• CHAPTER 29 •

Then, bam, it’s June. While the rest of the country starts to slow down for summer vacation, time speeds up for us. The Olympic Trials take place on Saturday, June 27, and the Olympics begin less than a month after that, on Friday, July 24—soon enough that I have a running countdown in my head that tracks how many days we have left. I don’t need to check a calendar; the days tick down automatically for me. It’s twenty-five, then twenty-two, and now we’re in the teens. This is what I’ve been preparing for since last October, and what Hallie has been looking forward to for quite literally her entire life.

The Olympics are just close enough now that regular people are getting excited. On one lunch break, Hallie squeezes in a phone interview with Kiss 108, the local Top 40 radio station; on another, she takes a call from a People reporter. A whole crew from the Boston Globe arrived during practice one afternoon to take pictures and interview her for a front-page story. Ryan shooed the journalist and photographer away after forty-five minutes, insisting that Hallie’s energy was best spent on training at the moment. As the reporters packed up their camera equipment, her face fell just a little bit. I don’t blame her.

Competitive gymnastics isn’t like football or baseball in the sense that the general public will tune in for a big game or even be aware when the sport is in season—it gets one blip of fandom every four years. So, even though throwing a new responsibility on top of preparing Hallie for the Olympics seems like pure lunacy right now, Jasmine insists that we have to capitalize on this moment in order to gain media attention. She wants to launch the Elite Gymnastics Foundation publicly now, before the Olympics kick off, while elite gymnastics is having its moment in the sun. If we wait until after Tokyo, the public’s interest in whatever we have to say may be lost. People will only see Hallie and her Olympic cohort as buff Miss America stand-ins—shiny, patriotic trophies—not flesh-and-blood young women battling real systemic issues. And then, well before the first crisp day of fall, gymnastics will have fallen off most people’s radars.