The Strongman
21
World Tour
OF COURSE, my time in Japan was not all working out, but my typical training day was from seven in the morning until seven at night, with breaks for rest, water, and nourishment. I got a day off and went straight to training the next day. On that day off, my hosts made sure I saw the sights around Osaka. Their daughter, Mio, escorted me to clubs and karaoke. I met other athletes and civilians. I didn’t participate in any drinking contests with my new friends, but they understood, even when we went to a club.
I didn’t feel so short in Japan. At five-five, I was only a couple of inches shorter than the average man in Japan. The only place I’d consistently been around short men was at the academy or in competition. Everyplace else, guys seemed to tower over me.
It had been seven months since I was last in regular training. I think I must not have been doing enough to maintain my strength. At any rate, I could feel new strength flowing into my muscles and I began to see the results in my exercises. My iron cross on the still rings was perfectly parallel to the floor. I could hold the position for seven seconds with a neutral expression on my face.
That’s another of the fine points of the differences between men’s and women’s gymnastics. No matter how hard or stressful the exercise is, men are supposed to maintain a neutral expression on their faces and not show the strain. Women in floor exercises are supposed to smile and be flirtatious. They all smile when they land their vault and uneven bars, no matter how serious and fierce their expression is during the performance. Guys aren’t supposed to show emotion or stress in their exercises. Floor exercises for women included dance moves and music. Balance beam had a section of the code of points devoted to dance moves and was sometimes accompanied with music.
Of course, when I was working on acrobatic gymnastics with Tara, it was a whole different world. It was hard to tell where the dance ended and the acrobatics began. Smiles were fine if they went with the music and the storytelling. Our code of points included dancing and showing emotion.
I worked hard, made friends, learned a little Japanese. Six months went by incredibly quickly and, after a visit home, I found myself on a plane to Hong Kong. While The People’s Republic of China owned Hong Kong, the rules there were significantly less restrictive. This was the result of the area being a British colony for a hundred years before being returned to China. Nonetheless, one of China’s top gymnastic coaches had set up a training center in the densely populated city.
Mr. Chen welcomed me in much the same way Mr. Kimura had, though we used a translator when working together. He promised to make my vault a record-breaker.
It nearly broke me, as well.
I cannot say how many times I came out of my vaults in something far less than a stuck landing. Often, on my face or back. When I asked about a spotter, Mr. Chen said, through our translator, “It is a soft landing place. Protect your own head and neck.”
I had my orders.
After four months in Hong Kong, I flew back to Minneapolis for my niece’s birthday.
“Good grief!” Mikey said when she hugged me. “What have they done to you in Asia? You’re bigger and stronger than you were before the Olympics!”
“I’ve been working hard,” I said. “Every trainer wants to add their own layer of muscle to my body. But they all insist that I still remain flexible. Now where’s my little niece, PJ?”
I was presented with the baby and just spent a long time looking at her and then playing with her on the floor as she showed me all her tricks.
Over the course of the next few days, I taught her to turn a somersault on the floor. She was barely standing up, so I couldn’t teach her to do a full flip. It was cute and natural for her to tumble, though. She put her hands on the floor and walked her feet up until she’d made a bridge. Then I helped her tuck her head between her hands and go on over. She thought it was great fun.
“If she grows up to be a gymnast, I don’t think I’ll ever forgive you!” Mikey said.
“Tumbling is a good exercise. Becoming a gymnast requires more hours in a day than any smart person would have,” I answered. “There’s no way to study and dedicate the hours needed for training. I got by on the bare minimum of both.”
“What you did was the minimum? And you still qualified for the Olympics?” Mom asked.
“You have to remember there are ten times as many girls competing for those five spots as there are boys.”
“What’s your next move?” Dad asked. “Competitions coming up?”
“No, not really. I mean there are competitions I was in two or three in Japan and one in Hong Kong, but I’ve been out of the country for almost a year. I resigned my position on Team USA, so any competition I go to now will be as an independent.”
“So, where are you going next?” Mom asked.
“I don’t know if you remember meeting Gerhardt Bohnert when I competed at the European Invitational. He’s invited me to come to Switzerland to train for a while. I think I’ll take him up on it.”
“Meaning you already have your ticket,” Mom snorted. “When do you leave?”
“I thought I’d stick around until after my birthday. The company down in Chicago would like to film me on the rings and vault to use in a new series of advertisements,” I said. “I understand they have a new uniform they want me to wear while training abroad.”
“Well, we have you for a few weeks, then,” Dad said.
“So, tell me about your love life,” Mikey said when I visited her at her home instead of her coming to Mom and Dad’s.
