I could hardly wait to see Mike later that night at the cabin house, where the gymnasts and some staff would hang out. As we sat outside in the fresh air, it was the first time I was able to have a long, in-person, uninterrupted conversation with Mike. We’d known each other for years and had written back and forth now and again, but we’d never had a decent chunk of time to talk face to face. I was intrigued by Mike—here was this stud gymnast who was intellectual and educated with well-thought-out opinions and ideas on so many things, yet he was humble, sincere, and easy to be around. The hours flew by as we talked and laughed. I felt a new and stronger connection with Mike that evening, and there was no doubt in my mind that he was special.
We were inseparable for that week at camp until I had to pack up and move on to my next camp, which was what I typically did during summers. I’d travel from one camp to another, so I really didn’t know when I’d see Mike again, especially since I lived in Texas and he was from Ohio. Oddly, we didn’t exchange phone numbers or talk about when we’d see each other again. We had always come back into each other’s lives and I figured it would happen again.
The year 2001 was yet another time of transition for me. Following my last attempt to qualify for a spot on the Olympic team in 2000, I was forced to step aside due to repeated injury and surgery. Having officially retired from gymnastics, I was left wondering how I was going to fill the void. My life had been consumed by my sport for as long as I could remember. On top of the sudden free time on my hands, retirement was bittersweet because I felt it was premature due to injury. I had two surgeries on my right knee (one in 1997, the other in 2000), then surgery on my right shoulder in early 2001. I was injured, but I wanted more and felt I still had it in me to compete. Heck, despite the gymnastics mileage I’d put on my body, I was still only nineteen years old.
I attended the 2001 US National Championships as a spectator instead of a competitor for the first time since retiring. The competition was held in Philadelphia, and I decided to go with two girlfriends. I was looking forward to the meet and thought it would be a good distraction since I was already going a little stir-crazy in my newfound retirement. My friends and I were waiting at our hotel to catch the shuttle to the gymnastics arena, but for a number of different reasons, we kept missing the bus and we’d have to wait for the next and the next. It was getting late and I was in the middle of asking someone about the next shuttle when the revolving doors in the hotel lobby turned and in walked Mike!
It was so unexpected that my stomach was doing flips. I was out-of-my-mind happy to see him. We hadn’t spoken since summer camp in the Poconos, and here he was strolling through the lobby and back into my life as if we’d planned it for months. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect.
I tried to walk over casually to greet him, so I didn’t look like a total dork, but it was no use—I couldn’t stop myself from sprinting toward him and practically tackled him as I threw my arms around him. I was so surprised to see him. He had hitched a ride to Philadelphia with some friends from Ohio State and was there to support Raj and the men’s gymnastics team. He still hadn’t connected with Raj to find out where the team was staying.
“Why don’t you stay with us? Hang out with us!” I blurted out. I was practically bouncing up and down as I ran with Mike to drop his stuff in our room before grabbing a cab to the competition. Thank God we missed those earlier shuttles, I thought to myself as we made our way to the venue.
Nationals flew by quickly and, quite honestly, I was more into Mike than the competition. He was so knowledgeable about gymnastics and could practically predict what would happen next just by analyzing a gymnast’s entry or moves leading into tricks. I loved how passionate he was. I was impressed by his knowledge of and respect for women’s gymnastics as well. Most male gymnasts I knew didn’t know nearly as much about the women’s events, especially the technical and historical aspects. Mike was like a gymnastics encyclopedia, and I found myself captivated by his rich love for the nuances and artistry of our sport. I even learned a few things just listening to his comments as we watched the women that day.
I learned of Mike’s goal to be a foot and ankle surgeon during our time together at IGC. He had taken a year off after graduating from Ohio State University with a degree in molecular genetics and was getting ready to start the long journey through medical school and residency. He had volunteered that summer helping the Ohio State Men’s Gymnastics Team prepare for Nationals and made his way to the meet to support them. He had also tutored many players on the Ohio State University football team during past years, wanting to help his alma mater as much as possible before burying his head in medical school.
Sunday morning came, the meet was over, and I dreaded having to say good-bye to Mike yet again. As he helped me into a taxi to the airport, I realized I didn’t even have his phone number. This time I wasn’t leaving until I got it. As we exchanged information, I leaned in and gave Mike a warm hug and planted a firm kiss on his lips. He kissed me back. I was complete mush as the taxi carried me to the airport, and I had no idea when I’d see him again.
We started talking on the phone regularly, often for three hours or more on any given night. I never knew I could talk so much and still have more to say. During one of our marathon conversations, I shared how I’d always imagined myself going to college, but so many things had happened in my life and college kept getting postponed. I was beginning to wonder when I’d be able to make it happen. Mike repeatedly encouraged me to enroll in college sooner than later and thanks to his persistence, I enrolled at Montgomery Community College in Texas in the spring of 2002. I had always dreamed about being the first in my family to graduate from college, and it was starting to look like I could. Mama and Tata never had that opportunity, and I wanted to do it for all of us. I completed my first semester of college with a 4.0 grade point average. I felt great.
