Winning Balance

by Nancy French

  I was thrilled to be in Belgium, although I got homesick when I couldn’t reach my parents by phone. I hoped they weren’t worried about me. Our accommodations weren’t five-star, to say the least, and I couldn’t even get the shower to work. There was one perk, however. The dining hall had the best bread rolls I’ve ever had in my entire life. We always had to be very careful about what we ate in front of our coaches, but when Ivana and I went down to dinner, we made sure to stock up on the rolls. Throughout our meal, we’d stuff them into our gym bags and pockets. When we got back to the room, we’d eat about a dozen apiece!

  I actually ended up taking first place in the all-around, vault, and floor in Belgium, but my main memories of that trip are of the USA leotard . . . and those dinner rolls. This competition represented a turning point of another sort as well. As my routines became more challenging, I began to pray for protection before every meet: “God, please watch over me. Keep me healthy and safe.” Like my mom, I understood that, at this level, gymnastics is a dangerous sport.

  When I returned home from Belgium, I felt a little different, a little more grown-up than I’d been when I had left. While my friends were thinking about the latest reality TV show or homework assignment, I was thinking about new moves I wanted to nail and competitions I wanted to qualify for. None of my friends at school really understood the gymnastics side of me. They just knew that I was exceptionally strong, always went to the gym after school, and had less free time on the weekends than they did. But I largely tried to keep my two lives separate, a surprisingly easy task since no one was all that interested in what I was doing when I wasn’t sitting at my desk or hanging out with friends.

  I’d gone from the winner’s podium at the competition to the school cafeteria lunch line, where I hoped there would still be some white milk by the time I got to the end. At competitions I loved the feeling of testing the limits of my strength, agility, and flexibility. It may sound silly, but once I was back home, I felt a little like Clark Kent, just trying to fit in at school and making sure I slid into my seat before the bell rang.

  My parents were good at helping me look ahead and find a way to fit in the normal teenage milestones. Because they encouraged me to take driver’s ed as soon as I was eligible to do so, I was able to finish the course before my competition schedule became too full to fit it in. Months before that my dad had begun teaching me to drive. When he got home from work, he’d park his truck in the street and call me outside so I could drive the truck into the driveway.

  When I was fourteen, I got an unexpected invitation. Bernie Saggau, the longtime head of the Iowa High School Athletic Association, invited my parents and me to meet him at the Iowa Hall of Pride, an interactive educational facility that celebrates notable Iowans in athletics, music, broadcasting, and other endeavors.

  Bernie had heard of me from his two granddaughters, who were also training at Chow’s Gym. He thought I had the potential to be a standout in gymnastics and a role model for girls. The Iowa Hall of Pride attracts thousands of schoolchildren to downtown Des Moines every year, but on the night we met with Bernie and the hall’s director, Jack Lashier, we were the only visitors.

  Bernie and Jack walked us to the area where they told us they wanted to create an exhibit highlighting my achievements. Mine would be right next to the display on PGA Masters’ winner Zach Johnson—thus, they could call us the “Johnson and Johnson” exhibit.

  I was nearly speechless. “You’re going to do that for me?” I asked. “I haven’t won anything yet.”

  Bernie smiled. “I don’t care. You are a tremendous role model for young girls, and I think you have the potential to be Iowa’s greatest gymnast.”

  I’ve always been proud to say I’m from Iowa. I don’t think there’s a more close-knit community anywhere, so it was an honor to be included in my home state’s Hall of Pride. My parents, coaches, family friends, teachers, and I were interviewed on camera so a video montage of my life and gymnastics career could be created. Sculptor Rick Stewart of Newton, Iowa, was commissioned to create a sculpture of me on a balance beam. While the exhibit didn’t open for a couple of years, I think Bernie and Jack were glad they began working on it when they did. Over the coming months, I had less and less time to concentrate on anything other than school and gymnastics.

  By early 2006, I was focused on preparing for the Visa Championships as a member of the junior national team. That year the championships would be held in St. Paul in August, and I saw my opportunity to make a statement. As I’ve mentioned, gymnasts don’t have many ways to distinguish their appearances. When competing as a national team member, my teammates and I wore identical leotards. However, a few times each year I had to compete as an individual to requalify for the national team. For those competitions, Coach Chow encouraged my desire to design my own leotard.

  I’d start with an outline of a bare leotard and then provide specific instructions, not only about color and fabrics, but about what stitching, “jewels,” and neckline should be used. GK Elite Sportswear provides a custom design service, so they’d create the leotard according to my exact specifications. My favorite was the one I designed for the competition in St. Paul. My name was written in Chinese characters on my sleeve. It was my way of expressing my goal to make the Olympic team that would be headed to Beijing. When people saw it, they assumed I’d done it to honor Chow. Of course, this was also true. I was so proud to be making the journey with such a great coach, someone who was willing to go out of his way to help me achieve my full potential.