“That’s kind of personal,” I snorted.
“Well, you knew every detail of my love life,” she said. “It kept me honest. I had to tell Rob about everything from my past—even the attempted rape at that party down in Bloomington. I couldn’t risk something coming up about a boy by accident.”
“How’d he take it?”
“He married me. I’m really past the days of wanting anything other than the guy I married,” she said. “Now spill it. A cute Asian girl got your eye?”
“I admit, there was a girl in Japan I hung out with sometimes. It was nothing serious, though. Everyone knew I was there temporarily and no one wanted to get involved seriously.”
In fact, Mio had been my hosts’ daughter. I’d been reluctant to get involved with her because I didn’t want to lose my lodging. It was almost one of those ridiculous anime settings where I was the boy trying to fend off the beautiful ‘sister’ in the house. The second time we’d been out to a club on a Friday night and she crawled in bed with me afterward, I realized how ridiculous the whole thing was and decided to just enjoy it.
It wasn’t a regular thing—well, maybe most Friday nights—but we did have some fun. Turned out she was kind of using me to get another boy interested in her and I got out of Osaka just in time to avoid a conflict.
“You shouldn’t avoid girls just because you aren’t going to be there a long time. You’re almost twenty-five years old. You shouldn’t have to live without a little company now and then.”
“You know, I’m working my tail off. The training I’ve been on doesn’t leave a lot of time for finding and dating a girl. Mostly, the only girls I meet are in the gym, and they’re in the same boat I am. They work from sun-up to sundown. Everyone is too tired to do anything after we practice. And, I’m not really interested in getting tangled up with someone yet. I still…”
Mikey understood without me having to say it. I was still emotionally attached to Tara. If I made love to a girl, it just reminded me again that Tara was out there and might have a new guy. She never posted a relationship status on her social media, so I didn’t know. I never posted one, either.
The flight to Zurich wasn’t bad. I took off in the evening from Minneapolis, arrived in Iceland early in the morning with just enough time to change planes and take off for Zurich. The total trip took a little over ten hours, but with the time zone changes, the clock showed about eighteen hours elapsed.
My host was waiting for me at the airport and drove directly to a pleasant apartment in town. Inge was a single woman about five or ten years older than me. She lived alone and had a spare bedroom she’d often used to house gymnasts who came to train. She made it clear that her duty as a host ended at providing a room. I had kitchen privileges as long as I cleaned up after myself. She gave me a key and disappeared from the apartment while I got settled in.
The next morning, I followed my instructions to get from the apartment to the gym and spent the next three months under Herr Bohnert’s instruction primarily on the parallel bars and pommel horse. Of course I was also given coaching on the other apparatuses. My gym time was paid for by my teaching several classes of young athletes, both boys and girls, each day.
Herr Bohnert made it clear that as I taught, I was to pay attention to fundamentals, and that I was then to apply those fundamentals in my own training. It was an interesting concept and I discovered several important bits that I’d let slide in my training as I became more advanced. I guess it is true of gymnastics as much as it is of other subjects, that the best way to learn is to teach.
At the end of June, I bade farewell to the Swiss and took a leisurely train trip to Sofia, Bulgaria. That was where things changed drastically for me.
I arrived in Bulgaria the first week of July 2030. I stayed much longer than I planned. Mostly, because of my lovely host.
I thought the arrangement was a little strange. I dragged my bags from the train station about a mile or so over cobblestones into town to a secure apartment building. I called my host and discovered once again that I had a woman with an extra room to let. Unfortunately, she was at work and could not get free for a while. I found a restaurant and had a nice meal of moussaka with a glass of dark beer. I gathered that the moussaka was a Bulgarian adaptation of a popular Greek dish. All I cared about was that it was delicious. It was a rare thing for me to drink anything alcoholic, but I’d been on trains for two days with a couple of layovers and little time to eat or drink.
Teodora met me at the apartment at eight in the evening and conducted me to a top (6th) floor apartment. She was a charming woman about my own age. I found she worked in a tech industry startup company and the hours were often long. She led me upstairs to my room, a fairly large empty space with windows that opened to a rooftop. There was really nothing in the room but a single mattress and springs on the floor and a small dresser. She said to make myself at home and come downstairs to the kitchen for a cup of tea.
There wasn’t much to do. The bed was made and it took about ten minutes to put my clothes in the dresser. I couldn’t complain, really. I would pay 30 Bulgarian leva a day for the room, which was only about $17. When I got to the kitchen, Teodora showed me around, including where tea and coffee lived. The tea was bags and the coffee was instant. But it was nice hospitality. We sat at the table and chatted over the cups of tea she made and she took it upon herself to instruct me in the Bulgarian language.
