Chelsea and Dani, wanders off to stretch out and keep warm while they wait. The rest of us head to the practice beams.
This final is going to be brutal. The beam workers at these Olympics are out-of-control good, and while I know I can compete with them, it all comes down to my connections once again. I don’t have the electric tumbling that Ana-Maria Popescu can do or the ability to put my feet together side by side with room to spare, making the beam seem huge in comparison, like Sun Luli. I have to hit my skills and keep going, no hesitation, let it all blend together into a beautiful dance for the judges and keep their pencils off those score sheets.
There’s a normalcy to all of this now, almost like we all train together in one gigantic international gymnastics commune. The girls we’ve been competing against all week have somehow, in the midst of the fiercest competition of our lives, become our teammates. We work in order, like a team would prepare for a competition, rotating one after another doing pieces of our routines before finally putting it all together as we hit the ten-minute warning the officials give us.
I grab some water, give my hair one last coat of hairspray, and then line up with the seven other girls who are going to fight me for every thousandth of a point today. As we march out into the arena, I feel it building again, the want. I want this gold medal. I want to go out on top. I wanted that bars gold too, though, and that didn’t exactly work out. I try to push it back, but it’s too late. I let the want in, and there’s no getting rid of it now.
We’re announced to the crowd. They seem more subdued than in the last few days. Maybe the realization that it’s all coming to an end has hit them too.
I’m up sixth, so when the Klaxon sounds to end warm-ups, I head down off the podium with seven other girls to sit and wait while Erika Sheludenko from Russia gets the green light from the judges.
Some people think that you can tell how a beam rotation is going to go by how the first athlete’s routine goes. It’s the same reason why teams tend to put up their most solid performer first, the girl most likely to hit, so that the day doesn’t turn into a splat-fest.
So when the crowd groans as Erika misses her foot on a back handspring into a layout and falls to the mats below, I want to groan with them. That is not a good sign. Not at all.
Then Elisabetta Nunziata from Italy goes up, and the same thing happens, a fall on a switch split leap, and the nervous energy in the arena begins to permeate everywhere.
My leg starts to bounce up and down on its own. I don’t want to watch this. I don’t need to put two—I cringe as Han Ji-a of South Korea falls on her front tuck mount—three falls into my head before I go up there with my last shot at an Olympic gold on the line.
“Breathe, Audrey,” Janet says, breathing with me.
I follow her, breathing in and out and the tension in my bones starts to seep away.
