Stick the Landing

by Kate McMurray

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Epilogue

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  Copyright Page

  Stick the Landing

  By Kate McMurray

  Elite Athletes: Book 2

  Jake Mirakovitch might be the best gymnast in the world, but there’s one big problem: he chokes in international competition. The least successful of a family of world-class gymnasts, he has struggled to shake off nerves in the past. This time he’s determined to bring home the gold no matter what.

  Retired figure skater Topher Caldwell wants a job as a commentator for the American network that covers the Olympics, and at the Summer Olympics in Madrid, he has a chance to prove himself with a few live features. He can’t afford to stumble.

  Olympic victories eluded Topher, so he knows about tripping when it really counts. When he interviews Jake, the two bond over the weight of all that pressure. The flamboyant reporter attracts the kind of attention Jake—stuck in a glass closet—doesn’t want, but Jake can’t stay away. Topher doesn’t want to jeopardize his potential new job, and fooling around with a high-profile athlete seems like a surefire way to do just that. Yet Topher can’t stay away either….

  Chapter One

  One year ago

  International Federation of Gymnastics World Championships

  JAKE HIT the mat so hard, he literally saw stars.

  When he remembered where he was, he did a quick mental accounting and determined that nothing was broken, but he’d probably hit his head. What he should do now was get up, salute the judges, and pretend he hadn’t just completely missed the landing on that vault.

  But apparently he’d been lying there too long, because Alexei’s face appeared in Jake’s field of vision. “Are you dead?” Alexei asked.

  “No.” It came out sounding strangled.

  “Good. Can you move?”

  Jake tried experimentally to lift his arm. He managed to make it rise off the mat, but any further movement seemed like a lot of effort. “No.”

  Oh, this was bad. If Jake had managed to paralyze himself during the fucking Team Championships and thus prevented the beleaguered American men’s gymnastics team from qualifying for the Olympics….

  Alexei, Jake’s coach, and Viktor, one of the other coaches, helped Jake to his feet. Jake wasn’t hurt so much as stunned. “Do I vault again?” Jake asked, confused.

  “No,” said Alexei. “You get down and let Dr. Ruiz look at you.”

  “Am I supposed to vault again? Like, if I’d stuck that landing, would I?”

  “No. It’s the team competition. You only vault once.”

  “Okay.”

  Jake heard clapping, but it could have been a herd of bees buzzing, the way it sounded in his ears. All sound was tinny and distant.

  He’d fucked up big-time.

  “Score gets erased,” said Alexei.

  Well, yeah. Landing on his back was sure to earn Jake a zillion deductions. “What happened?”

  “Over-rotated.” Alexei guided Jake into a chair. “When you came out of tuck, you should have kicked your legs harder, but instead, you kept rotating.”

  “Ah,” said Jake.

  Dr. Ruiz, the team medic, swooped over and started asking questions. Did Jake hit his head (he didn’t know, but probably), had he hurt anything else (his pride; otherwise, no), and did he know where they were (yes, Beijing). Really, he felt stunned more than anything else. This was like all the times he’d gotten the wind knocked out of him when he hit the mat too hard during practice; now he felt like he’d just got his breath back. Surprised, but okay. Not nauseous. No obvious pain.

  “I’m fine,” Jake insisted, though it started to sink in now how badly he’d fucked up. Sure, they’d toss out his score if it was indeed the lowest vault score for the American team. But fucking up in international competition—again—did not improve his chances of making the American Olympic team.

  “You sure?” asked Alexei.

  “Yeah. Just stunned. I thought I’d land that.” Jake tried for a self-deprecating smile. Probably he looked crazy.

  Alexei patted him on the back. Dr. Ruiz finished taking his vitals and ruled him okay to keep competing. Up on the scoreboard, his score flashed up: 13.333. Jake grimaced. Not embarrassing, but definitely not good, especially on a vault that he routinely scored better than 15 on.

  “You didn’t quite push off table hard enough,” Alexei said, rewatching the vault on his phone. “You would have landed it if you got higher off table.”

  “Okay.” Jake pretended to absorb that criticism, even though he was thinking, Too fucking late now.

  “It’s fine,” said Viktor. “As long as you are okay?”

  Jake nodded.

  “We’re in second place right now.” Viktor pointed at the scoreboard. “One more event to go. We will podium.”

  “No thanks to me.”

  “Your high bar routine was very good,” said Viktor.

  “Good on parallel bars,” said Alexei.

  “Pommel horse not so much,” said Jake, who’d biffed a skill there too.

  Alexei shook his head. “When we get back to States, we change training. I’ve seen you do that vault a hundred times, no problem. Now, people watching, you land on your back. Why?”

  “Oh, Alexei, if I could answer that question….” Jake shook his head. “Forget it. I’m all right. We’ll qualify a full team to the Olympics, which is all that matters.”

  “You’ll be on that team,” said Alexei.

  But Jake was not so sure.

  On the other side of the world…

  “YOU WANT me to do what?”

