Proud

by Ibtihaj Muhammad

If having to endure mistreatment from my teammates on the road wasn’t enough, dealing with Akhi’s lack of commitment to my training was also causing a lot of stress.

  Akhi had become so unreliable that I wasn’t able to depend on him at all. I never knew if he was going to be there for me at practice or at competition. But I didn’t have the time or the energy to look for a new coach in the midst of the greatest moment of my athletic career. Instead, I started to take lessons here and there with one of the other foundation saber coaches, a new Georgian coach named Luke Nakani. Whenever I showed up to practice and Luke noticed Akhi’s absence, he’d immediately make time in his busy schedule, even if he had a previous lesson or class scheduled. We never talked about Akhi; it was this unspoken understanding we had between us. He knew that I wanted to make the Olympic team, and he saw how hard I was working, so he did what he could in Akhi’s absence. I think he felt sorry for me. Luke was pivotal in helping me maintain my precision and hand speed whenever Akhi fell off the map. At this point, I still attributed much of my progression and success to my years working with Akhi, but I was disappointed by how disconnected we had become.

  I often spoke with Peter, knowing he would always impart words of wisdom in our lengthy heartfelt talks. I wanted to be in the right headspace as I approached the Olympic qualifying season, and without a dependable coach in my corner and with the burden of unsupportive teammates to deal with, I needed some guidance from someone who’d been in the same place. If anyone understood having to forge one’s own path, navigating everything from his mixed-race identity to dominating a sport where African Americans had never been welcomed, it was Peter. I thought of him like a wise grandfather, who was still in impeccably great shape and good enough to take on any opponent on the strip if need be.

  I knocked on the door. Peter was sitting in the coach’s room, reading glasses at the tip of his nose, and his eyes buried in whatever he was reading.

  “Hi, Peter,” I said. I’m sure my voice gave away my internal state of anxiety, because he immediately put aside the papers he was looking at and told me to grab a seat.

  I could feel my stomach in knots and pulsing in my head. There was a sense of doom hanging over me, and I knew it was going to ruin any chance I had of qualifying if I couldn’t get my head in the right space.

  “What’s going on?” Peter asked gently, his usual bravado toned down about 90 percent.

  “Peter,” I started, trying to sound calm and at ease, but then the words just came tumbling out like water let loose from a dam. “I know if I’m not top three in the nation at the end of the qualifying season, there’s no chance I’m going to the Olympics. Every time the coach talks about who is going to be on the Olympic team my name is never mentioned, and you know how they feel about me in general.”

  “Ibtihaj,” Peter interrupted me. “You’re a God-fearing person, right? The Olympic team isn’t in their hands. Whether you make the Olympic team or not has already been written by God. They have no power in who qualifies or not. The second you believe they do, you’ve defeated yourself,” he said. Peter was a deacon at his church, so I knew to be ready for a sermon. “Your success comes from God, not them.”

  “I know,” I said, and I believed it wholeheartedly, but I needed the reminder.

  “If you don’t stop this negative thinking and if you let those people get in your head, then no, you’re not going to make the team, you understand me?”

  I shook my head in agreement. “Yes,” I said aloud.

  “Fencing is an individual sport, Ibti,” Peter continued. “And you are the only one holding that saber on the strip. So, don’t look to anyone other than yourself for the success you want. You talk to God. You talk to me. And don’t look to them for acknowledgment or empathy. That’s what you do.”

  “That’s it?” I said, wanting desperately to have faith in Peter’s words.

  “Yep, that’s it. If God wants this for you, then you will get it. Believe that and accept that.”

  I let Peter’s words seep in, and I forced myself to acknowledge their truth. My faith taught me to have faith in God. There is a saying in Islam: “What is meant for you will reach you even if it is beneath two mountains. What isn’t meant for you won’t reach you even if it is between your two lips.” If God wanted me to succeed, no one, not the national coach nor my teammates, could change what was written.

