Quicker (an Ell Donsaii story)

by Laurence Dahners

  Phil had had Chuck notify him when Ell started her first Olympic routine and he watched it live on his HUD. He hadn’t actually watched her before, and had not actually seen many gymnastic events at all. In fact, he didn’t really understand the vault and wondered, as she started down the runway, just what she was going to do, or was supposed to do for that matter. The first thing he noticed was that she seemed to be running very fast. He wondered if it was a video artifact but then Radin Venta, one of the gymnastics announcers said, “My God! Look at her go! I’ve never seen a vaulter sprint this fast. Will she really be able to handle that velocity when she hits the table?”

  Then Phil saw her spin end over, hitting the springboard, next the table and then fly much higher and farther into the air than he had ever dreamed might be possible, all while turning end over end. He thought she might be twisting too but it was hard to tell? Were there special springs in the apparatus that let her do that? he wondered

  The woman announcer, Eva Escanescue, gasped.

  Phil watched Ell land, after all that incredible twisting and twirling, an amazingly long distance from the table where she had launched herself, right in the center of the lane. She was facing straight ahead, flexing her knees a little and then standing up and throwing her arms in the air! You would have thought she just hopped down off a chair, as effortless as she made the landing look. She bowed towards the judges and then the other direction. Then Ell turned to trot back to the waiting area.

  Phil turned to Joe Ingvul, one of his new friends on the USA Olympic wrestling team who had been watching too. “Wow! I didn’t know gymnasts could do that kind of stuff.”

  “Holy shit! They can’t! They can’t, that was out the lock!”

  Venta, apparently having been stunned into silence, came back on the air, “I have… never—never seen a vault like that! I’m pretty sure that was a layout “double” with two and a half twists which has never been performed before in competition and I would have sworn—was impossible. Despite the fact that it must be the most difficult vault ever performed, I could not see anything that wasn’t perfect, absolutely perfect form. Maybe the slow motion will show some error but the judges judge in real time. I can’t imagine what they could possibly deduct for.

  Escanescue stammered a little, “And, and, and, a double with even one twist has never been done before. Much less a double in the layout position! And, that had to be the biggest, highest, longest vault I’ve ever seen.”

  Phil’s eyebrows rose as he noticed that the stands had erupted into pandemonium. Apparently a lot of other people thought that that was a pretty good vault too. Then the slow motion replay started showing. Phil’s mouth fell open as he now saw clearly how much spinning and twisting had actually been going on during Ell’s flight through the air! How could she possibly even land without hurting herself, much less land elegantly like she had?

  Radin Venta said, “Our analysis people tell me that the speed gun clocked her max speed during the sprint to the springboard to be 29 miles per hour! Michael Fentis has been the record holder for the fastest human footspeed or sprint speed at 28.1 miles per hour at his fastest during the 100 meters! Of course she only runs about 25 meters for the vault but Fentis doesn’t reach top speed until about the 60th meter. This is so, so hard to believe! We’ll have to have them clock it off the video to confirm. We’re also trying to get confirmation that she just set world records for height and distance in addition to being the very first in the world to perform a vault that no one thought could be done! Even reviewing the slow motion video, I don’t see any flaws in that vault. We may have just seen the best vault in history! The very best by a very, very large margin!”

  Escanescue broke in, “The judges have actually given her a 10.0! That’s not supposed to be possible anymore. But honestly, I don’t know how they could have done otherwise.”

  Venta said, “She’s not going to take a second vault. She’d be absolutely crazy to try such a dangerous vault again after a perfect first try!”

  Phil could hear the crowd going crazy in the background as the arena announcer boomed, “What a start to these Olympics! In one of the very first gymnastic events of the competition and in the very first Olympic event for this almost unknown gymnast she gets the first 10.0 score in decades!”

  Ingvul punched Phil on the shoulder, “Man, your girlfriend is something else!”

  Phil shook his head in bemusement, “She’s not my girlfriend, but you don’t know the half of her ‘something else!’”

  The big screens over the arena were showing Ell’s vault over and over in slow motion as the crowd became increasingly giddy. Ell was called out for another bow. The team and coaches were going crazy. She had not really expected her vault to cause this much commotion even if no one had ever done one like it before. She wondered whether or not to continue to do her best on the other events too. As Ell walked back from her second bow Anna stared at her wide eyed. Ell wondered what she might be thinking now. The stare morphed into a glare and as Ell walked past Anna hissed, “You must be taking drugs!”

  Coach Benson came up grinning foolishly and gave Ell a huge hug. She whispered in Ell’s ear, “I’d say ‘I knew you could do it!’ but I had no clue. You’re gonna ruin me as a coach if you tell the world I had no idea that anyone could do a two and a half – two and a half! You know it’ll be named a ‘Donsaii’ and no one else will ever be able to do one?” She stood back and clapped as Ell walked the rest of the way off the floor to her little corner.

  On the net Venta said, “It has been brought to my attention that Donsaii has a history of performing at the highest levels only when it really matters. While other athletes crumble under pressure; that has been the only time that she turns in her best performances. It’s like she thrives on pressure! We can only wonder, ‘how will she perform in the other events under the crushing pressure of the Olympics?’ The vault has always been her best event, but will she deliver unbelievable, ‘first ever’ performances in other events here at these Games?”

