Grace, Gold, and Glory Read online

  Over the following months and years, Mom’s physical condition grew better. And better. And better. After the physicians took her off of the medication that had made her so sick, they eventually found the right prescription. And though we still lived awfully close to a financial cliff’s edge, we did what we could to cut corners on costs — and to cut coupons out of the weekly newspaper.

  A fractured wrist. An ill mother. A funnel cake in the bottom of the trash can. Where could I go from there? Good thing I serve a God who specializes in making broken things whole again.

  The Ice Cream

  Once my father was home from Iraq, he’d pop up to see me from time to time, usually when I least expected it. In 2010, when I competed in the Excalibur Cup, that’s exactly what happened. I hadn’t even talked to him for weeks — then, suddenly, while I was on the competition floor, I looked up to see him smiling and waving in the audience. Afterward, he came up to hug me. “Hi, Scooter,” he said. He’d started calling me that because when I first began crawling, I’d scooted around on both knees before I learned to put one knee in front of the other. “Hi, Dad,” I answered flatly.

  We never talked about the tough subjects, like why he and my mother had split or when I’d see him next. Instead, we did a lot of small talking, about things like movies or puppies. It was complicated, because I had such mixed emotions toward him. On one hand, I was excited when I did see him; on the other hand, I was disappointed that he was seldom around. Mom constantly encouraged Dad to be in my life, as well as in the lives of Joy and John, and she often told him when I had big meets coming up. But he seldom showed up for anything— and when he did, as in the day he dropped by the Excalibur Cup, it felt awkward for me.

  Sometimes, Mom would arrange for Dad to pick me up after training if she had to stay late at work. On one afternoon when my father was supposed to pick me up at five o’clock, Dad first stopped to buy a Christmas tree to go in the home he shared with his new girlfriend. He pulled up at seven thirty. “We’ll go get ice cream if you don’t tell your mom I was late to get you,” he bribed. I nodded, and we stopped at Dairy Queen. Later, Mom indeed asked him why I was so late. “Oh, we picked up ice cream on the way home, and Brie helped me Christmas shop,” he fibbed. Tightening my grip around my cup, I stepped aside and spooned up the rest of my ice cream in silence.

  Chapter Eleven

  Twenty years from now, you will be more

  disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than

  by the ones you did do.

  —MARK TWAIN

  “LIANG CHOW IS COMING TO EXCALIBUR.” WHEN ONE OF MY COACHES uttered that sentence, I froze. “Do you mean Liang Chow— Shawn Johnson’s coach?” I finally managed to ask.

  “That’s right,” my coach said. “He and some other trainers will be here to teach a clinic next week.” I could have fainted.

  Since that moment during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when I’d seen Liang Chow and Shawn Johnson embrace after her beam final, I’d thought of him constantly. And every few weeks, I brought him up to my mother with the same refrain: “That’s my coach.” We both knew that the chances of me even meeting Liang Chow hovered around zero; he happened to live 1,200 miles away in Iowa. So on that afternoon in July 2010, when I heard he was actually coming to my gym in Virginia Beach, I flipped out.

  On the day of the clinic, I came into the gym and spotted Liang Chow right away. My heartbeat doubled in speed. There he is! I thought. Later, my teammates and I introduced ourselves to him. “I’m Gabrielle Douglas,” I announced as confidently as I could. He smiled and nodded before moving on to the next girl.

  Once the introductions were complete, he gave us a warm-up: five sprints on the runway. We then began working on skills. When I showed him my double twist on vault, Chow said, “Whoa! That was powerful. Do you compete with the two-and-a-half twist on vault?” When I told him I didn’t, he was surprised. “On the next one, try a double twist. Then when you land, jump and do a half turn.” I nodded then did exactly what he told me to do.

  “Okay, now do a two and a half — and we’ll take the mat out and have you land in the foam squishy pit.” When I did the exercise and landed in the pit, Chow was again impressed. “You can easily do it on the mat!” he said. He walked over and put in the mat for me. And just like that, after one session with Chow, I went from performing a double-twisting vault to executing one of the most difficult vaults in gymnastics, the Amanar. That’s when it clicked in my head: if he could teach me a two-and-a-half in one day, what other big skills could he teach me?