  Yes, I had ambitious goals, but I delivered by coming in first in the all-around at the Visa Championships. I was still a junior, which simply meant I was under fifteen years old. (To compete at the senior level, gymnasts generally must be sixteen. The exception is the year just prior to the next summer Olympics, when fifteen-year-olds are also eligible to compete as seniors.) The neat thing about my scores that year—and the thing that surprised everyone in attendance—was that they were higher than those of the winning senior-level gymnasts. I was thrilled, and people began describing me as the top up-and-coming junior, the gymnast to watch.

  This championship was special for another reason: it was the first time I met Mary Lou Retton, who presented the medals. I’d always looked up to her because of her style, her character, and the fact that, like me, she’s never been afraid to be her own person and stand out. I was thrilled to shake her hand after she presented me with my medal, but I was even more pleased when she came over to me later and showed genuine interest in my story.

  The media has often compared me to Mary Lou, and frankly, that’s a big compliment. I love that she has remained down to earth, true to her own goals, and committed to her family. I hope the same will always be true of me as well.

  Lesson I’ve Learned

  “Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance” (1 Corinthians 13:7).

  Chapter 8

  Watch Me, World!

  I am building a fire, and every day I train, I add more fuel. At just the right moment, I light the match.

  —Mia Hamm

  EVEN AFTER THESE EARLY SUCCESSES, my life hadn’t changed very much. Coach Chow is a firm believer in a training program that allows for life outside the gym—something he never had growing up. That meant that I continued to practice about twenty-five hours a week, including four hours after school each day and another five or six hours on Saturdays. The intensity increased as my coaches helped me set and work on new goals. They even helped me come up with key words that would keep me focused on exactly how I wanted to perform each skill—simple phrases like “stay under control.” Chow told me he was constantly amazed by my ability to listen to his correction and then incorporate about 90 percent of it the next time I performed that skill. That ability, he said, was rare and would help set me apart from other gymnasts.

  Chow and Li had always taught me to recognize the difference between practicing and performin
g. It’s relatively easy to learn and execute new skills in the gym. I wanted to learn all the time, so that came easy to me. But they reminded me that competition demands much more. You have to be able to overcome your nerves and ignore the spectators and cameras while performing at your highest level.

  I took those lessons to heart, and they became important as 2007 began. In March I was in Jacksonville, Florida, for the Tyson American Cup. As I warmed up in the arena before the competition, I was able to tune out the activity around me.

  Boom, boom, boom. I was hitting my flips hard on the balance beam and didn’t notice a woman and a USA Gymnastics official pause for a moment to watch me. The woman with the official was Sheryl Shade, a former marketing executive with Walt Disney Pictures and Hawaiian Tropic who, about ten years before, had founded her own firm. Shade Global specializes in representing Olympic athletes and documentary filmmakers, among others. Sheryl had already heard some buzz about me. After seeing me in person and watching as I took the all-around title, she decided she’d better get in touch with my coaches quickly.

  Immediately after the American Cup, Sheryl e-mailed Coach Chow to express her interest in talking with me and my parents. Chow told her he thought that would be wise; however, my parents resisted at first. In fact, my mom refused to even talk with her. After all, why would I need an agent? Besides that, my mom wasn’t sure what to think of New York agents.

  My dad agreed to talk with Sheryl, but he, too, was skeptical. For six weeks, he and Sheryl talked about once a week, and each time my dad asked her more questions. Finally, he called to suggest that Sheryl fly in to Des Moines to meet our family. After meeting at Chow’s, we had a great conversation over salads at a casual restaurant; in fact, I connected with her from the start.

  It took a bit longer for Sheryl to convince my parents that she could play a vital role in my career. In particular, given my young age, she could help us determine whether I should go professional or retain my amateur status and remain eligible to compete in NCAA college gymnastics. My parents ultimately decided it was in my best interest to have a pro like Sheryl help me navigate these options. Though Sheryl handles many of my “business” decisions, my parents and I now think of her as family, and we trust her completely.

  In July 2007, I headed to the Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I’d never been part of an event like it. There were more than five thousand athletes from all over the Americas, and participants competed in over three hundred events. The spectators were loud and enthusiastic—more like a soccer crowd than a typical gymnastics audience. People painted their faces and blew air horns to distract us. They threw Mardi Gras beads and bottles in the stands.

  Some athletes might have been intimidated by this scene, but I wasn’t. In fact, I was invigorated. There I was with my teammates, ready to compete in front of people who were yelling, stomping their feet, blowing whistles, and generally trying to mess with my mind. But they weren’t able to rattle me. I felt like I could do anything, and once again, I was crowned all-around champion. Plus, I helped lead my country to the team title. I felt like I was on top of the world, but I knew I hadn’t gotten there by myself.

  As our national anthem played, I invited my teammates Rebecca Bross and Ivana Hong to join me on the podium’s top spot. I knew they had worked just as hard as I had and deserved that spotlight as much as anyone. As I stood there listening to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” I realized that these games would be one of the highlights of my career.

