The Strongman
19
Getting to LA28
ON MY TWENTY-THIRD BIRTHDAY in 2028, I slowly realized I was pretty much the oldest guy in the academy adult dormitory. I’d been in the same room for three and a half years. It was convenient. I had a couple of sponsorships and a collection of medals that I’d sent on to my parents. I’d won a gold at Nationals twice for my floor exercise and had garnered silver in the Worlds in China. The Chinese team had been shocked when I nudged their competitor out of second place, so China took first and third.
I was traveling a lot for competitions and had to thank my sponsors for that. Between training and travel, I was making less from massage than I’d made my first year at the academy.
It was also becoming obvious that I was out of place at the academy. I’d need to move to Denver where the men’s national team would be training for Nationals and LA28.
I’d had a massage client, Rachel, who I almost turned away, because I remembered her as a fourteen-year-old when I got here. She was eighteen now. I gave her the massage as a birthday gift. She felt fantastic beneath my fingers and I was reminded that I’d not had a lover, or time for one, since I started preparing for last year’s Worlds.
I guess it was really brought home, though, when I had a meeting with Coach DiCello.
“What are you going to do when you grow up, Paul?” she asked bluntly. I wondered if she’d been talking to my dad. He’d asked almost the same question at my sister’s wedding in December.
“I haven’t had time to think of anything but preparing for LA28. The Olympics have always been my goal.”
“I think by July you’ll be a gold medal contender in the floor exercises. I’m betting you’ll be in medal contention in three other events. That means a possible all-round. But that is only four months away. You need to start planning what comes next.”
“The ’32 Olympics?” I said.
“Where? Even if you are preparing for the next Olympic games, where are you going to do it?”
What she was saying finally dawned on me.
“My time at the academy is over?” I asked.
“Certainly as a full-time student it is. I can continue to coach you and you can buy training and practice time here, but having a dormitory room at twenty-three is a little extreme. And meals included. The academy is focused on second tier training and you’ve done well by it. But we don’t lodge and feed professionals here. And you need to decide where you’ll be working as a professional—possibly as an Olympic gold medalist.”
“Oh. Crap.”
“You don’t need to have this all planned out today, but we need to get you on a track toward success in life, not just in the Olympics. I’d suggest you start looking at the circus training option. You’ve done some of that in your tumbling. But look at the aerial acts, too. You can continue to train and keep your gymnastics sharp while you are learning some new skills that are more marketable.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll look at it.”
I was still making trips out to the beach with half a dozen girls about once a month. It was funny. None of the girls who piled into my car had been with Sydnie, Lena, and Eva when we started going out. I didn’t know anything beyond the names of a couple of them. I wasn’t even sure who was organizing the trips as it always seemed to be a different girl who asked me to drive them.
We still had fun. We played on the beach and in the water. We did tricks that kept a lot of the spring break kids entertained. Occasionally, I went to the beach with more girls than I brought back to the academy. They were pretty popular.
Rachel had come to my door to ask if I could take some girls to the beach on Sunday, but I told her I was planning to see the Twins’ spring training game down in Fort Myers.
“I didn’t know you liked baseball!” she said. “Can I go, too?”
“Sure, I guess. I was just going online to order my ticket.”
“I’ll pay for mine. And help with gas and stuff,” she said excitedly.
She looked over my shoulder as we looked at the seating map of the stadium and chose good seats behind the Twins’ dugout. They were a little pricey, but I knew from experience that these were concierge seats and we’d have service right in the stadium without getting up to leave.
“We won’t catch any foul balls here, will we?” she asked. “Should I bother to bring my glove?”
“If you want. It’s always possible. Even if we don’t, you could get your favorite player to autograph your glove,” I suggested. “They love beautiful young flirts.”
“You think I’m a flirt?”
“I didn’t say that. Did I?” I laughed.
We decided to make a day of it and really enjoy the ball park and Fort Myers. We might even drive down to Fort Myers Beach after the game. I wondered what the odds were that I’d be driving back alone.
I didn’t need to worry about that. Rachel had gone to work and got two more girls, Dorene and Lydia, to join us for the game. Of course, they didn’t get their tickets at the same time we did, so they were seated a section away from us. Too bad that wasn’t a concierge section.
We ate hotdogs and popcorn, slathered on enough sunblock to stop a direct hit, and Rachel got her mitt signed by one of the players. The Twins had just become her favorite team. I had no idea who had been her favorite before that.
