The Strongman
22
It Happened in Vegas
THE FIRST MAJOR COMPETITION to qualify for the Olympic Trials was the Winter Cup. And, yes, all the top college athletes registered for the competition as well as those in dedicated training at the center in San Diego and others who had not yet left their normal gym for the training center. There were fifty competitors in the men’s division at the Winter Cup. It was a little different than some of the big competitions. An athlete did not have to compete on every piece of equipment unless he was going for the all-around title. Like I was.
We were randomly divided into twelve groups of four (and a couple of five) and the first six groups did their routines on the first flight in the morning, and in the afternoon, the other six groups did their routines. Day One was the qualifier round, determining which gymnasts advanced on which apparatus. I qualified for the final round in all-around, and for the floor exercises, high bar, and vault in the individual rounds. There was no team competition at this event. Out of fifty men in the open competition, eighteen qualified for the all-around final. That was easier than dealing with everyone. The final was over in two hours.
I didn’t win. You can’t drop any scores in the final. When I fell flat on my face off the vault, that was really it for me in the all-around. I just lay there for a minute trying to catch my breath while a medic rushed to me to see if I’d broken anything. I hadn’t, but I hurt like hell.
Most of the individual apparatus competitions had far more competitors. I almost withdrew from the vault because it was in the afternoon after my fall in the all-around. I went for it, even though I hurt in every part of my body. A handful of Advil helped to dull the pain. I completed a good vault, but I’d simplified my difficulty level enough that even with a perfect execution, I wasn’t in the top three.
The next day, I placed second in the Floor Exercises, fighting through the pain of a full-chest bruise from my fall the day before. I launched my routine on the high bar with a chest pull-up in slow motion. When I reached the top of the bar with my arms extended to my waist, I kept pressing up into a handstand on the bar. That was a move I thanked Coach Karov for. Unfortunately, my double pike at the top of the next rotation left me short of the bar and I fell on my face again.
I was thankful for my one medal, but disappointed overall.
I was beginning to feel old. Most of the men on the team were between twenty and twenty-three. That was because of the number of college kids who were now competing. I think there was only one other guy who was nearing thirty in age.
I’d worked hard over the past three years with coaches who drove me harder than any coach I’d had in the US. Their intent was to either make me a champion or kill me. It didn’t seem to matter which. Over the past twenty years, USA Gymnastics had focused on less abusive training techniques. I guess in principle, I agreed with that. While the women’s team had been the focus of the reform—and victims of the most egregious abuses—the men’s team had also come under close scrutiny. Every training program and trainer in the country had been visited to be sure they were not physically or mentally abusive.
Mostly, I think the program benefited from that. My years in Asia and Europe had definitely taken a toll on me in some ways. I’d had various injuries and a surgery for a torn meniscus that kept me going easy on my knees for a while. It didn’t stop my training in other events, though.
The US Classic was the next qualifying event. Technically, I was already qualified for the Olympic Trials, but the coaches and selection committee wanted to see consistent performance in competitions. I couldn’t just sit idle for the next four months and expect to get selected for the Olympic team.
I did better at the Classic. Men and women competed on alternating days and there was a team component to this event. The colleges and universities entered their entire teams in the events. I think only one independent gym entered a full team. As far as I was concerned, that was a day wasted on a college event while the rest of us sat idle.
However, I got four silvers in the competition, including second in the all-around, floor exercises, high bar, and vault. It was good to show the coaches how much I’d improved and conquered my problems on vault and high bar from one competition to the next. On the other hand, there were only three competitors on the vault. Getting second was a hollow victory.
The new national team training center and association headquarters was really state of the art with multiple stations for each apparatus. Two guys could work out on the vault at the same time, for instance. Four on rings and high bar, six on p-bars, and six on pommel horse. There were only two floor exercise areas because of the amount of space they take up. When we looked across the gym toward the women’s area, we could see eight or nine beams, three vaults, six uneven bars, and three sprung floors. Well, the women outnumbered the men about three to one here and only had four apparatuses, so it made sense that they had more of them.
Coach Danilo Ryabets finally agreed to function as my principal mentor. He was Ukrainian, and immigrated to the US during the war when he needed to get his students out of the country. He approved of the training I’d had in Europe and Asia because it was closer to what he did in Ukraine. He did, however, comment that my routines were more acrobatic than other seniors. He thought that was okay, but warned me that some would discount that.
It was true, I guess, but I also had to thank him for an acrobatics move in my floor exercise that both increased my difficulty and assured a cleaner landing. We do six passes or lines in floor exercises in seventy seconds and have to sandwich a strength exercise in there somewhere. My most difficult element was still the double salto with a one-and-a-half out (twist). But when you get that much height and speed going forward, it’s really hard to stick the landing. Coach Ryabets suggested I connect it to a single salto half-out, going the opposite direction.