I had boarded a flight and departed New York the morning the World Trade Center was attacked on September 11, 2001. I didn’t learn about that horrible news until my plane landed and was immediately grounded in Pennsylvania, not too far from where the third hijacked plane crashed that morning. There were no flights anywhere, so I knew I couldn’t get home to Houston. I managed to use the voucher I was provided by the airline to pay for cab fare to Cleveland, where I could stay with Mike until the airlines were operating again.
Mike and I were horrified as we watched the 9/11 stories unfold on the news. I ended up spending the next five days in Cleveland. It was an emotional, dark time for our country and we, like most, were overtaken by grief. I felt closer to Mike as we talked about life and death and war and how much being American means to the both of us. I felt our relationship strengthen during my stay and there was no denying that my love for him had become strong and genuine.
Growing up under Mama and Tata’s turbulent union, I couldn’t believe I was already thinking he was “the one,” and I felt in my heart with great certainty that I wanted to spend my life with Mike. He understood me like no one ever had, and I never felt like I had to hide my skeletons or water down my rocky past. He loved me for who I was now and nothing else seemed to matter.
Looking back at that time now, I had become a bit chubby. In fact, I was the most full-figured I’d ever been when Mike and I began dating seriously in 2001. Having been hyperaware of my weight and a topsy-turvy relationship with food my entire life, I felt self-conscious at first, but Mike always made me feel beautiful. He loved my curves, embraced them, and helped empower me to feel more confident about myself in every way. I knew I was falling deeper and deeper in love and I wanted to spend every waking moment with Mike. Every time we said good-bye, I was more certain that there would come a time when we wouldn’t have to separate.
It took eight more months of flying back and forth between Cleveland and Houston until I took the leap and moved to Cleveland to be with Mike as he continued in medical school. My parents were not happy that I was leaving, especially to “chase a
boy,” without being formally engaged, but I knew in my heart it was right.
Tata and I had been slowly rebuilding our relationship. There was never a moment when he or I formally apologized for any of the things that had gone on between us. It was more that the fighting and rehashing of the past had died down and we began to realize it was pointless to argue when we both still felt we were in the right. We learned to accept each other for who we were and move forward little by little.
Mike came to Houston to meet my family during Christmas 2001, five months before I moved to Cleveland. I really wasn’t sure how Tata would react to Mike. Despite the improved condition of our own relationship, he was always a tough critic when it came to my friends or anyone I’d shown interest in dating the past two years. I couldn’t imagine him ever “approving” of someone I wanted to follow to another state. Tata grilled him with what seemed like hundreds of questions, and Mike calmly and respectfully answered each one and was able to win Tata over in the course of the conversation. I remember Tata even asking Mike what he knew about goat cheese, of all things.
“How much a pound?” Tata asked.
“I don’t know, Mr. Moceanu, I just eat it,” Mike replied with a smile.
Tata laughed and really got a kick out of Mike, which was a huge relief. I knew Mike was “the one” and nobody was going to convince me otherwise, but having Mama and Tata approve of him certainly instantly made my life easier. It also provided me with hope as we moved into this next stage.
In May 2002, I stuffed my Ford Explorer with my personal belongings and set off on my 21-hour trek to Cleveland. In contrast to the last time I had left Texas, Tata was warmly supportive, even helpful. He even generously offered to bring my furniture and larger items in a moving truck a few weeks later. I was thankful for his blessing and support. Mama was supportive as well but reluctant to let me go in the end because of the distance. I promised I would return home often and be in regular touch.
Mike opened a door for me to work as a coach at Gymnastics World (GW), a gym where he had trained since he was a junior in high school. GW owners Ron and Joan Ganim welcomed me with open arms and have continued to be an extended family in Cleveland to this day. While I coached, I also attended Cuyahoga Community College and John Carroll University, to complete my business degree.
Mike remained passionate about gymnastics and even after he retired from competition, he stayed competitive by participating in the annual Ohio State University Alumni gymnastics performance each January, despite his heavy course load as a full-time medical student. It was inspirational to watch Mike deftly balance his various commitments. I also admired how he was so disciplined about getting to the gym to train. He used the January performances as a personal goal to keep in shape and stay involved in gymnastics while he navigated through medical school, residency, and beyond. Precision conditioning for our sport is demanding, and most gymnasts I know are unable to perform at an Elite level even one year after retirement, yet Mike was continuing to wow audiences years and years after he’d retired. He has actually earned quite a reputation at Ohio State for his impressive Alumni performances. I have never known anyone who loves gymnastics as much as Mike does, from the inside out. January 2012 marked his 17th consecutive alumni performance.
In 2004, I was spending a lot of time in the gym training for a post-Olympic tour and Mike started making comments about me getting back into competitive gymnastics.
“You should train again. You could do it,” he’d say.