We all agreed to go down to Fort Myers Beach for dinner. As I was driving, all three girls stripped in the car and put their bikinis on. That was a treat. I’d expected them to wait until we reached a restroom or at least to have me wait outside the car while they changed. Rachel was not only casual about stripping, she seemed to be in no hurry, making sure I had plenty of opportunity to glance over beside me and look at her. The other two weren’t in much more of a hurry, but I had to catch glimpses of them in the mirror.
“Your turn,” Rachel said, when I’d parked in a space that was just being vacated. It was after five and there was a shift change going on as spring breakers from the previous week rushed to the airport or packed cars to drive north, and spring breakers for the next week were still arriving and hadn’t had time to get fully drunk yet. At least that was one thing I didn’t need to worry about. None of us drank alcohol. It would definitely be bad for our training.
“My turn?” I said, not understanding what she was talking about.
“Strip and get your trunks on. You got a free show from all three of us. Pay up!”
“Oh. Um…” I put thoughts of being bullied out of my mind. She had a point. Fair was fair. If only I didn’t have quite such a hard-on from the show they’d given.
I sighed, slid my seat back, and shucked my pants. I grabbed my trunks out of my bag and worked them up and over my cock, as the girls made appreciative sounds. I was redder than if I’d sunburned, but I’d get over it.
One thing we all did was wear skimpy bikinis or Speedos. There was no question we’d have tan lines. The idea was to have them where they wouldn’t show when we put on our gymnastics uniforms. We grabbed our towels to take with us and I locked the car. Rachel had a small beach bag and dropped the keys in it along with our wallets. We headed out for a stroll along the water. The beach is a couple of miles long and we’d parked almost at the north end of it, so we had a really nice walk along the water, the girls attracting stares as we went.
“Let me up on your shoulders,” Rachel said, handing her bag and towel off to Dorene and Lydia. I threw her from a cannonball and she landed on my shoulders without faltering. I thought she was just going to sit on my shoulders, but she stood there making quite a spectacle of herself up where everyone could see her.
Since she was perched up where she could be seen, I decided to have some fun and turned toward the water. I was already up to my knees before she realized what I was doing. I was up to my waist when she finally did a forward pike salto and dropped into the water. My waist. Where she landed, the water was fully up to her chin. I mentioned that she’s a gymnast. That’s almost guaranteed to mean short.
We had a little tussle in the water and my Speedos ended up rolled down below my crotch. It’s not really easy to get a suit that tight off. Somehow, though, her top ended up in my hands without her in it. We were still deep enough not to be readily visible from the shore, but Rachel jumped at me and wrapped her legs around my waist, smashing her small breasts against my chest. She also smashed her lips against mine and gave me a kiss that was guaranteed to bring rigidity to where she was sitting.
“I hope you’re planning to put that someplace useful tonight,” she breathed. “Now give me my top.”
I gave her the top and pulled my trunks up.
Dorene and Lydia were just sitting on the beach laughing at us and threatened not to give us our towels. They quickly relented when we began dripping on them. By the time we were away from the beach to a restaurant, our suits were dry enough to sit and enjoy fish and chips for dinner. They didn’t have grouper sandwiches.
The other two girls jumped out of the car as soon as I pulled in to the dorm, yelling thanks for the ride. Rachel pulled my hand and led me to her room where she immediately stripped out of her bikini and ‘helped’ me get out of my suit.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked. “I mean, I’m a lot older than you are.”
“I hope that means you know what you’re doing,” she laughed. “Because from here on, this is all new territory for me.”
“This is your first? Rachel, we should have made it special.”
“What do you think we did? A ball game, a walk on the beach with a tumble in the water, and dinner. I don’t think it gets more special than that. What… um… what do I do next? You’re not the first naked boy I’ve seen, but I’ve never done anything with it.”
“Let’s just relax and let nature take its course,” I said. “Maybe we should rinse off in the shower to get the salt and sunscreen off.”
“Okay!”
That was the right place to start. We soaped and kissed and generally slid around on each other while we got things cleaned up. If we’d been in my room, I had spare towels because I washed my own for the massage room. In Rachel’s tiny bath, we shared one towel and then tumbled into bed.
I was pretty nervous. I think Rachel was the first girl I’d ever been with who was less experienced than I was. We didn’t do a lot of fancy stuff. We weren’t making a porn movie. We just kissed and stroked each other until it was obvious we were both ready.
“You might want to be on top so you can control the speed and depth and all,” I suggested.
“Really? I thought I just laid here and spread my legs. This is cool.”
She had a couple of false starts, but I held her body weight with her butt in my hands until she got into a position where we could couple with minimal discomfort. Once she’d managed to get fully seated on my cock though, she kind of went wild.