I thought that was crazy until I tried it. Sticking the landing without taking a step or falling forward is hard enough, but sticking and reversing direction for a lower value element connected made sticking the final landing much easier. And I found it was actually easier to hit and reverse into another salto than to just stick the landing. Weird. It gave me another quarter point difficulty for that pass.
“Are you sure you don’t want to switch to acro?” Coach asked me, pointing across the gym where a lone girl was working out. She was tiny.
“Coach, I did that for a while. Maybe when I’m old, I’ll go back to it.”
“Don’t forget, you are twenty-seven. Think about what you mean when you say ‘old’.”
Yeah. He was probably right. I went to the training room and submerged myself in an ice bath with another handful of Advil.
I did okay at the US Championships in Fort Worth, TX. I had solid performances on all apparatuses, but finished fourth in the all-around and got a gold medal for floor exercises. The next step was in New York City for the Olympic Trials at the end of June.
It wasn’t a bad showing, considering that I was the oldest in the competition by three years. Some of the guys had started calling me gramps. A couple of the girls on the team had taken a year off to have a baby and then came back to compete, but they were having a hard time of it. I didn’t think I was old enough to be grandpa to their kids.
The trials were to be at the Jacob Javits Center and the end of the event would include the announcement of the five men who would compete at the Olympics. There was a strong preference toward selecting the top all-around qualifiers so the USA would have the top chance at the Olympic team gold. But they had to balance that with who could win an individual apparatus gold. They could switch off who competed on each apparatus in the team competition.
Back in 2020-21, IOC rules said four persons per team. Any NOC (National Olympic Committee) could submit up to three nominees to the games. That was mostly for those countries who had no national team but had one or two great gymnasts. In 2021, Team USA had four gymnasts on the team, but also had one who was absolutely great on a single apparatus. The NOC nominated him as an individual on just that apparatus and he went to the Tokyo Olympics. I was a strong all-around contender, but I was the top favorite for the floor exercises.
In 2024, teams were changed back to five members, and countries with a national team were not allowed to submit an extra. Whoever they chose for the team were all that were going.
The Olympics in 2032 were in a part of the world I’d never traveled to: Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. It was only the second time the summer Olympics had been held south of the equator during the host country’s winter. The first time was 2016 in Rio. The forecast said we should expect pretty mild, dry weather with temperatures between seventy and eighty degrees. It sounded like heaven.
Of course, temperatures in New York City at the end of June were expected to be about the same, but we could expect rain, rain, and more rain. Regardless, we were all excited to get on with this next chapter and find out who would be on the team for the Olympics.
I had pains where I used to only have aches. After the Olympics this year, I was definitely going to consider retiring and coaching. A gold medal would certainly get me more high ranking students.
There was this kid…
Damn, he was good. He was only seventeen years old and a junior in high school. He came from one of the top gyms in the country and had devoted time to his training like I had. The Olympic rules said a male gymnast had to be eighteen by the end of the year. Kevin’s birthday was in October.
It seems weird to me that women’s gymnasts only need to be sixteen in the year of the games. I guess it used to be fourteen, but there were so many injuries and abuses that the age was raised. I don’t know when the age was raised for men. I guess it’s assumed we just mature later than women. After all, I was the oldest man on Team USA at twenty-seven. It had been eight years since a woman that old from the USA had won a gold medal.
Anyway, this kid, Kevin, was wicked on the vault. I’d only seen him qualify at Classics and the US Championships. He beat me at both, but it was a narrow margin. And he specialized in the vault.
Well, the story is sad but true. I was in the final five in the men’s all-around, but the selection committee decided Kevin was better for the team because of his vault. They dropped me and put him on, even though he’d been seventh in the all-around.
I wanted to appeal to the NOC for a place as an independent but, of course, that was no longer allowed. I was an alternate.
I flew back to San Diego to work with the team, but it was soon obvious that I wouldn’t be called upon in my role as an alternate. The team would not pay for my transportation and lodging in Australia.
I packed up and drove back to Minneapolis to decide what my life would be like in retirement.
God damn it all, anyway.
It was the darkest time of my life that I could remember. And there had been some doozies. Tara leaving and then telling me we were no longer a couple. Being disqualified at the LA Olympics in ’28. Leaving Teodora. And finally, not making the Olympic team for ’32. I had no idea what I’d do with my life now.
I considered calling Teodora and asking if I could come back. We hadn’t been on very good terms when I left, and just when I had screwed up the courage to call, I read her relationship status change on social media. She was now in a relationship with a guy who worked with her.
Shit.
I got my gig at the local health club giving massages back, so I managed a small but steady income. And when I wasn’t working and my sister wasn’t working, I hung out with her, Rob, and little PJ. I was doing that one evening when the elephant in the room trumpeted.