  Before I left the gym, I asked Chow if I could have a photo taken with him. “Sure,” he said. Mom was there at the gym that afternoon, and she snapped the picture for us. My coach had asked Mom to take Chow to the airport (his original ride fell through), so he and Mom chatted on the way. Mom told Chow how pleased she was that he had taught me the Amanar vault. She thanked him again as she dropped him off.

  I cherished my photo. Each time I looked down at it during the following days, I visualized Chow as my coach — the one who could take me to the next level of gymnastics. That’s when I began plotting.

  My grandmother, Miss Carolyn, calls her mother Boo, which is short for Beulah. The rest of us simply call her Grandmother, even though she’s really our great-grandma. On either Thanksgiving or Christmas, my family would visit Grandmother in Gary, Indiana. That meant every fall, I began counting the days until we could head to her house — especially since that involved one of my favorite desserts.

  “How do you always get the crust so perfectly golden brown?” I asked Grandmother. We usually arrived to the smell of her best recipe: homemade sweet-potato pie. The fresh sweet potatoes, cinnamon, brown sugar, and creamy butter had swirled together to fill her living room with an amazing aroma. “The recipe is my little secret!” Grandmother would always tease. I could hardly wait to taste that pie, which she kept wrapped and on her countertop. Even now, just the thought of that pie makes me want a huge slice.

  Miss Carolyn raised my mother in Gary during the first three years of Mom’s life; my grandparents divorced when my mother was small. After Mom’s parents separated, Mom spent summers and every other major holiday with her father in Gary. My mother has one sister, Bianca, who is eleven years younger than Mom and born on the same day, February 16. (We’ve always called my mother’s sister “Tia” — she was once taking Spanish classes and loved the way that sounded.) When Mom was a girl, Miss Carolyn even put Tia into a recreational gymnastics class for a little while. That happened back during the Mary Lou Retton era, when families around the country had watched Mary win gold at the 1984 Olympics. My grandmother has always been a very cultured woman, and she worked hard to give her children everything that she could. After she and my grandfather separated and eventually divorced, she joined the Navy; Mom, then just four, lived with her grandmother in Gary; at five, Miss Carolyn moved her to Norfolk, where she was stationed.

  Miss Carolyn wasn’t wealthy, yet she valued education so much that she scraped together enough to send her children to private school. When all the homework was finished, Miss Carolyn would call her girls into the living room to watch things like figure skating and gymnastics on television. “Look how disciplined you have to be to master all four of these apparatuses,” she would explain. She wanted to expose them to as much of the world as she could; that was her way of giving them a vision for what was possible in their hometown and far beyond it.

  I loved having Miss Carolyn close by in Virginia— especially when it was my birthday, lol! She always made a big deal about my and my siblings’ birthdays, especially since we are her only grandchildren. The year I turned fourteen, she picked me up and took me to the Cheesecake Factory. She always lets me choose the activity and restaurant on my birthday, as she does when she celebrates the birthdays of my sisters and brother.

  “What would you like to order, Brie?” she asked. I straightened my back and shoulders and flipped through the enormous menu.


  “I’ll have the macaroni and cheese balls,” I finally announced. We laughed our way through dinner before Miss Carolyn pulled out the gift she’d brought for me, a bag filled with nail polish and headbands. By age twelve, I’d started to set aside my tomboy ways (thanks to the influence of my sister, Joyelle, who always picks out the cutest girlie outfits!). So when I opened the gift, my huge smile showed just how pleased I was. “Thanks, Miss Carolyn!” I said, giving her a big hug. As we left the restaurant and walked out to the car, I began looking ahead to the next birthday — that one time of year when I could always be sure I’d have Miss Carolyn all to myself.

  “If I’m going to make it to the Olympics, I need better coaching.” Mom had just picked me up from my double session at Excalibur, and we’d arrived back at our town house. In the two days since I’d met Chow at that clinic, I’d become obsessed with a single thought — I wanted him to coach me. That’s what led me to make my declaration to Mom that afternoon: “I want to move to Iowa and train with Liang Chow.”