“Yeah! Yeah! I knew it would be good. It’s good! Isn’t it, Paul? Is it good?”
“It’s really good,” I said as she bounced up and down on me. It didn’t last long, but it was really fun. And from her perspective, it was as special as she wanted it to be.
The second time was just as fun. We lay there cuddling and kissing. Whispering together. Then she shocked me.
“It’s nine-thirty. You should get back to your room. I need to get ready for bed so I can make my first session tomorrow. I’m teaching a bunch of six-year-old tumblers. Thank you for such a special day, Paul. See you around.”
I dressed in my shorts and T-shirt, then headed downstairs to my room, feeling a little like I’d just been dismissed.
Rachel didn’t avoid me in the cafeteria or around the gym, but it was obvious that she considered what we’d done to be a one-time thing. I saw her hanging out with a guy who was part of a men’s group team. That’s four men who worked together and built pyramids, did throws, tumbled, and basically did everything Sydnie, Lena, and Eva had done. I thought the top she’d paired up with was really young, but I guess that was none of my business.
My old buddies had moved up to Montreal the previous summer and were working on a new show with a world-renowned circus company. I was really proud of them, but I missed them. They’d been so important to my first year or two at the academy.
Acrobatic gymnastics and then circus acts. That was the progression Sydnie had given me. I was the only person I knew of who had done acro and then went back to artistic gymnastics. I supposed the next stage would be circus. I began taking an hour of training time a day to learn some circus skills.
Circus acts use a whole different set of apparatuses. I stayed away from trapeze and rings for the time being. Not only were they risky while I was focused on artistic gymnastics, but swinging rings could mess up my routines on still rings. I just didn’t want to get into that.
On the other hand, I rather liked the corde lisse and the silks. The corde lisse is a smooth rope, hung from the ceiling (or up high). It’s great for climbing, but learning to create different shapes and positions, hanging from a foot, doing a flag, and other tricks was really fun. Silks replace the rope with special fabric ribbons. You can work with a single strand or multiple strands and a lot of the learning is of the different wraps and releases. It’s also popular with two-person acts where one is on one ribbon and their partner is on the other ribbon. They can do combination poses, swing, spin around each other, and a variety of other tricks. Of course, I didn’t have a partner, but I was learning the tricks.
All this did not take any significant time from my training for Nationals and the Olympics. There were four competitions leading up to the Olympics and I traveled to each of them, moving to Colorado to train with Team USA. I was one of the strongest members of Team USA. I brought home more hardware.
More medals to ship home to Minneapolis. Mom and Dad ‘stored’ them for me. I’d discovered at Christmas that they weren’t merely putting them in a box, but were storing them in plain sight in the living room in a special cabinet Dad built.
I spent most of April and May training with Team USA men in Colorado. I thought it was smart to work at such a high altitude. It really deepened your breathing. Supposedly, the new National Training Center would break ground in San Diego after the Olympics this summer. That was high on my list of places to move to when I could no longer really work at the GAC Academy
In May, the Nationals were held in Portland, Oregon. I felt good and strong, and my performance established me as one of the elite gymnasts in the US. I got two gold medals, a silver, and three bronze in the events. It wasn’t common to medal on all six apparatuses. I received the gold for all-around. I was ready for the Olympics.
July in Los Angeles is hot and muggy. As Dad said, “It isn’t the heat, it’s the humidity.” I was glad I had trained the past four years in Tampa. I guess July wherever the Olympics are held tends to be pretty hot. The Forum, where the gymnastics events were held, had new environmental controls and my sister and her husband managed to wangle a tour of the control room and equipment. Might’ve known. She was doing some good things with an architectural firm in Minneapolis to design some next generation environmental systems.
Of course, I hardly saw my family. It was exciting to march in the parade of nations as we entered the SoFi Stadium. It was hot, but we scarcely noticed. Taking a page from the Paris Olympics, the parade actually started over a mile away from the stadium and spectators lined the street to watch the parade without having to pay admission to the stadium. Still, I was glad we were only walking a mile and then around the track in the stadium before we got to our seats. In Paris, the teams had floated down the Seine for four miles on boats with cameras on them.
I didn’t carry the flag. The women’s basketball team was one of the most popular teams in the world and one of their popular players carried the flag. She was someone I really looked up to, but I’m only five-five and ‘looked up’ to the whole team.
After the opening ceremonies and the parade, our team boarded a bus to Olympic Village at UCLA. The dormitories at UCLA were on a par with the dorm at the academy, but we were housed two to a room. I was with one of the other gymnasts and we got along pretty well. We’d roomed together in Colorado and Portland.
