Dimitri put Summit on the map in the 2000s by producing more Olympic gymnasts there than any other training facility in American history—Lindsay Tillerson, Jasmine, and plenty of others. But after 2012, he left Summit to found his own gym, Powerhouse. Summit was taken over by one of its own longtime coaches, Mary Li, but I haven’t heard much about her. It sounds like she prefers to stay behind the scenes these days, running the business, rather than training athletes on her own.

“I’m training this girl Hallie for Tokyo,” he explains, referring to the 2020 Olympics. “She’s amazing, especially on bars. Hardworking and determined like you’ve never seen before, real natural talent, total star quality. Maybe you’ve heard of her?”

“Um, believe it or not, I haven’t been keeping up much with the sport lately,” I say.

The truth is that if 2012 had gone differently for me, I might not have the hard feelings that I do now.

“I’m optimistic about her chances,” he says. “Bars is on lock. She’s strong on vault and beam, too. But floor is a weak spot for her. Her routine has an impressively high level of difficulty, especially when it comes to tumbling, but she keeps getting dinged on execution. Her artistry could be better.”

I know what he means. There are two types of gymnasts: the powerhouses who nail sky-high tumbling and have so much energy, they nearly bounce out of bounds, and the delicate dancers who captivate fans with beautiful choreography, but never attempt the toughest tricks. I was among the latter. You can’t choose—you work with what comes naturally to you. At five-foot-three, I was relatively tall and elegant for a gymnast, and my flexibility put the famously bendy Russians to shame. Floor was where I shone—I had a sense of poise and presence to my artistry that’s almost impossible to teach. You either have it or you don’t.

“I’m looking for an assistant coach to come on board to lead her training on floor,” Ryan continues. “There’s only so much I can do to help her.”

Gymnastics is split by gender: women and men compete on both floor exercise and vault, though women also do balance beam and uneven bars, while men do parallel bars, high bar, rings, and pommel horse. But even though Ryan and I both did floor, the event is drastically different for men and women. We both performed difficult and exciting skills, but his focused on brute strength while mine were interwoven with dynamic choreography. It doesn’t matter that Ryan earned an Olympic gold team medal, a gold on high bar, and a bronze on parallel bars. His skills don’t fully translate to women’s gymnastics, although plenty of men coach women. That’s how it’s always been. The greatest coaches in the sport’s history—like Igor Itzkovitz and, yes, Dimitri Federov—are all men.