  About a month later, I was in San Jose for the 2007 Visa Championships, which would determine the national champion in women’s artistic and rhythmic gymnastics. Because the Olympics were coming up a year later, I had been classified as a senior competitor in February, shortly after I turned fifteen. This competition was the first qualifier for the World Championships, but I wasn’t more nervous than usual. I looked at these meets as the place to show everyone what I’d been working on, to push my body to its limits. The pressure didn’t faze me. Instead, it clarified my thoughts and allowed me to concentrate fully on the task at hand. I won the gold in the all-around.

  As I stood on that podium, I couldn’t believe how far I’d come.

  But I was about to go a lot further.

  Placing first at nationals allowed me to go to the World Championships in Germany later that fall. In our sport, winning this competition carries more prestige than medaling at the Olympics. To compete at the Olympics, a gymnast must be representing a country. This means that sometimes very good gymnasts from small countries are left out because those nations don’t have enough gymnasts to qualify as a team. Conceivably, a girl could be the best all-around in the world but be unable to compete at the Olympic level. Though it’s not as publicized as the Olympics and doesn’t have the same hallowed history, the world competition truly determines the best gymnasts in the world.

  In addition to competing individually, I would be part of the USA’s national team. We weren’t favored to win the team all-around. China was expected to dominate, but we had other plans.

  The American team had come for a battle. We fought Romania and China for the gold medal, all the way down to the very last event. I was the anchor on beam, which is supposed to be the most important position. Amazingly, I fell. In a team competition, you really can’t make a single mistake. I was so upset because I felt that I’d disappointed all of my team members and, in fact, the whole country. However, our team captain, Alicia Sacramone, reminded us that if we won the floor, the gold would still be ours. We really came through on the floor: I hit every single landing, and so did everybody else. In the end, we pulled ahead of China to win the team gold medal.

  We’d been working together for so long that when we finally got ahold of that gold medal, nothing in the world could have felt better. We hugged and cried and shared the moment as a true team.

  A couple of days later, I competed in the individual all-around. The winner of this event would go home with the most coveted medal and title in gymnastics . . . world champion. Only three American women had managed to win that title before: Chellsie Memmel, Shannon Miller, and Kim Zmeskal.

  I hit every routine and ended up winning. I had gone from an up-and-coming junior to the best gymnast in the world in one year. It was unbelievable.

  Not every moment of the world competition was picture-perfect, however. This was my first experience with a grueling, Olympic-length meet, so competing day after day after day was a little challenging. During the event finals, which happened a few days later, I competed on the beam and floor. That day, when I went up for beam, I fell twice in the same routine. This, of course, is unheard of. If you fall, you fall. But normally you don’t fall twice . . . especially in the event finals. This was my event. I’m not sure I’d ever been so devastated.

  I had an hour to be in the practice gym to warm up before competing on the floor finals. I’ll never forget going back into the training gym and seeing Chow standing there.

  He looked like he was in shock, but he collected himself before he spoke.

  “Mistakes are mistakes,” he said to me kindly. He wasn’t mad at all, just disappointed. “Something was simply off.”

  I started bawling. He let me have my space for a little bit, then he came back to me to encourage me to regain my competition mind-set. “You know, things happen. Mistakes happen. But it’s time to pick yourself up. You have another event.”

  I went out there with my head held high. I’d made it this far with great parents and a supportive coach. And so, when it was time for me to do my floor routine, I had no fear, doubt, or embarrassment over the mistakes I’d made.

  I ended up with the gold in that event, as well as the Longines Prize for Elegance, which celebrates the athlete who has demonstrated the “most remarkable elegance” in the course of the world competitions. It was a great honor, especially since I’ve never really thought of myself that way. I’m regularly described as energetic and powerful, and I’ve even been called a spa
rk plug, but this was the first time I’d been described as elegant.

  When I returned home, my parents and I were startled by the increasing interest in me. I was introduced to the nation almost by accident. Sheryl had just returned from the World Championships when she met with an ABC News executive producer, Tom Yellin, about a documentary project. When he found out she’d just returned from Stuttgart, he mentioned hearing about the “small girl” who’d surprised everyone by winning the all-around. Sheryl told him my name and said she represented me.

  Yellin thought for a moment and then explained that the news team would soon be meeting to choose the ABC Person of the Week. While it looked as if they would select either a politician or another world leader that week, he thought they should consider me as well. A day or so later, he called Sheryl to tell her the group had chosen me over the other two being considered.

  There was only one problem: they needed to film on Thursday so the piece would be ready for Friday’s newscast. I told Sheryl that I had already agreed to be ball girl for the football team after school on Thursday. ABC worked around that; they ended up taking footage of me on the sidelines of the football field, as well as in the gym.

  Charlie Gibson introduced the Person of the Week segment this way: “She’s a high school sophomore from an Iowa suburb—at first glance a typical good Midwest kid who likes text messaging, giggling with friends, who has a bunch of cats and dogs. And—oh yes—she’s a world champion.”