  Topher stood in his kitchen with his cell phone wedged between his chin and his shoulder. It was very likely going to end up in the pot of boiling water below. The smart thing would be to fetch his headset from the other room and finish the call that way, but suddenly Angela, his agent, was saying strange words, and Topher felt dumbfounded.

  “They want you to walk at Fashion Week. As a model. See, Jennifer Cole has a new collection—”

  “She’s a womenswear designer.” Topher did not like where this was going.

  “Yes, she is, but she collaborated on a menswear collection that is being put out under her label, and they want a couple of splashy stars to walk as models.”

  “It’s insane, isn’t it?” Topher stepped away from the boiling water. An onion sat half-chopped on his cutting board, next to the still-unopened package of pasta and a tomato that seemed to be shriveling up as it sat, whole and unblemished, mocking Topher. His dinner date would be here any minute, and he’d miss out on the pre-dinner flirtation if he didn’t get this meal going. He sighed. “The collection, I mean. Hot pink feathers and, like, rainbows and whatever. I saw Col
e’s collection last year. She designs for teenage girls.”

  “I’ve seen some of the drawings,” said Angela. “The collection certainly couldn’t be called subdued, but I’ve seen crazier men’s fashion. Hell, I’ve seen you wear crazier men’s fashion. This could be a really good opportunity for you, Toph. You’d get the kind of positive press that would win over the TBC execs.”

  Topher harrumphed. TBC was the television network that had an exclusive contract to air the Olympics in the United States. Topher had been hired during the last World Championships as a figure skating correspondent—because who better than a two-time Olympic figure skater and world champion to comment on the sport—but because the old guard wasn’t ready to retire, mostly he just interviewed the athletes off the ice. There had been rumors swirling that TBC liked Topher enough to have him replace one of their regular commentators, and Topher wanted that job more than he wanted his next meal. The ancient man who’d won his gold medal in 1960, when all one really had to do was spin around a couple of times, somehow still did the primetime commentary. Topher kept hearing that the old man could barely walk these days, let alone muster the energy to say anything informative about figure skating, so that spot was Topher’s.

  If he didn’t blow it.

  Or, not even blow it. More than one TBC employee had implied they wanted him to be less flamboyantly gay. Which, sorry, but no.

  “I don’t know if Fashion Week is the kind of thing the network executives really want me to do. Play football or hunt for wild game, sure, but prance around in frilly outfits? I mean, that sounds like a good time, don’t get me wrong, and I’d sooner wear pink feathers than hold a gun, but I don’t know if this is really what I need to solidify my position. Besides, the next Olympics are still three years away.”

  “What if I said you might have a job at the next Summer Olympics?”

  Good thing Topher was nowhere near that pot of water now, because he moved his head so sharply, the phone slid down his chest. He caught it and held it back up to his ear. “What did you say?”

  “TBC got a lot of flak at the last Olympics for having the same tired old commentators that they’ve had since the midseventies. And rightly so! I watched some of the coverage from the 1984 gymnastics finals—you know, Mary Lou Retton and all that—and it’s the same damn people. Some market researcher finally suggested that the reason ratings are down could be that the broadcast has been basically the same for three decades. They want fresh blood. I think they want someone like you because they know you appeal to the youth market. As far as I know, they don’t want you commentating on specific sports, but they’d like you to do puff pieces and some of the cultural stuff. They want you to build up your fan base and social media presence, though, which you can’t do if you never leave your apartment. And if you do it well and they like you, this could pay off for you in the long run. Think of it as an audition of sorts.”

  Topher was having a hard time processing all this. “So, wait. What I hear you saying is that you want me to walk in Fashion Week so that I get some flashy, on-brand headlines and media attention, long enough, at least, for my name to stay in the news so that TBC will hire me, Christopher Caldwell, super gay figure skater, to do hokey human interest stories at the Summer Olympics. And that if I do those hokey stories well enough, they may hire me to do a commentary for the sport I am an actual expert about.”

  “Yes. That is exactly what I am telling you.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “You want a job or don’t you?”

  Fuck yeah, Topher wanted the job. “I mean, I’m in, obviously. I’ll go to the moon if it gets me a broadcasting job. But after what happened at my last Olympics and how much the network shit on me….”

  “New management, buddy. There’s a new head of TBC Sports and a new chair of the Olympics broadcast, and both are looking to shake up their coverage. It’s all still in the early stages, but I think your odds are good. You’re a household name, at least among the Olympic-watching demographics. I can’t guarantee a lot of airtime, and this is all kind of experimental to see what pulls in ratings, but if it goes well, who knows? Maybe this is your ticket to that primetime commentary chair.”

  Topher took a deep breath. He’d retired from skating three years ago, after a post-Olympics World Championships in which he’d finished fifth. It was a last gasp more than a swan song, and a sign that it was time to hang up his skates. And this year he’d turned thirty, and was having the requisite crisis about it.