Well, I was playing with three-year-old Polly, helping her do a back bend and then kick to get over in a backward somersault. She kicked especially hard and blew her diaper out. We’d have had a real mess if she hadn’t been ready for bed, which was the only time she was still wearing a diaper. She was devastated to have pooped her pants.
I followed Mikey into the nursery for the clean-up. For such a tiny girl, she could sure produce a lot of poop! We eventually took her into the bathroom and she got her second bath of the night. Once she was clean and in fresh jammies, she went to bed, promising to do it better tomorrow. I assumed she meant the back walk-over. She did a pretty good job on the poop.
“So, what are you going to do?” Mikey asked me as she poured us each a glass of wine. I didn’t often indulge, but what the hell.
“Maybe I’ll find a little studio to set up as a full-time massage therapist,” I mused. “Might even ask Mom and Dad if I could pay rent and set up in the entertainment room.”
“They wouldn’t go for that, even if they weren’t selling the place.”
“What? When did they decide to sell their house?”
“Well, think about it. You’ve been gone for eight years except limited visits. I’ve been married for five years. They rattle around in that house. They’ve been talking about selling it forever and moving to something more compact. You know, Dad’s been at the University for thirty years—almost thirty-five, I think. He can retire with his full pension.”
“He’s too young to retire!”
“He’ll be sixty in the spring. Our parents aren’t that young anymore.”
“Man! I just never thought about them not being there in the house where we grew up.”
“You often don’t think about things. Like how happy you wouldn’t be if you were only doing massage therapy and let this body go fat and flabby. If you don’t keep working out at your intensity level, it won’t be long before you start packing it on. Just look at what happened to me when I got married.”
Mikey wasn’t fat and flabby. She was, perhaps, a little fuller than she’d been when she was lighting hearts on fire in college. I credited that to having had a baby.
“There are a couple other gyms up here. I never considered them seriously before because they’re both a lot farther away than Hennepin Gym is.”
“Was. They closed the doors there two years ago.”
“Wonder if I could buy it.”
“Too late. It’s been subdivided into half a dozen custom health and fitness businesses: Massage, aerobics, weight machines, Pilates. You know.”
“Too bad I wasn’t here then.”
“You’d still be bored and getting fat. You need to do something that will use your talents. Don’t you think you could coach?”
“Yeah. If I could find the right gym. If I changed my workouts, I could start training for a circus act.”
“Why not do acro like you did with Tara?”
“Um… I’m twenty-seven years old. What little girl who’s fifteen to eighteen is going to want to have a partner who is so old? In fact, I’d probably have to start working with a girl who is twelve or thirteen, so we could develop a partnership by the time she could qualify for senior competition. By that time, I’d definitely be too old.”
“What then?” she asked.
“Coach Karov wanted me to get more into acrobatics and start developing a circus act. He suggested that when I was done chasing my Olympic dream, I move to Moscow or to Las Vegas. They seem to be big centers for training circus acts.”
“Don’t you dare go to Moscow. It was ridiculous having you in Bulgaria. We don’t want you even farther away.”
“I’ll have to check out what’s available in Vegas.” I didn’t mention that I’d already made a contact there. I wasn’t completely set on becoming a couch potato.
In a way, it always seemed to work before, though some of my acquaintances said I was just running away. When Tara left me, I left for Florida the next day. When I was disqualified in the Olympics, I took off on a US road trip and then a world training tour. No one in the family was surprised when I loaded my old car and headed for Las Vegas.
In reality, I put a lot of thought into it. I’d met a coach from Vegas and he introduced me to the owner of a circus gym down there. She looked over my record and agreed it wouldn’t be hard to turn me into a performer, and that she could use the coaching assistance in the gymnastics area of the gym.
Of course, there are circus acts that don’t require acrobatics. A flame eater or sword swallower come to mind. Lion tamer, anyone? The LVC Gym, however, focused on various acrobatic acts, and you really had to train for gymnastics in order to get there.
Nicole D’Amour had been a circus acrobat with one of the big stage shows in Las Vegas and had toured the world with her act. She still consulted on shows and had established the Gym in Las Vegas specifically for those who wanted to work on the big stages. She’d been trained in Montreal, where the girls from the academy had gone to train. She still spoke with a rather thick French accent and I had to be careful to tune into her so I understood what she was saying.
Nicole had found a furnished ‘bachelor pad’ for me that was little more than a hotel room with a partial kitchen. I could rent on a weekly basis until I got myself established. The partial kitchen included a sink, refrigerator, microwave, and hot plate. After I checked in, I ran out and bought some basics for my meals, a frying pan, a bowl, and silverware.