  “Brie, have you lost your mind?” my mother said, widening her pupils and raising her voice by an octave with each word. “Chow lives in West Des Moines, Iowa. Have you looked at a map lately? Iowa is nowhere close to Virginia Beach! There’s no way I’m sending my baby across the country. You just need to make the best of your training here.”

  It’s not that I wasn’t making some progress at Excalibur. I was. But that progress simply wasn’t happening fast enough. For months, I’d been struggling with an uneven bar skill called the Pak salto, a move in which you release the high bar and then do a backward flip before catching the low bar. While doing the skill, I’d often hit my feet on the floor — and that’s a major score deduction of five-tenths of a point. The fact that I hadn’t yet mastered the Pak salto had kept me from medaling in all-around competitions; I’d often end up in fourth place rather than on the podium. I’m sure my coach was doing his best to teach me the skill, but his technique wasn’t working for me. Plus, we hadn’t been working to upgrade my other skills; after that one session with Chow, I hadn’t even been able to continue doing the vault he taught me. I kept thinking, How can I compete if I have no big skills in my routines? With the 2012 Olympics just two short years away, I knew I had to do something — and fast. Mom wanted me to succeed; she just wanted me to do it a lot closer to home.

  “I’ve got to train with a coach who can take me to the next level — and that’s Coach Chow,” I said.

  “If they don’t teach you anything for the next few months,” she said, “I will think about moving you.”

  “But there’s no time to think about it!” I pressed. “If I don’t move now, I won’t be good enough by 2012. And if I do go to the Olympics, I want to do it big!” I knew I’d crossed the line by raising my voice to Mom. But in that moment, all I cared about was one thing — my Olympic dream. And if I couldn’t get Mom to see my point, that dream might be out of reach forever. “If I don’t change coaches,” I told her, “I’m quitting.” I then stormed out of the living room, stomped into my bedroom, and yanked the door closed. That’s how my July ended.

  Chapter Twelve

  When I let go of what I am,

  I become what I might be.

  When I let go of what I have,

  I receive what I need.

  —THE TAO TE CHING, ANCIENT CHINESE TEXT

  IN AUGUST, I DID A LOT OF SULKING. MOM WOULD BARELY EVEN DISCUSS my idea of moving to Iowa to train with Chow. So I tried another approach: rounding up reinforcements. One evening, I huddled with my two sisters and told them just how passionate I was about this idea. “If I don’t make this move,” I explained, “I may never get to the Olympics.” They immediately got it. “I need you to help me out with this,” I told them. “We all have to persuade Mom.”

  Arielle — the sibling who has the best track record for getting through to our mother — made a list of pros and cons. She and Joyelle then presented that list to Mom one evening when our mother was already in a fairly good mood. “On the plus side,” Arielle explained, “Brie might get a coach she can bond with. Her confidence level would increase. Her skill level would improve, making her more competitive among elite gymnasts. And Brie might also make it all the way to London and get the gold.” She paused before continuing. “Of course, there is one huge con — we’d all miss her so much.”

  “But pleeeease, Mom,” Joy added, “you just have to let her go. There’s no other way she’ll make it to the Olympics.”

  John was the one voice of dissent — he couldn’t see Mom sending his sidekick and baby sister to another state. “If you send her to Iowa,” he said, “how will I be able to protect her all the way from Virginia?!”

  Mom didn’t say too much after my sisters made their case. But she also didn’t say no, and as far as I was concerned, that was major progress. After Arielle and Joy had pleaded with Mom in a series of follow-up conversations, I could tell something had clicked. Mom was actually starting to change her mind.

  Kaiya and I will always be friends — but when she left Excalibur in 2009, we missed seeing each other at the gym for so many hours every week. Once Kaiya moved on, I formed an even tighter bond with another amazing friend. Her name is Beka.