  I left Peter with the faith and confidence I needed. I told myself that whatever was meant for me would never miss me, and all I had to do was keep my head down and continue to grind. If it was meant for me to make the team, then God would give it to me. If not, that was God’s will and I would accept it as such. I let go of my anxiety and put my total faith in Allah. From that moment on I was able to approach each competition from a place of faith. And believe it or not, I had the most successful year of my life. I had more World Cup podium finishes and reached more finals than I ever had, and I genuinely believe it was because I chose faith over fear. Of course, there were still obstacles thrown in my way that were a test, but I never allowed the obstacles to diminish my faith.

  It was November and we were about halfway through the Olympic qualifications. We were in Paris training at INSEP, the national French sports training center, prior to our World Cup. I was training with one of France’s top competitors, and we were in the middle of an intense match, when I took a hard fall. I screamed out in agony, the pain shooting up my leg was so excruciating. I thought my foot was broken. I lay on the floor scared to open my eyes, as I feared I would see my Olympic dreams vanish in front of me. The team doctor hurried over to my side, helping me from the ground and over to the trainer’s room. It turned out I had severely sprained my ankle. Luckily Faizah had traveled with the team for this competition, and she stayed by my side as the trainer assessed my injury. Members from the French team came to see me to offer their support, as they knew how important staying healthy was during the Olympic qualifying year. Meanwhile, not a single person from Team USA, fencers or coaching staff, inquired about me, despite my screams of pain. Their behavior was hurtful, but not surprising.

  The next morning, I didn’t go to practice because my ankle had swelled to the size of a softball. The team doctor instructed me to keep it elevated, compressed, and to ice it every few hours. I could barely walk, but that afternoon we had to leave Paris to go to the World Cup competition, which was being held in the city of Orléans, about an hour southwest of Paris. I could barely maneuver with a crutch, but I had to keep up with the team climbing up and down the Métro steps and through the cobblestone streets of Paris as we headed to the train station. I don’t know what I would have done if Faizah hadn’t been there to help with my fencing bag and other luggage.

  We finally made it to Gare d’Austerlitz, where we’d have to wait a few hours for our train to Orléans. I gratefully collapsed onto a bench while we waited. Faizah sat next to me and tried to get me to prop my ankle up on one of my bags to help with the swelling.

  “I don’t want you trying to be superwoman. If it hurts and you need to slow down, ask for help,” Faizah warned me.

  I knew my sister was right, but I didn’t want to be seen as weak. There were twelve fencers traveling all together—the four from the national team and about eight others who would also vie for a chance to fence at the Olympic Games, including my sister—as well as the coaching staff and the team doctor. One of the fencers came over and announced that Ed was having an impromptu team meeting. I looked at Faizah, and without saying a word she helped me to stand. Together we walked a few dozen feet to a small café where everyone was sitting around a few small bistro tables. Faizah had me rest my injured ankle on an empty chair. As per his custom, the coach didn’t sugarcoat his words, perhaps because English was his second language. Without any warning or prompting Ed looked straight at me and said, “Ibtihaj, I don’t understand why you weren’t at practice this morning. Do you have an excuse for skipping practice?”

  It took me a minute to regis
ter what he had just said.

  In front of all of these people, he’d just accused me of skipping practice? The coach knew about the injury to my ankle, so why was he calling me out as if I had done something wrong? As if I had a habit of skipping practices?

  “Coach, I sprained my ankle. Remember, I couldn’t even walk yesterday?” I said, trying, against my better judgment, to give him the benefit of the doubt. Was it possible he forgot about my ankle, even though I was sitting there with my leg propped up on a chair and a crutch by my side?

  Ed didn’t say anything at first. Instead he stood there looking like he was trying to decide if he should believe me or not.

  I turned to the team doctor, waiting for him to chime in.

  “Coach, she sprained her ankle,” the doctor confirmed. “I taped it up yesterday, but it was pretty bad.”

  For the first time, the coach looked down at my ankle, like he still needed some kind of verification.

  “Well, you can walk now, so I don’t believe that you are injured that badly. You should have been at practice. Are you going to be able to compete tomorrow?” he asked.