Fortunately, both the room and the gym were well air-conditioned. I don’t think there was a day the temperatures didn’t reach 100 for a month after I got there in mid-August. Unlike gyms I’d worked at before, Nicole did not have me working with children, but rather with teen boys who were talented, but had gotten too late a start to seriously compete in gymnastics. When I started at twelve, it was considered to be a late start and only my devotion to being in the gym all the time made it possible for me to advance to the level I had.
But circus acts required showmanship, not just gymnastic skills. I could teach skills to guys who were dedicated to the show. Having worked with Tara, Madison, and the girls in Florida, I was comfortable training a young man to be a strong base or get him ready for an aerial act.
I had four students who were dedicated to the track and were in the gym every day. Four students is not many when they aren’t in the gym all day. That gave me time to train with a couple of circus pros and I sampled all the apparatuses that didn’t require actually flying. But I did work on the pole, the corde lisse, and aerial silks. I suppose it would have been a small step from there to pursue the aerial hoop, but it just didn’t appeal to me.
Balancing on the rola bola was a trick that almost cost me my front teeth. The guy who was spotting me as I learned the trick managed to get his hand between my face and the floor before I hit. It hurt anyway. By late fall, I was advancing in a number of new skills, not the least of which were more acrobatic uses of my gymnastic skills.
Hmm. How to explain that.
Well, in gymnastics, I could tumble across the floor, do a double salto with a one-and-a-half out, and land stably on my feet. As an acrobat, I adjusted that so I could land on a two-foot-high platform, make a back flip, and land on a four-foot platform. That’s acrobatics.
And that was also when the next big change in my life occurred.
I went to the gym and did my coaching sessions, did a massage, and headed out to the floor to work on my new skills. When I got to Nevada, I immediately checked on the licensing regulations and started my locally required classes so I could practice as a licensed massage therapist. The gym let me practice in a private room and I was now charging $100 an hour. The gym took only 20%!
Anyway, I’d just started my routine when my eye was caught by a kid doing multiple flips across the sprung floor. She looked familiar, but after seeing female gymnasts for ten years, all the tiny women looked familiar. Still, there was something almost haunting about her presence. She seemed older and determined, but the only apparatus she worked on was the floor.
Then she turned and faced me and we both had an instant of recognition. We ran across the intervening space like a parody of one of those slow motion commercials. She leapt from several feet away and landed in my arms with her legs wrapped around my waist and her lips smashed against mine.
“Sydnie! How great to see you! Are the rest of your group here?” I glanced around to see if Lena and Eva were nearby.
“Oh, Paul!” The happy girl was suddenly a bundle of sobs. “It’s terrible! I’m so sorry!”
“What? Did your group break up?”
“Lena…”
Lena had been the one of the group who had rescued me the day Tara told me we were no longer a couple. We’d only occasionally made love, but I was always close to all of them.
“What happened? Did she leave your group?”
“We were on our way here to audition for inclusion in a new show—driving from LA, you know. Lena was driving and Eva and I were making out in the back seat. I don’t know for sure what happened. We heard a loud bang and thought there had been a gunshot. The car went out of control and crossed the median, head-on into a semi-truck. Lena… She didn’t survive, Paul. She died. I’m so sorry.”
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” I panted. I collapsed to the floor with Sydnie still held in my arms as tears streamed down both our cheeks.
“Eva threw herself on top of me, but she was hurt and doesn’t think she’ll be doing acrobatics again. But Lena…”
“Oh my God!” I repeated. “She’s gone?” Sydnie nodded against my chest.
For a long time, we just sat on the floor crying together. It had only been a month since the accident. The wound was fresh for Sydnie. For me, it opened a hole in a heart I thought was dead, and I bled for the bright Alabama girl who had once rescued me.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “And Eva is okay? Not seriously injured?”
“No, but she’s not going to perform any longer.”
“She’s not crippled, is she?” I asked with visions of Tara’s body in my mind.
“No. The stress was getting to her and honestly, this was going to be our last shot at the big time before we retired. Isn’t that the dumbest thing you ever heard of? I’m only twenty-five and we were talking about retiring after this gig.”
“Well, I’m only twenty-seven and kind of forced into retirement,” I snorted. “I’m coaching here and learning more circus skills. Like you said once a long time ago: gymnastics, then acrobatics, then circus.”
“Oh, God. I’m thinking the same thing. Our acrobatics had already taken a turn to circus acts. You can’t just perform an acro gymnastics act for long and get bookings. We’d just been working on some new techniques, but not knowing what to do next. We just always thought we’d all be together.”
“You and Eva are still together, aren’t you?” I asked.
“Oh, we’re married. That’s not going to end. She thinks she might do some coaching if she can find a good opportunity when she’s fully healed. I just had to find a place where I could get some serious workouts in. I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“That’s easy,” I said without thinking. “Work with me.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
