and said boy, let me tell you what

"devil went down to georgia" by charlie daniels band & olympic gymnastics

Should I get a tattoo of the Olympic rings? Like, prominently on my forearm, and then when people ask me what event I competed in, what year, I’ll say, “Oh no, I’m just a fan?”

Just kidding, I shan’t be doing that. It’s tempting, though!

I fell in love with the Olympics — and specifically, gymnastics — the summer of 1996. My family was road-tripping up the east coast like we did most summers, visiting an uncle who lived in Virginia and then my grandparents who lived in New York. The most important thing to me was WHERE we were going to be when any gymnastics events were on, because my nightmare was being in the car and missing a single second. My uncle’s house had this low stone wall in the backyard and I would stand on it and point my toes and wave my little arms around like I was doing a beam routine. My grandfather’s favorite gymnast was Russia’s Svetlana Khorkina, which tracks for him — he always appreciated someone with fire.

MY favorite gymnast was Dominique Moceanu. I still maintain that her floor routine to “Devil Went Down to Georgia” is one of the most iconic there is — and I mean, picking THAT SONG when the Olympics were in Atlanta, they knew what they were doing!!! When this song comes on in the Country Bangers playlist, I always do the little robot hand move over the chest that she does around :49 into this video, it’s just part of my DNA at this point.

I know it’s been All Baseball All the Time around these parts, but gymnastics was my ORIGINAL sport, and so I thought it would be fun to let you in on a few of the gymnastics-related topics I could give a 30-minute presentation on with no prep:

The Magnificent Seven’s Team Gold

Listen, I know this particular Olympics BACKWARDS AND FRONT. I watched it live, I owned the official highlights tape on VHS, Amy Chow does beautiful Stalder work, Jaycie Phelps’ name comes from her parents’ first initials of J and C, The Awesome Dawesome with her back-to-back tumbling pass, I used to picture Dominique Moceanu’s bar routine as a visualization/meditation technique when I was really anxious about something, I just know and love this team! All the gymnastics from this era, really. Ask me to announce Lilia Podkopayeva in the dramatic way they used to before she took the floor, I can still do it!

This was the last Olympics where they had “compulsory” routines, which for those of you who don’t know — basically, there used to be a standardized routine that every gymnast had to do, so you could compare apples to apples with the execution and see whose form was better, who got a twist all the way around, that kind of thing. I can understand why they stopped this practice, since it’s a whole extra routine for gymnasts to have to learn and probably wasn’t the highest rated thing on TV, watching the exact same routine over and over and over. But I kinda miss it.

I do, however, still hear this song in my sleep.

As my meme above suggests, I also could talk for hours about the dramatic U.S. finish, how Kerri Strug landed that heroic one-legged vault to secure the first ever team gold medal for the U.S. in women’s gymnastics. Back then, I admit I was a little . . . uncharitable about Kerri Strug’s vault. I was SUCH a Dominique Moceanu fan (and she’d fallen on her own vault, right before) that I just didn’t like the narrative that only by Kerri Strug’s great sacrifice did we win gold. “We didn’t even need that vault to win!” I’d say.

(I was also a child, I’d like to remind you! Let me have my salty little fan-related opinions lol)

I DO think that particular vault remains very interesting, however, even to this day. I think there’s a reason it’s remained such a sticky moment in sports history. Was Kerri Strug urged to do a vault she shouldn’t safely do by a coach (Bela Karolyi) whose allegedly toxic and abusive practices would come under fire decades later? Was Kerri herself caught up in the competitive moment, determined to see it through? HOW the fuck did she manage to nail that landing on a bad ankle?

I had this poster on my wall!

Vanessa Atler’s Career

I was also a big fan of Vanessa Atler in the late ‘90s, despite her being originally introduced to me as a direct rival of Dominique Moceanu (my loyal ears pricked right up!). If you’re a fan of Simone Biles’ gymnastics now (and, who’s not?), Vanessa was similar in that she was most known for the power and height of her tumbling, how fun and joyful she was on floor exercise, and how difficult and daring her vaults were.

She was also known for having this block on the uneven bars in particular, where she just kept falling on one release move, but she wouldn’t take it out of her routine because she was determined to conquer it. I’m sorry, but the image of Kevin Costner just hitting that golf ball into the water over and over in Tin Cup imprinted on me, so this will always be a narrative that catches my interest! I admire that level of “fuck it, I WILL get this no matter what it costs me!!”