  Something about the tone of his voice pushed me to stand up in defiance even though my ankle was throbbing. “You’ve got to be kidding me!” I said, my voice raised to levels that caused others to turn and see what was going on. But I didn’t care; the coach had gone too far. “I don’t need you to believe that I’m injured! Every one of you saw me fall yesterday. I can barely walk. I’ve never missed a practice. I’ve never led you to question my work ethic. You all don’t even have the human decency to ask me if I’m okay!” By now angry tears were streaming down my face. I didn’t get it. Did my coaches and teammates see me as so different from them, that somehow I didn’t feel pain? Did they not see me as human, too?

  Faizah wrapped her arms around me and pulled me back down to sit. I don’t know what the other girls were doing, but I didn’t care. I realized in that moment it wasn’t about my injuries or missed practices. My place on the US Women’s Saber Team was an affront to their sensibilities. They didn’t want me there, and the micro- and macro-aggressions were a form of harassment, a psychological game meant to break me down.

  No matter what had happened the day prior, I had to be ready for competition. The team doctor taped my ankle as best he could and I left the rest to Allah. I fenced completely on pure adrenaline and faith. I asked God to help me get through it, and my prayers were answered. I don’t even remember how I did it, but I won match after match and captured my first medal of the season that day. If the coach and my teammates counted me out of the Olympic running because of an injury, they were wrong.

  I knew my coach and fellow teammates were desperate not to see me on the 2016 Olympic team. While I was trying my hardest to fence my best at every competition, they were plotting to get other fencers on the team instead of me. If they could find someone who could challenge me for second or third place, then that was another way they could get rid of me. In other words, they were working on multiple fronts not to have me around. When they weren’t busy ignoring me at practice, they put a lot of effort into scouting for other talented fencers with the hope that they would surpass me in the rankings. Their great hope was Eliza Stone, who had now been on the team since the 2013–2014 season. She was a strong fencer and had been ranked as high as number seven in the world and number four in the United States. It was clear she had a really great shot at making the team, and it seemed that the coach and my fellow teammates wanted her on the team and not me. I think there was a lot of pressure put on her as well, and it didn’t come off in a positive way. Instead of positive encouragement for Eliza, it seemed more like relentless pressure was placed upon her. I think my teammates and coach were so desperate for her to do well enough to move past me in the rankings, they pushed her too far.

  Eventually the issue came to a head, and the team psychologist was sent for to discuss our team dynamics. The sad thing was, this wasn’t the first time the sports psychologist had been summoned to help the women’s saber team work out their personnel problems. The dysfunction was so rampant, we regularly had to have meetings to address the issues that plagued our team.

  At this point the psychologist was called in to talk about how we could find a better way to support one another, particularly Eliza. I was hopeful that since for once I wasn’t the focus of the dysfunction, perhaps we could address some of the real issues going on. I spoke up on Eliza’s behalf to corroborate her feelings of isolation and the examples of unsupportive behavior from Mariel and Dagmara. But Eliza didn’t return the favor by acknowledging that she too had witnessed my teammates’ unsportsmanlike behavior. Instead, Eliza negated everything I said and suggested I might actually be the problem on the team! I want to say I was shocked that she threw me under the bus, but it made sense. I think her desire to fit in with the team was so strong, she decided that having the black sheep of Team USA defending her was not the way to gain the support of Mariel and Dagmara. It still hurt, considering we had been friendly with each other up until that point. But I had to shrug it off. My success and my purpose did not come from the acceptance of anyone on Team USA. I had learned that lesson a long, long time ago. This was just another day in my strange fencing reality.

  As it turned out, Eliza had a bizarre accident in which she sliced open her hand at the laboratory where she worked and had to have surgery to repair the extensive damage. It was her fencing hand, so although she came back after the surgery, she wasn’t quite the same fencer, and any hope of her making the team instead of me was quietly put to rest.

  Team drama aside, after my ankle healed, I continued to do well throughout the season. Competition after competition, I continued to chip away at my Olympic dream, fencing hard in the hope of a strong result. My ranking hovered between the number two and three spot on the national rankings, and the Olympic team now felt more like a possibility and less like a dream. I stayed true to my habit of not obsessively checking my ranking or trying to plan my results. Still, by early 2016, I knew I had a chance before March—the end of qualifying season—to make the team.