She drew a chart of the equivalent of Cyrillic characters and Latin characters. Then she showed me that there was significant overlap in the words of our languages, once you translated the characters from one alphabet to the other. Certainly not 100%, but it was closer to comparing Spanish to English than say, Kanji to English.
I didn’t need to report to the gym for another day, so she invited me to go with her in the morning to her office and she would see that I got a good cup of coffee instead of the instant. I accepted.
Then came the surprise. I discovered that Teodora’s bedroom was also up the stairs and she had to go through my very open space to get to or from her bedroom. My bath was back down on the same floor as the kitchen, while hers was an en suite. I debated for only a minute and when I finished in the bathroom and came back upstairs, I simply stripped off my clothes and crawled into bed. Her door was shut tightly, so I assumed she was in for the night.
I know I’m saying more about my arrival in Bulgaria than I have about any of the other locations where I’d trained. I guess it was more significant. Teodora did, indeed, get me a good cup of coffee at the espresso shop in the building where she worked. She told me to go exploring and be back at noon so she could show me a good local place to eat. I explored the lovely city of Sofia and was back at noon.
She met me and took me about two blocks from her office to a restaurant where she proceeded to call up an app on her phone that allowed her to translate what food items on the menu were and show me pictures of them. We had a great time chatting and she asked me where I’d visited, giving me several more suggestions of where to visit in the afternoon. Then, over my protests, she paid for our lunch.
My calculations said that she had paid almost as much for coffee and our meal as I’d paid for my first night in the apartment. I would have to do something about that.
I was already infatuated with Teodora. It was nothing compared to what was to come.
I thought I’d be there three or four months—the length of my study visa—and then move on to either Germany or Israel.
I might have done that if I were only interested in the training. Don’t mistake me; it was great. Coach Karov helped me more with my floor exercise than anyone since I’d first worked with Coach DiCello at the academy. I worked hard at it and was often home as late as Teodora. I taught at the gym, much as I had in Switzerland. The difference was that most of the kids in Switzerland spoke at least rudimentary English. The kids in Bulgaria hadn’t started English lessons yet. Still, we managed to communicate, and I learned as much from teaching as from practicing.
I learned the names of the gymnastic elements in Bulgarian first, so at least I could instruct kids on that. Then I started picking up bits from my coaches as they helped me—more complete instructions that enabled me to communicate more clearly.
Nor was all my instruction in the gym. Teodora and I spent whatever time we had available talking and learning about each other’s goals and desires. By late August, we’d had a few days with temperatures over 80º, but the weather was really pleasant. I got ‘home’ from the gym and a light dinner about eight o’clock and plopped on the sofa to watch some TV. That was also helping me with my Bulgarian. My phone rang.
“What are you doing tonight?” Teodora asked.
“Just got in and sat down. No plans,” I answered.
“Give me fifteen minutes and meet me outside. I’ll pick you up. I want to show you something,” she said.
“Sounds like fun,” I said. It was Friday night and I had a lighter training day on Saturday, though I had a couple of afternoon classes I taught. In fifteen minutes, I was standing outside the apartment building and a few minutes later, Teodora pulled up in her little Dacia Sandero, a popular car in Bulgaria.
“I wanted to do this a little earlier. Sunset is wonderful, but dark is when everything comes on,” she said as we took off out of town and onto a winding uphill road. The City of Sofia is built right up against a mountain on the south and before long, we were at an overlook, maybe a few hundred feet above the city.
We walked out to a viewing area and watched the lights of the city as they continued to come on—dusk turning to full night.
“I’ve wanted to show you this most beautiful thing in our country,” Teodora said softly. “I have only just found the courage.”
“I love it,” I said. “It should not take too much courage to bring me here to see this wonderful sight.”
“No. Not to see the sight. For this,” she whispered as she leaned into me. For a moment or two, I wasn’t sure what was happening, but then our lips met and I no longer had any doubts. Our first of many many kisses lasted nearly half an hour as darkness encompassed us and we glanced out over the beautiful city.
Teodora led me up the stairs in the apartment, but didn’t hesitate in ‘my’ room. We went straight through to her bedroom.
I’d been infatuated with her since I arrived, but it didn’t take long for that to turn to love. We undressed each other and fell into bed as we continued to kiss and explore.