At the 2000 Olympic Trials, Vanessa had a somewhat shaky event capped off by a scary-looking fall on her beam dismount, but still managed to score high enough to make it into the Top Six (back when they used to send six gymnasts to an Olympic Games). Unfortunately, it was the first year that the sport had moved to a “selection committee” model, where only the Top Two slots were guaranteed a place on the team and the rest were chosen. And Vanessa . . . was not chosen.

This devastated me at the time! And a little bit, still! I won’t even get into Vanessa’s time on Starting Over, or else I’ll start to cry lol.

From the author’s private collection of International Gymnast magazines! That referenced Dominique Moceanu poster is now gone because you KNOW I tore it out and hung it on the wall immediately.

Andreea Răducan’s Stripped Gold

Vanessa not making it onto the 2000 Olympic team was the tip of the iceberg, because those Games got WILD. One thing I became low-key obsessed with at the time — I even wrote my COLLEGE ENTRANCE ESSAY on the topic lolol what a weirdo! — was the whole situation with Romanian gymnast Andreea Răducan winning the all-around gold and then having her medal stripped the next day after she tested positive for pseudoephedrine.

Actually, you know what, I’ll defend my choice of college entrance essay topics, because I still think this is an interesting one to debate! On the one hand, you have the absolute “no tolerance” policy against any kind of doping in the Olympics, which I understand. You can’t have x level of a drug in your system, if you test for that level, you’re done. I get it.

On the other hand, you have this person who was a minor when this happened, under the care of a team doctor, who’d been given some standard cold medication because she was sick the day of the competition. (This was the same doctor, by the way, who’d reportedly almost let another Romanian gymnast get on the plane to Sydney with severe anemia because he’d thought blood tests were “a formality” and hadn’t ordered them before that point.) The levels of pseudoephedrine in the medication were so low that, but for the fact that Andreea was so tiny, they might not have showed up at all.

So yeah, I get it, zero tolerance, etc. but Andreea is still MY 2000 All-Around Champion! As far as I’m concerned!

Andreea shares a birthday with Dominique Moceanu (albeit a different year); used the same floor exercise music that Dominique used at one point (“Reel Around the Sun” from Riverdance); and shares Romanian heritage and the same overall look as Dominique . . . was she a stand-in in my young mind for my favorite gymnast? I mean, yes, obviously.

If you really want to get down to it, the REAL scandal of the 2000 Olympic All-Around Final was that . . . someone set the vault 5cm too low! How does this happen! You have one job! (I assume that person actually had multiple jobs, but still — the safety of the equipment has to be a key part of their job??) If you’ve been watching gymnastics the past week, you know how carefully everything is calibrated, how much gymnasts are relying on muscle memory and years of training to know exactly how to hit the vault, when to open up in the air, etc. Those 5cm mean a lot! It throws everything off!

And sure enough, there were a ton of uncharacteristic falls and mistakes on vault in the first couple rotations of the All-Around. One favorite to win — Svetlana Khorkina, back again! truly a legend of this era — was so shaken by landing her vault on her knees that she made some uncharacteristic errors on the bars, too, to the point where when they finally fixed the vault height and gave her the opportunity to do it over she was like, whatever, I’m already out of it, thank you so much for tanking arguably the most important competition of my life.

One FINAL scandal from this particular Games, as if that wasn’t enough — it was later revealed that one of the Chinese gymnasts had been competing under a passport that stated she was 16 when she was really only 14, under the age cut-off for competition. So the Chinese team was later stripped of their bronze medals, and the U.S. awarded the bronze in their place.

Simone Biles’ Dominance

Once again, if you’ve been watching gymnastics this past week or for the past decade, for that matter, you already know this. But Simone Biles is just so dominant and so fun to watch — you really love to see it!

During the height of my absolutely insane gymnastics fandom (I invented an entire competition around different games of Solitaire, where like one form of the game was the bars, another the floor, etc. and I “scored” myself based off deductions of how many cards were left at the end of the game, if you need a story of what a lonely nerd I was I guess this is it!), I used to invent routines for my jointed gymnast Barbie (technically, Whitney) to do. And let me tell you, this doll was a PRODIGY.

