Besides watching Michael Phelps blow everyone out of the water on a nightly basis, the only other Olympics I've watched has been the gymnastics. I'm interested and patriotic (yay USA, etc.), but I don't watch with quite the fervor that I used to.* And I don't mean "used to" like "the last Olympics", I mean "used to" like "When I was 6". Because when I was 6 years old I had one hero. One hero who to a starstruck youngster was practically Jesus, Santa Claus, and Wonder Woman, all bundled up in a 4'9" package and wrapped in a flourish of red and white stripes. That's right, Mary Lou Freaking Retton.
I was obsessed with Mary Lou Retton. I had a record (haha, that's right, I'm old. I had a record player. Off my lawn, you damn kids) that Mary Lou had recorded to encourage kids to exercise. I listened to it all the time, even though as I recall the exercises were rather difficult to follow. (I think one of the exercises included pretending to stalk around like a tiger, but I may be misremembering that)
After dinner my mom would go put on her (bor-ring) Jane Fonda record and do leg bends and arm circles, and I would retire to my room to don my red-white-and-blue leotard & rainbow-striped legwarmers and "train" with Mary Lou.
I was convinced that I would be an Olympian. It was my dream. It wasn't so much a dream, even, as an inevitability. I WOULD be the successor, it was just a matter of finding a proper coach and, oh yeah, learning how to actually DO gymnastics. I took classes at the Y, like every other little girl (it was one of those gymnastics/ballet/tap/jazz supercombo classes designed to get the most moolah out of the parents for costumes, recitals and whatnot). I learned cartwheels and roundoffs and splits and worked on my handsprings. I subjected my parents, and any guests who happened by, to countless "routines" that consisted of me doing lines of wobbly cartwheels and then posing and smiling, Mary-Lou-style.
It was a sad day for me when I realized that Bela Karolyi would likely not come calling.
It was a sad day when I looked in a mirror and saw, really saw, that I was a tall, pudgy, and quite ungainly goose of a kid. But even then I didn't really give up on it. I took gymnastics well into middle school, when the pituitary glad had rendered me rotund and non-aerodynamic in a whole new way (and acne-spotted to boot! Thanks, hormones!). I am quite glad that no photos exist of that time I spent (with Otis, actually) sweating it out through vaults and balance beam rolls** at good ol' Appalachian Regional Gymnastics, because it was the very epitome of "awkward phase".
So eventually I came to see that competitive gymnastics weren't in my future. I hung up the chalk bag and walked away forever ... into my new calling as a competitive ice skater.
* - Watching gymnastics always makes me nervous now for some reason. I hate to watch people who have trained their whole lives for something slip a tad this way or that and blow it all. Much better to never try than to train so hard then fail so spectacularly. {That was sarcasm}
** - I was actually quite good at balance beam. I could do more stuff on there than on the actual floor mat. No idea why that would be.