Eventually, we made love. It was sweet and gentle. Neither of us were complete strangers to sex. Perhaps we weren’t as driven by it as some people, but we thoroughly enjoyed it and each other. I thought to ask her if she was protected or if I needed a condom. Birth control was almost a universal standard, but some chose not to use it. Teodora did and I slid into her welcoming body to unite with her for the first of many times. We kissed and whispered as we moved together, mounting slowly but surely to our climax. When it burst upon the two of us within a heartbeat, we gasped our pleasure into each other’s mouth as we kissed some more.
And that changed my entire living arrangement in Bulgaria. I applied for a new resident visa on my visit home, and it was granted under terms of a study visa. I left my clothes in the little dresser in the open room at the top of the stairs, but slept her bedroom.
We found we both wanted a lot of contact when we first went to bed—always kissing and sometimes making love. When we were ready for sleep, though, we curled up or stretched out on our own side of the bed with no more than our hands touching.
And I stayed in Sofia for another year.
During the summer of 2031, Teodora had to do extensive traveling for her company. They were expanding rapidly and she was often a speaker at conferences and trade shows. While we loved each other, our relationship did not have the dramatic peaks and valleys that most had. We both worked long hours and met for interludes of intimacy. Even though we slept together most nights when we were both home, and shared in household tasks, we really didn’t make love all that often.
In addition to Teodora’s travel, I was competing at the events in Europe that summer. There were several FIG challenge events. The excitement and tension were beginning to build for the 2032 Olympics and I was doing well in the European and International competitions.
I was often the only American present at these competitions. Often, but not always. I met John Archer at one of the events and he told me I needed to return to America in order to have a chance at the team. Since he was the director of USA Gymnastics, the national governing body for the sport in the US, I took his instruction seriously. The organization had moved its headquarters with the completion of the new training center in San Diego.
“Come with me to America,” I pled with Teodora.
“I can’t come to America,” she said. “I have a job. I am not going to give it up. Besides, it would take forever to get a visa to spend any time in the United States. Stay here and train with Karov. You like him.”
“I can’t stay here and compete for the USA in the Olympics. This is my last chance. I’m almost twenty-seven years old. I won’t have another chance if I don’t go.”
“Go, then. You don’t need to stay here.”
That was a final dismissal.
Oh, we ‘discussed’ things frequently after that, with more passion than there had ever been in our relationship. I suppose if we had learned to disagree and argue earlier in our time together, we might have made it through the rough patch. We didn’t.
I flew back to Minneapolis for a little time with my parents, Mikey, and thirty-two-month-old PJ—who was happy to show me she could stand on her head. By the end of October, I was in San Diego, working under the direction of the coaches for Team USA.
I petitioned the committee for inclusion on the USA National Team by virtue of my previous Olympic berth and record in Asian and European competitions over the past three years. They were willing to bring me on as listed on the team. That didn’t mean I’d be selected for any of the team competitions before Nationals in 2032. There was still a lot of proving ground to be covered.
The national team is to have a minimum of fifteen members, but the upper limit is poorly defined. It’s generally accepted that they could have as many as twenty members. Regardless, including me on the team didn’t displace anyone else. Just before I returned to the US, there had been a FIG Challenge Competition held in Bulgaria. Coach Karov entered me as an independent from his gym. I won the all-around, the floor exercise, and the high bar. I got a silver and two bronze on the other apparatuses. I didn’t place in the vault.
The world of gymnastics had changed significantly over the past few years. When I’d told Mom and Dad I didn’t need to go to college for gymnastics training, there were only fifteen NCAA sanctioned college or university men’s teams in the country—in all divisions! In fact, there were so few that the Div III schools competed directly with the Div I schools. It was widely assumed that if you were a college athlete, you were, by definition, not a professional.
The Elite Division of the USA Gymnastics were mostly paid and sponsored athletes. Even during my long residence in Bulgaria, my equipment manufacturing sponsor had kept paying for my training and for photo shoots when I came back to America for them. They paid for my transportation and expenses when I traveled. And after I won the FIG Challenge (FIG is the Federation Internationale de Gymnastique or the International Gymnastics Federation), I picked up two more high-profile sponsors as we headed for the Olympics.
At that time, athletes had to leave their college programs (after the NCAA championships) and declare themselves as professional Elite gymnasts. Of course, NCAA changed the rules governing amateur athletes in school with the advent of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals for top tier athletes. Now there was little difference in the categories of amateur and professional, except that the collegiate athletes had to make progress in school.
The number of schools offering men’s gymnastics programs tripled and in 2031 the only athletes who bore the name of an independent gym were Junior Elites, most of whom were still in high school, and older guys like me who were past college years.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