His words intimidated me at first. I wasn’t sure that I could do it, or that I had it in me to push myself through the mental and physical aspects of training again, but he had me thinking. I had often felt my retirement was premature, and leaving the sport because of injury had felt like I didn’t leave Elite competitive gymnastics on my own terms. My heart still ached when I watched others perform. I definitely missed performing competitively. There were so many things that could have been done differently, and I certainly was intrigued by the thought of competing on my own terms. Mike was consistently encouraging and wanted to help me feel fulfilled with my gymnastics career, so slowly but surely I started training more seriously. By 2005, I was in full-blown training mode. However, this time, we followed Mike’s strategy to “train smarter, not harder,” so we could preserve my body and limit injury. I felt strong and motivated and trusted Mike’s approach, but it was at first a challenge for me to change the mind-set that had been hammered into me all those years. For most of my career, I was conditioned to believe I had to be in the gym forty-plus hours each week and that I couldn’t miss more than one day a week to perform at my best. Mike helped deprogram those notions and showed me that this smarter approach was just as effective. I trained a few hours every day, went to college full-time, and coached young gymnasts at GW part-time three days a week. I was taking on a lot, but I felt balanced, empowered, and determined. I’d always loved gymnastics, but for the first time I felt like I was doing it for me.
With Mike’s guidance, I decided to become a “specialist,” meaning that I would focus on two events only—vault and floor exercise—as opposed to training for the All-Around like I’d always done in the past. I was learning new skills and it was challenging, but very exciting, too. I was enthusiastic to train, so even when Mike wasn’t able to meet me at the gym, I would videotape my sessions, and we’d review the footage together later that night. I’d never studied my training sessions like this before, and it was an eye-opening experience. I learned so much from this approach because I could actually see what I didn’t always feel as I was doing certain skills. It opened up a door to finally being able to clearly identify the things I was doing right and the things I needed to correct. Watching film certainly was not an original idea, as I’m certain the Soviets and others have been utilizing it for years, but I had seldom seen it during my training throughout the United States, and we never recorded training with the Karolyis, aside from media footage. I wondered why more coaches didn’t incorporate it in their training as it surely seems every gymnast could benefit from watching and critiquing her own routines.
Mike continued to coach and encourage me, and before too long I felt confident enough that I set my mind on doing what I never thought would be possible … training for an Elite competition at the age of twenty-four.
There were skills that still came naturally to me, like the Tsukahara element on floor exercise named after legendary Japanese gymnast Mitsuo Tsukahara. The skill is two flips in a tucked position with one 360-degree twist in the first flip. It’s a skill I’d been doing since I was nine years old and mastered by my twenties, so it came back to me relatively easily once I got in shape. I loved flipping again and it was exhilarating to learn new skills and prove that I could get better with time.
Everything was clicking, so with Mike as my coach, we set our sights on me competing at the US Nationals in 2005, knowing full well it would be an uphill battle considering all of the rules and restrictions our governing body placed on gymnasts attempting to come back after retiring. It was widely believed that USA Gymnastics was then almost entirely controlled by Marta Karolyi, who was National Team Coordinator for Women’s Gymnastics and who didn’t appear to be a Dominique Moceanu fan by any means. As National Team Coordinator, Marta oversaw the US National team, having a powerful say in selecting the gymnasts for international assignments, as well as World and Olympic teams. We were well aware that she had the power to easily put a stop to my gymnastics comeback at any moment by simply stating “she didn’t qualify” or “didn’t meet the criteria.” Selections for the World and Olympic teams, as well as scoring, are very subjective, and Mike and I were fully aware of the politics of Elite women’s gymnastics going in. I’d seen at least a few gymnasts magically appear on the National and even World team without qualifying through the normal process. These gymnasts were selected for these teams without any explanation, not that anyone would ever question Marta. We decided to move forward anyway, feeling th
at if I performed well enough, I might have a chance of breaking through the politics and earning the right to compete again.
I was coming back to my sport for different reasons this time—and I moved toward my goal with a different attitude. I was wiser, mentally tougher, and totally focused on my main goal: to compete at the highest level one last time, 100 percent on my own terms.
On July 2, 2005, that sixteen-year-old boy I had met in the hospitality room eleven years earlier asked for my hand in marriage. “Yes!” couldn’t come out of my mouth fast enough. The pieces of my life that had been scattered far and wide for too long were finally coming together and settling in their rightful places.
Chapter 13
THE COMEBACK TRAIL
A gymnast in her twenties is considered geriatric, so my “comeback” at twenty-four was virtually unheard of, especially since I’d been out of the Elite scene for a good five years. If I were younger, I would have been deterred by my critics, and at this point there were plenty of those. Haters and naysayers seemed to come out of the woodwork when I announced I was training for a comeback. By 2005, however, I was older, wiser, and definitely more thick-skinned, so the negative comments and mean-spirited barbs didn’t sway me.
Fortunately, as I trained for my comeback, I had the support and sponsorship of Woodward Gymnastics Camp in Pennsylvania. The gym offered to cover my training and living expenses during summers in exchange for my coaching at their camps. I loved working with young gymnasts, so it was a win-win for me. I lived at the summer camp lodge and had access to the cafeteria, but I elected to bring my own food to make sure I stayed on my regimented diet. For once, I was eating a sensible, well-balanced meal plan and I didn’t want to mess that up. The Woodward facility had top-of-the-line equipment with foam pits for vaulting and floor exercise, which was key to sparing my body from the heavy pounding and overuse that is exacerbated with older equipment.
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