  Beka and I did just about everything together — both inside the gym and away from it. I sometimes even spent the night at her house. On double-session days, my mother and Beka’s mother took turns picking up both of us. On Mom’s days, she often took us to play at a little park behind Kempsville Library once our homework was done. After gym, we loved snacking on Hot Pockets and peaches. Then if we were at Beka’s house, we’d create our own obstacle course in her backyard. On the days when I was staying at Beka’s house for a sleepover, we’d put on our Heelys (those shoes with the wheels embedded into the soles) and roller skate all over the neighborhood.

  One Fourth of July weekend, I spent a night at Beka’s house. We awakened to the smell of hot, buttery cinnamon rolls; Beka’s dad had gotten up early to make a fresh batch. “Help yourselves to breakfast, girls!” he said as we followed the mouth-watering aroma right into the kitchen. We didn’t have gym that day, so once we’d devoured our rolls, we decided to create our own little workout.

  “How about if we do some jump rope?” I said, grabbing on to both handles of the rope. Beka grabbed another jump rope, and we began jumping and counting in unison: “One, two, three …” After we’d completed a couple dozen jumps with lots of giggling in between, we decided to pull out the bikes for a ride.

  “Here, you can use this bike,” Beka offered. Before I mounted the bike, I noticed my shoelace was untied — but in our excitement to get rolling, I didn’t stop to retie my shoe. Big mistake! By the time we got halfway down the street, my lace had wrapped all the way around the pedal.

  “Hey, wait — my foot’s gonna get caught in the spokes!” I yelled out to Beka, who was pedaling beside me. I was so worried about untangling my shoelace from the pedal that I hardly noticed that I was drifting to the right, onto the road. Then just when I looked up again — bam! I ran right into the back of a parked truck.

  Beka panicked. She slammed on her brakes and ran to my side. “Are you okay, Gabby?” she said. I could see drops of blood falling from my face to the ground. I had broken my two front teeth in half.

  Beka started crying when I took my hands away from my face to show her the damage. “Oh, no!” she screamed, “I’m so sorry, Gabby!” We hurried back to the house, and Beka’s dad called my mother immediately. Mom made an emergency dentist appointment for me. The good news is that both teeth broke right beneath the nerve, which means I didn’t need implants or crown work. So my careless mistake cost me two broken teeth — but you want to hear something crazy? I was even more disappointed that I had to miss two whole days of training. That’s just how sore and swollen my mouth was. What a pain!

  I suited up in my hot-pink leo for a big competition: the U.S. Junior National Championships. In August 2010, Mom traveled w
ith me to Hartford, Connecticut, so she could watch me perform. I earned a silver on the balance beam, I claimed the eighth spot on the floor exercise, and I grabbed fourth place in the individual all-around. After the meet, my coach stopped in at the hotel room. Mom, Arie, Joy, and John — who’d all stayed at another hotel — were already there with me, catching up after the competition.

  “I can’t believe you did so good,” my coach said when he came in. “I thought you might be ninth or tenth in the all-around — but never fourth.” I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard — and neither could Mom.

  After the coach left the room, I plopped down on my bed and turned to my mother. “You see, if my coach doesn’t have faith in me,” I said, “how can I have faith in myself?” That was Mom’s second aha moment: even if she didn’t send me all the way to Iowa like my sisters and I had pleaded, she needed to find me a different coach. What happened over the next four weeks is nothing short of a miracle.

  Placing fourth at the Junior National Championship was enough to put me on the Junior National Team for the first time. That gave me the chance to compete at the upcoming Pan American Championships in Guadalajara, Mexico. First, the not-so-good news: I fell twice on the beam, and that knocked me out of all-around placement. And now for some much better news: in addition to helping the team score gold, I won first place in uneven bars — my first international gold medal. That’s mostly because my main coach, who was traveling in the weeks leading up to the Pan Am meet, had finally allowed another coach at the gym to train me. That coach’s training technique had made all the difference in my bar routine — yet my primary coach wouldn’t hand me off to anyone else at the gym. So if I wanted to get better, I had one option: I had to move on. After Guadalajara, Mom was as convinced of that as I was.