  Ell looked up into the stands for her mother and grandmother. She picked them out in their assigned seats. She shrugged her shoulders. Her mother shrugged hers back, then grinned and put both thumbs up and pumped her fist. Ell decided that that meant her mom liked having her daughter “kick some butt.” Should she keep “going for it”? The bars were next and Coach was trying to get her to “warm up a little.” This time she simply insisted on resting, trying to conserve everything she had for the actual performance. Benson looked at her for a moment as if she might try to order her to warm up. Then she grinned and shrugged her shoulders, “After that vault, I’d be crazy to try to tell you what to do.” To the bewilderment of Ell’s teammates she lay down and actually took a brief nap while waiting for her turn to come up. Going into the zone always left her drained, so it was easy to drop off for a moment.

  Benson shook her awake and she came up without any muzziness. As Ell walked out to the bars she was startled to hear another rush of thunderous applause. She looked around to see what had happened but it wasn’t obvious so she looked up at the big screens to see if they were replaying whatever had happened. Her own face was in the monitors! The crowd was cheering before she even started! She felt her adrenalin levels start to spike and suppressed them with a couple of long calming breaths. As she stood and dusted her hands she looked around and to her astonishment realized that the girls at the other apparatus had all paused and were waiting to watch her on the bars. She’d never seen anything like this at a meet before. Apparently, they were all waiting to see if she produced another bit of Olympic gymnastic history and unwilling to miss it if she did. She shrugged, deciding that she would go ahead and do her very best on this routine too. She mentally reviewed her “secret weapons” for the bars. After another deep breath she used her usual simple mount and then dropped into the zone, feeling the world slow. The arena became nearly silent as thousands of people held their breath. A couple swings around the upper bar an
d then she rocketed into the air above the bars for a double flip before catching the low; the first of the bar elements she had been working on after midnight when no one else was in the gym. When she finished the bars with a back triple dismount, she had performed three extremely high difficulty elements on the bars that had never been seen before, and she’d performed them like she owned them, perfectly. As Ell stood from her flawless, wobble free “stuck” landing and threw her hands high, the arena came to its feet for another standing ovation. Ell looked around the arena as she came back down out of the zone and saw that the gymnasts waiting at the other apparati had still not started their own routines and after a moment her eyes moistened as each and every one of the other gymnasts on the floor began applauding too! Shortly thereafter the judges awarded the second “perfect 10” Olympic gymnastic score in decades and the big screen began showing this bar routine in slow motion, over and over to admiring gasps.

  Phil watched Ell’s performance on the bars as soon as it came up on the net. Mesmerized by the dazzling perfection of her routine he almost didn’t register Venta’s words, “And I’ve just learned that this young woman, though a rising sophomore at the Air Force Academy, is only 16 years old! She apparently was so bright that she skipped two grades and then left high school a year early! Not only a physical phenom but a mental genius!” Phil’s heart sank as he realized that he’d tried to force himself on a fourteen year old girl that Fall after their Physmed testing. The fact that he’d been unaware of her age, and not quite eighteen himself at the time was no excuse.

  And, she was his math tutor!

  Ell finished the day with three 10s. There had been no doubt on beam where she again inserted two unimagined elements, but on the floor exercise the judges broke into vociferous arguments. Her floor exercise had three, never before performed elements, just like the bars. No one could dispute the extreme, extreme difficulty of those elements nor the perfection of their execution. However, Ell had never gone in her zone four times in the course of a single morning before and a floor exercise at about 90 seconds was pretty long for her. So she not only performed a shorter exercise than most of the gymnasts but placed most of the low energy “dance” and simpler acrobatic elements of the routine near the beginning. Half way through her planned routine she tried to go into the zone and failed, so she converted a planned triple into a double. She thought for a moment that she might fall and the frightening possibility of the fall did drive her into the zone. Once in the zone she performed extraordinarily difficult elements back to back including her three “secret weapon” elements that had never been performed by women… or men. One of the judges took exception to the easy-hard arrangement of the exercise and pointed out some minor imperfections which, to everyone’s surprise, fell in the “easy” first part of the exercise!

  Nonetheless, Ell won four individual gold medals. As soon as she left the stand from receiving the last one for the floor exercise she was taken to an exam room where they took blood and urine specimens as well as a performing complete physical exam. Leaving the exam area she was mobbed by admirers and press. She signed hundreds of autographs, continuing long after Coach Benson tried to pull her away to rest.

  The reporters were harder to handle. They put her at the front of the press room, sitting behind a table with a roomful of journalists peppering her with questions. “How do you feel after breaking more gymnastic records than anyone else in history?”

  “Sir, I feel the same as I did early this morning.”

  “To what do you attribute these incredible feats?”

  “Ma’am, I’m just lucky to have been born of very athletic parents and to have a sport that matches my odd abilities. I live in a great country that provided me this fantastic opportunity and my school, teammates and coaches have been wonderful.”

  “’Odd’ abilities?!”