We were up early the next morning, had breakfast, and were bused back to The Forum for a day of practice before the qualification round began on Monday. It was a good session and the men were divided into teams and groups, as they had been at the Worlds a year ago. It took longer to cycle everyone through all the apparatuses because we were allowed two full run-throughs of our routines. There were a few hundred fans in the stands, mostly local, and most down on the women’s end of the arena. We warmed up at the same time, though men and women performed on alternate days until the apparatus finals. Of course, there were warmup rooms available as well, but they contained standard gym equipment, not competition apparatuses.
After our practice session, we were bused back to UCLA and dinner.
We had one more sleep before the Men’s Qualification Round.
Team USA was in the third subdivision of the qualifying round. That meant we didn’t actually perform until eight in the evening. I spent most of the day sleeping until mid-afternoon when I needed to catch the shuttle to The Forum to warm up.
The subdivisions comprise six team and NOC mixed groups. I guess that is as clear as mud, as Mom would say. Twelve national teams from different countries had earned the opportunity to qualify at the Olympics. Each team had five members. In addition to that, the National Olympic Committees could submit up to three athletes to compete with final approval of the International Olympic Committee. So, there were sixty team athletes and thirty-six independent athletes, meaning they weren’t competing as part of a national team.
In order to facilitate a consistent rotation on the apparatuses, the independent gymnasts were randomly assigned to one of six mixed groups. The result was eighteen total teams and groups. These were divided into three divisions, each with four national teams and two mixed groups. Six groups and six apparatuses. One group or team started the rotation on each apparatus and at the end of that round advanced to the next apparatus.
Each athlete got one shot at each apparatus and that determined if he (and/or his team) qualified for the final round of team, individual all-around, or apparatus finals. Only the vault was an exception. Each athlete got two vaults, but only the first was tallied for the team placement. The two scores were averaged to determine if the gymnast qualified for all-around or apparatus finals. Weird, but when you are competing, all you pay attention to is what apparatus you are on and the best you can possibly perform on it. The judges can sort out the fine points.
It takes a little over two hours to cycle each subdivision through all the apparatuses. Team USA started on the parallel bars. Then we went to high bar, floor exercise, pommel horse, rings, and vault.
We were competing with the best of the best. Team USA qualified as one of the top eight teams who would compete in the final on Wednesday. I missed qualifying for the all-around by 0.015 points. That was due to a mess-up on my pommel horse routine. I just wasn’t feeling it. I would have qualified for being in the top twenty-four, but only two gymnasts per country were allowed, and I was third on our team. Individually, I qualified for the floor exercise, high bar, parallel bars, and vault finals.
No medals were awarded in the qualifying round. It just determined which eight teams, twenty-four gymnasts for the all-around, and eight scorers on each apparatus (with a limit of two per nation) would advance to the finals. My failure to advance to the all-around meant I wouldn’t be competing on Friday.
It was disappointing, but I did well in qualifying for four event finals and would do my best to get to the podium.
Wednesday at 5:30 in the evening, we started the team finals. There were five members of each team; three competed in each event. My score counted toward our team final in the floor exercise, the high bar, and the vault. My teammates handled the parallel bars, pommel horse, and rings. We had three extraordinary athletes on the still rings who dominated the competition.
At the end of the evening—about eight o’clock—we stood on the podium as a team to receive the silver medal. I had my first Olympic medal.
I went to the gym each day to practice and stay warmed up and loose. Coach DiCello worked as hard at keeping me calm and settled down as she did on my routines. The first two events of individual apparatus exercises would be held Monday evening. My high bar, parallel bars, and vault qualifiers came in third, seventh, and eighth. The top three qualifiers in each event were incredibly good and no one expected any of the other five qualifiers to make it to the podium. I knew that could happen, though, if any one of the top three faltered.
I had to do both the high bar and the vault Monday night. I had a stellar performance on the high bar and moved into a tie for second place. We were all shocked, though, when the fifth place qualifier had the performance of his life and moved into first. At the end of the event, I was tied for third.
Sadly, that doesn’t mean they give two bronze medals. When gymnasts are tied, the gymnast with the highest difficulty score is declared the winner. It was determined the other gymnast had a higher difficulty than I did, and I was moved into fourth place by 0.01 points. Shit.
I’d barely edged out another qualifier in the vault and then stepped out of my landing in the final. I finished in sixth. I was done until Tuesday night when the finals for floor exercises and parallel bars were held.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