  In February of 2016, we were competing in Athens, Greece. This was the second of two back-to-back competitions, and we had had a training camp in between tournaments. I was traveling from Warsaw, Poland, following a weeklong training camp, and my mother and Faizah were flying directly from the United States to meet me in Greece. Mom was flying in for emotional support and to cheer us on as we neared the end of the qualifying circuit. Faizah was in a good position to qualify for the Olympic team as well because her national ranking was around fifth or sixth place. It would be a dream come true to go to the Olympics with my sister. Dreams aside, I was really thankful my mom and Faizah would be in Athens. I could feel the tension in the air everywhere I went. When I saw my mom and sister in the hotel lobby, I was so happy to see them, I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Little did I know how soon that relief would be gone.

  It was past midnight on the night before competitions were slated to begin. Something woke me up from a deep sleep. There it was. A sharp, grinding pain in my gut. Instinctively, I jumped out of bed and raced to the bathroom. I barely made it to the toilet with explosive diarrhea before my stomach heaved and I found myself vomiting into the bathtub. The pains continued, as did the need to empty the contents of my stomach, and a vicious cycle ensued. The force of the waves of pain was so violent, I couldn’t even form a coherent thought as I continued to vomit. I sat curled in fetal position, hovered in the tiny space between the bathtub and toilet, exhausted from the intensity of the sickness.

  “Mom,” I cried out weakly before I heaved again.

  My mom pushed open the door to the bathroom. When she saw me splayed out on the floor and the mess in the tub, she ran for the phone and called the team doctor.

  The team doctor came quickly to check on me and decided that I had food poisoning. Apparently, some other women on the fencing team were suffering from the sa
me symptoms, so I was not alone in my misery. The doctor said I was the fourth person she’d seen that night. Rather than prescribe anything to combat the illness that was now wreaking havoc on my system, the doctor told me my body was doing its job and would rid itself of everything on its own. She told me to try to drink fluids and eat crackers once the vomiting subsided. As I lay there on the bathroom floor, my face pressed against the cold blue-and-white floor tiles, I prayed to Allah that I would survive the night. The pain roiling through my body was so excruciating and unlike anything I had ever experienced before, I felt like someone was using a rolling pin to smash shards of glass into my intestines and stomach. After each violent attack, I started to fear that maybe it wasn’t food poisoning, but rather that something far more insidious was responsible for the gut-wrenching torture taking place in my body. I considered going to the local hospital. But as it turned out, everyone who had eaten the smoked salmon in the first-class airport lounge during our layover in Poland—like I had—was now suffering these unfortunate consequences.

  The team doctor had said my body would take care of the problem, and she was right, but it took all. Night. Long. I felt so badly for Faizah, because she had to compete in the morning and I know I kept her awake with my moans of pain and the grotesque sounds of my body ridding itself of the smoked salmon.

  The next morning while Faizah competed, I stayed back at the hotel. I still couldn’t keep any food or liquids down without vomiting. My head was pounding, my muscles ached like I’d been run over by a bus, and whenever I tried to stand up, I was overcome with dizziness. My back hurt from the violent way I had been throwing up, and my entire body felt fatigued. I couldn’t imagine trying to compete in this state. Luckily for me, because I was in the top sixteen in the world, I didn’t have to fence until the second day of competition. Some of the other women with food poisoning weren’t so lucky and somehow had to find the energy to compete anyway. They didn’t fare too well. Unfortunately, neither did Faizah. I felt awful because I wasn’t able to be by her side to support and coach her during this really important tournament. I loved watching Faizah fence because she was so talented, and I wanted to be that source of support that she always provided for me. I felt guilty for being sick, and I was thinking my being so sick had interrupted her sleep and thrown her off her game. Now she had failed to make it to the second day of competition. This meant her chances of making the 2016 team, even as the alternate, were pretty much dashed.