I still have this doll!!! She Sparks Joy!

She could do an INSANE number of twists on a dismount! A double layout on floor? Make it a triple! I basically made her an absolutely overpowered character lol who swept every single competition she ever competed in, except for MAYBE the one time I had her choke in some dramatic fashion, just to add narrative flair.

Anyway, Simone Biles IS this prodigy! In real life! I just think it’s really cool that we get to see it. And I love other stuff she’s brought to the sport, too — the way she’s openly talked about her mental health, a bit of that confidence and swagger and “I know I’m the GOAT” attitude that frankly this sport for young women often felt hostile to, her Black joy and pride, her petty spirit (the pointedly long salute at the end of her floor routine after they deducted her for it on beam, I’m here for it), the fact that she’s still doing this at 27 years old, an age that used to be practically UNHEARD OF for a female gymnast competing at this level (1996 was obviously a long time ago, but the oldest woman on our team then was 19! For perspective!). So yeah, I think this has been a really fun era for gymnastics.

Televised Gymnastics Broadcasts

This is kinda a catchall category, I’m aware, but I could talk for hours around everything else involved with televised gymnastics. The interviews, the promo bits, the “exhibition” events where gymnasts get to pick fun music with lyrics and wear themed costumes and stuff like that. Recently I went on a deep dive to remind myself of the nuances between the Reese’s Gymnastics Cup and the Rock ‘n Roll Gymnastics Championship because these things MATTER. The commentators! The fashion choices! Like give me thirty minutes on the clock and it would only take me ten before I’d be talking about Yelena Produnova’s badass little line shaved into one eyebrow.

Gymnastics commentators have historically been a little silly to me, largely for somewhat excusable reasons (THEY feel like the same songs over and over in their constant reference to “jam-packed” routines and how the beam is only four inches wide and how “she’s a fighter,” etc., but I also recognize the challenge in having to give play-by-play for a very technical sport to an audience that you know might be tuning in for the first time in four years). There are lines from gymnastics broadcasts from 25 years ago that I still reference to this day (“You see a lot of front tumbling on the balance beam, you see a lot of back tumbling on the balance beam” — well, that sure does cover it, doesn’t it, Mary Lou?). That being said, I thought Laurie Hernandez in particular was a delight! She just has a great voice to start with, and I loved her enthusiasm and her firsthand perspective. I also think her comparison of how connecting skills for bonuses is like picking up coins in Mario Kart is pretty brilliant, honestly. That’s a great way to explain it.

And the gymnastics fashion is BETTER THAN EVER in my opinion. The U.S. women had such strong eyelash game. I love that visible tattoos are more of a thing now. The sky’s the limit for bedazzling on leotards at this point! They can make the whole place shimmer!

Gymnastics Book Recommendations

I wanted to close out with some of my personal favorite gymnastics-related books — and I know there are a TON, some I’ve read and some I haven’t, so feel free to drop more in the comments! But here are a few that always come to the top of my mind, in a variety of genres:

The End of the Perfect Ten by Dvora Meyers - Okay, it’s been over a decade now since gymnastics scoring changed from that iconic “perfect 10” of Nadia Comaneci’s day to what we see now, which is a combination of a perfect 10 for execution and then extra points added for the difficulty level. But I still think this nonfiction book that talks about the history of gymnastics, how scoring works, and why that change was made is super fascinating. I love the way Dvora writes about the sport — I’ve followed her work for some time!

Chalked Up: My Life in Elite Gymnastics by Jennifer Sey - Jennifer was an elite gymnast of her era who never became a household name, which is part of what I think makes this memoir unique. It really focuses on how much pressure the sport puts on its athletes (and their families) without some of the play-by-play of major competitions or cookie-cutter inspirational stuff that SOME of the top gymnasts’ memoirs released immediately post-Olympics fall into (not meant to be slander to every single one of those memoirs, since I haven’t read all of them, but I know the Genre!)

Head Over Heels by Hannah Orenstein - A charming romcom where a former gymnast whose career ended prematurely (I’m sorry, this is catnip to me) pairs up with a coach who wants her to help him train a future Olympian. This isn’t relevant to YOU at all, but I remember this was one of my very first Book of the Month selections and I was so excited to see a gymnastics romance on there!