  “Oh yes Sir. I’m quick but I have terrible endurance. I’m very lucky that gymnastics requires bursts of rapid maneuvering rather than staying power. I can hardly run a mile without throwing up.”

  “Really? Is that why you had a hard time with the longer floor exercise?”

  “Yes Ma’am, I was tired from the other routines and worried that I couldn’t ‘stick it out’ for the whole routine. The hundred meters is a long race for me.”

  “That reminds me. Did you know that you clocked a higher speed than Michael Fentis’ best in your sprint for the vault?”

  Ell covered her mouth as if dismayed, “Oh no, that can’t be!”

  “Yes, yes, it’s been checked, both the speed gun and the video frame count agree.”

  Ell blushed, her hand still on her mouth. She mumbled something that they couldn’t pick up, but with enhancement later turned out to be “Oops.”

  They continued to badger her with questions. She continued to speak with humility, be embarrassed by their admiration and to deflect as much glory as possible onto her teammates and their performances, which had also won some medals for Team USA. “You should be sure to interview Anna Kernova, our vault specialist, she got Bronze on the vault and you wouldn’t believe that girl’s tenacity and drive. And Kathy Voss got the Silver on beam with a great performance. If I hadn’t gotten so lucky today she would have had Gold. Irene Illman really put in a tremendous effort on floor, if she hadn’t gone out of bounds she would have medaled too.

  Rather than turning attention to others as she had hoped, Ell’s persistent humility won her even more admirers. Venta reported, “Ell Donsaii, appearing shy and not sure what to do with all the attention, claims that she ‘got lucky’ today in winning gold on all four apparatus. However, ‘luck’ did not allow her to perform nine completely new elements of almost unbelievable difficulty, elements that almost everyone familiar with the sport would have predicted were impossible for ordinary humans. Ms. Donsaii obviously is not an ‘ordinary human,’ and most of us who follow the sport would say she is ‘superhuman’ to have accomplished these feats today. All drug testing has come back completely normal so far, but many of us will want to see if she can perform in the same fashion in the presence of Kryptonite won’t we Eva?” he said turning to Eva Escanescue.

  Escanescue grinned, “Maybe we need to check her for ‘Spidey’ bites?”

  Phil won his match as expected and got on the bus back to their quarters. Since Ell had finished her part of the competition earlier in the day he was surprised to see her getting on the same bus as he was. She broke away from a huge crowd of reporters and trotted out. She looked like she was dragging a little getting on the bus but then she saw Phil and brightened up as she dropped into the seat next to him with her usual crooked little smile. “Phil! Hey, I saw you won your match. Way to go!”

  Phil stared at her, dumbfounded that Ell was congratulating him for his win. Taken aback actually, that she even knew how his match went. He, like everyone else at the Olympics and around the world, was stunned by what Ell Donsaii had accomplished. Ell had gone from a little known “dark horse” to the most recognized athlete in the world over the course of a single day. Every sports and news outlet prominently featured video of her performances with flabbergasted announcers discussing at length just how impossible it was to do what she had just done. With a bemused expression he said, “Congratulations yourself. Not everyday that someone breaks every Olympic record in their sport in one day.”

  Ell looked sheepish, “Yeah, I was a little out of control wasn’t I?”

  “A little out of control, or way, way into control. One or the other.” Phil smiled at her .

  The coaches isolated Ell from the press that night, insisting that the interviews they got right after the events would have to do. After warning her to get plenty of rest for the “all around” tomorrow, they did sneak her mom and grandma in to see her that evening. Her mother threw her arms around her and whispered in her ear, “Ell! That was amazing! I knew you’d be able to do something special if you turned it loose, but WOW! I never thought it would be something like that!”


  Ell hugged her back fiercely, “Me either. I was pretty sure I would win if I went for it, but I really didn’t know that it would be by such a huge margin.” She leaned back and then drew her grandmother into a three way hug. “Maybe I shouldn’t have thrown in so many of the new elements?”

  “Yes you should have! If you’re going to stop doing gymnastics anyway, you’d just as well do everything you can right now. Why not leave as big a mark as you can?”

  “I guess you’re right. I just worry that people will get too freaked out by the whole thing.”

  “You just go ahead and “give it your all” in the all around tomorrow, freaked people or no.”

  They spoke a while longer and then her mother and grandmother left so that Ell could get some rest. Going deep into the zone four times that day had really taken it out of her so she actually slept six hours.

  Chapter Seven

  Hamid was in a frenzy. That morning they had been set to board a bus with Olympic athletes and take it hostage. Then an argument had broken out regarding how they would tell whether a bus had American athletes on board. While they were arguing they looked up to see a bus passing that had several recognizable American athletes staring out the windows at them. Jamal had recognized his personal favorite, Donsaii to be one of them. That had meant that the gymnastic team was likely on board. They had already decided that the high public recognition factor of the gymnasts made them the best target and they had missed that target while arguing amongst themselves.

  “Fools!” he shouted. “At this moment we would have been in the eye of the world if you had followed orders instead of bickering!”

  Jamal said, “Perhaps we should have-” but he was interrupted and told to shut up and think for a moment.