“We’re going to keep training hard and make Coach Gibson proud and the first step to that is the internal competition he scheduled for today. We’ll be doing a full all-around competition to develop baseline scores for our lineups in Tokyo.”
My heartrate thunders to a new beat, pounding in my temples, setting my back teeth grinding together. Nothing else matters right now, not Gibby, not whatever the hell our coaches decided or why they decided it, nothing except my next four routines.
“Uneven bars first, just like we’ve all been practicing,” Maybe-Liz says. I really should find out her name if she’s going to be in charge. “Okay, ladies, warm up.”
“Ugh, bars,” Chelsea grumbles as we hustle to the chalk bowl, pulling on our bars grips as we go. Chelsea’s great at a lot of things, especially vault, but bars were never her strength.
“Yay, bars,” I shoot back, forcing a cheeky smile onto my face.
“Shut up,” she says, nudging me softly with her elbow, but I manage to make her grin a little bit. This isn’t so bad. This is normal. Chatting around the chalk bowl. It might help to just focus on gymnastics for a little while. Maybe-Liz is right about at least one thing: we still have an Olympics to train for.
“Rotation order: Jaime, Chelsea, Sierra, Emma, and then Audrey,” Maybe-Liz calls out our alternate and then the worst bars worker to the best … me. At least I’m starting from a position of power. Of course, that means when we head to vault for the last rotation, my final impression will be my one and a half while everyone else is busting out doubles and two and a halves.
No time to think about that, though. First, I need to hit this routine like I have in training and give myself enough cushion to make it through the other three rotations. Bars should be no problem, vault and floor are what they are, and beam? We’ll see.
We warm up quickly, like we will at the Games, and bars goes exactly the way I imagined. We all hit, and the scores from the NGC members acting as our judges hold from trials, building with each routine. I smile at the three-tenths margin I have on Emma.
1.Audrey Lee
15.4
2.Emma Sadowsky
15.1
3.Sierra Montgomery