You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott - God, I love Megan Abbott’s writing. There’s such tension, such an underlying dread, it’s EXACTLY how I want my psychological thrillers to be. It’s all about family secrets and ambition and how far would you go to achieve your dream? for your child’s dream? Gah, I actually think I need to reread it.

Break the Fall by Jennifer Iacopelli - This YA romance follows Audrey Lee, a gymnast poised to make a comeback after a big injury, who finds herself distracted (in a bad way) when some horrifying news rocks her gymnastics community and then also (in a good way) by her coach’s cute son . . . both of which could threaten everything she’s been training so hard for. EXTREMELY loyal readers of this newsletter might remember that this was the first book I ever blurbed, way back in 2019! The blurb request meant a lot to me, because I hadn’t published a book in YEARS and could only see my own potential comeback as a very distant dream. The validation that another author wanted my words on their book cover really gave me a boost.

The Go-for-Gold Gymnasts Series by Dominique Moceanu and me!!! - That’s right, part of the reason I was asked to blurb a gymnastics book at all was because I’d co-authored a middle-grade series with none other than my own childhood idol, Dominique Moceanu! Bringing it full circle!!!! This all feels like such a lifetime ago at this point. You won’t find these books in bookstores anymore, but you can still order them online and in fact they put out this bind-up of the first two books in the series with an introduction by SIMONE BILES HERSELF!

Isn’t this illustration really pretty? I still find something so restful about it.

As one more book recommendation, I’ll say Bridget Morrissey’s eventual sapphic gymnastics romance, which doesn’t exist yet except as maybe a twinkle in Bridget’s eye, but PLEASE, Bridget! PLEASE Berkley Romance!!! Give the people what they want!!!! For those of you who don’t know, Bridget is the brilliant author of sapphic romances like That Summer Feeling and the upcoming Anywhere You Go, AND she happened to be an elite gymnast herself and a long-time gymnastics coach, AND she understands allllll of my niche ‘90s-’00s gymnastics references and fills me in on what Vanessa Atler is up to now, AND she is one of my favorite people in the whole world so I just really want this to happen. I want it to happen like wanting to win gold at the Olympics, where I don’t care WHAT I say, silver or bronze just won’t do.

Really, though, I am not looking to put Olympic-level pressure on anyone, so in the meantime I highly recommend all Bridget’s other books, of which she has written many.

I realized I didn’t even TOUCH fictional cinematic portrayals of gymnastics like Stick It or Make It or Break It, but we could be here all day so I’m just going to wrap this up. As one final housekeeping bit, I know I teased last week about possibly revealing the title of my next book in this week’s newsletter, but I can’t do that just yet. I *think* it would be okay? I’m pretty sure it would be okay? But my editor is out of the office and I’m not looking for a -.3 deduction for some breach of etiquette, if you feel me, so I’ll just hold off for now. I also wanted it to be kind of a celebration of me finishing my revisions on this book, but I . . . got a slight extension on those so I’m still working lol. But soon!

Currently reading . . . I’ve been reading Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo’s Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008 by Chris Payne because, well, it is HIGHLY relevant to my interests! And to this book I’m revising!

watching . . . Obviously after my bitching and moaning last week, I finally got the chance to watch some Olympics live, aka the minute I found out I had a couple more weeks to finish these revisions I was like FUCK IT I’M WATCHING GYMNASTICS THEN

Can I just say — I hate holding shit. If they tried to hand me a cardboard box to hold while I was up on the medal podium I’d be like oh, no thank you. I know inside is a beautifully illustrated poster (I Googled it), but I’m trying to hold up my medal and pretend to bite it and take pictures and shit! Why don’t YOU just hold onto the box for a hot minute, I’m a little busy here!!!

Of course, I’d also be the one hiccup-sobbing at the chalk bowl after a fall, so. Bold of me to assume I’d get the chance to hold a box on the medal stand!

listening to . . . In this week’s smorgasbord of podcasts: episodes of Publishing Rodeo including the one with Nisha J. Tuli about romantasy and the one with Suyi Davies Okungbowa about managing your author bandwidth; episodes of You’re Wrong About including ones about Chris McCandless (I could talk about this for 30 minutes no prep EASY) and Lizzie Borden and why phones aren’t the problem we make them out to be. I also went through a dark afternoon where I listened to “This Love” by Maroon 5 on repeat, but let’s not talk about that.