  He’d once been a teenaged phenom, though he hadn’t gone to the Olympics until after he’d turned twenty. Everyone expected him to win that first time. The pressure had gotten to him. He singled when he should have tripled one of his jumps in the short program, which had put him at enough of a point deficit that he couldn’t make it up in the long program when everyone else skated flawlessly. He ended up in fourth place, which was basically the worst. The second time, he was still expected to win, but expectations seemed more tempered, and by then there were all these other rising stars and Topher was kind of the old man—at the ripe old age of twenty-five. Still, after a near-flawless short program that had landed him in first place going into the long program, something had happened and he’d choked. Actually, he’d fallen on his ass executing a jump he’d done without incident hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

  Topher had won three World Championships, but something about the Olympics’ stage was like a curse. He’d been hoping to try one more time, but fatigue and an old injury prevented him from doing so, and now he had bad knees that ached on rainy days and zero Olympic medals.

  TBC generally hired retired athletes to comment on Olympic sports, but they got the guy who won a gold medal in Seoul or the woman who won a silver in Albertville. Not knowledgeable, albeit flamboyant, also-rans. Because Topher had been skating almost since the time he’d learned to walk, but he’d never won an Olympic medal. So what kind of expert could he be?

  He shook off his shame spiral and said instead, “Hey, if Jennifer Cole wants me to dress like a unicorn and that’s what I need to do to persuade TBC to send me to Madrid, then I’m already practicing my runway walk.”

  “Attaboy.” Angela laughed. “I’ll let the Cole people know.”

  Chapter Two

  One week before the Olympics

  Transcript: Wake Up, America!

  MORALES: AS you know, we’ll be starting our broadcast from Madrid on Friday morning, but in the meantime, we’ve got a bit of a preview for you.

  HOLT: If you follow some of these sports, none of these people are strangers, but for the casual viewers, you’ll be meeting a lot of these athletes for the first time once the Games start in Madrid.

  MORALES: Each day this week, we’ll be profiling one elite athlete who we think has got what it takes to win gold this year. Today, meet Chelsea Mirakovitch!

  HOLT: Get used to hearing that name. Chelsea was too young to make the Olympic team four years ago, but she’s been raking in the awards ever since. She’s not only the reigning national champion, but she’s a three-time World All-Around Champion as well. And she comes from quite a legacy.

  MORALES: That’s right, Joe. Her father, Valentin Mirakovitch, was a gold medal gymnast himself, winning the men’s all-around in Seoul, representing the USSR. He’s now her coach. Her mother was also a Russian gymnast and competed for the Unified Team in 1992 in Barcelona. Even her brother Jake is a gymnast. He’ll be competing in Madrid as well.

  HOLT: Wouldn’t it be something if both Mirakovitch siblings won medals in Madrid?

  MORALES: Oh, definitely. Jake has a shot at a medal. He’s the reigning national champion, and he’s the veteran of the team, having competed four years ago. But he faces stiff competition from athletes from Japan, China, Ukraine, and Great Britain, not to mention his own teammates. On the other hand, I’d say that gold medal is Chelsea’s to lose. We haven’t seen a gymnast this dominant since Simone Biles….

  JAKE ST
ARED at clouds out the window, surprised that this moment was already here. Just six weeks ago, he’d laid in bed at night imagining what this very plane ride would be like. Then he’d gotten sucked into training camp, and suddenly he was here. He let out a breath when a bit of turbulence bumped him. Yes, training camp. Even though the US men’s gymnastics team was pretty spread out geographically, the new head coach, Viktor Chakin, had decided that the men’s team should follow the women’s model and spend some time bonding. Viktor, who had once been part of the Soviet gymnastics machine, did have a special gift for plucking boys out of fledgling programs and grooming them into world champions, but gymnastics was not a team sport.

  Still, the American team had struggled the past few years. The dozen or so guys who had been on the national team in the past four years had a handful of medals between them, but mostly on individual events. The men’s team hadn’t won a team championship in… a while. Viktor Chakin, the champion-maker, had been hired to fix that problem.

  Viktor Chakin had once been the teammate of Valentin Mirakovitch, the head coach of USA Gymnastics and lead women’s coach. Jake’s father.

  So they were all one big happy family, apparently. After spending all of July at the men’s team training camp outside Houston, everyone had been sent home for a week. Home for Jake was three miles from training camp. But no matter. Here he was now, on a plane with not only the entire men’s gymnastics team—including the alternates, coaches, and staff—but the entire women’s team as well. Which meant Chelsea sat three rows up, and dear old Dad was in first class, sitting next to Jake’s mother, Lana. Lana didn’t work for USA Gymnastics, but she was an honorary staff member, a team mother of sorts. And given that her entire immediate family was on this plane, it made sense for her to be here too.

  Jake kind of wished he could escape them all, though.

  His teammate Corey sat beside him. Corey had bought the Olympic preview issue of Sports Illustrated at the airport and currently had it open in his lap. “Too bad we won’t get to see most of the swimming. You know that guy Isaac Flood?”