AMERICAN PRODIGIES
EPSIODE 1
TRANSCRIPT
AMIRA ROSE DAVIS: Before we start, a content note: This episode contains accounts of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse and racism. You’ll also hear some swearing.
YOUNG GYMNAST 1: I think it’s going to be a pretty spectacular night.
AMIRA: This was the sound outside of the Gold Over America Tour when it stopped in Houston Texas.
YOUNG GYMNAST 2: It’s gonna be pretty awesome. Because these are some of the people who have been on the Olympic Team for a couple years, so - and we’ve seen them level up while we’ve been leveling up in our gymnastics too so that’d be pretty cool.
AMIRA: Gold Over America was the 2021 post-Olympics gymnastics tour. And, outside the arena, little kids—mostly girls—were dressed in matching gymnastics club shirts or sparkly gold leotards. They were vibrating with excitement.
SIX-YEAR-OLD 1: I came to see Simone Biles.
KELLY JONES (Producer): What do you think the show is going to be like?
SIX-YEAR-OLD 1: Gold.... Amazing.
SIX-YEAR-OLD 2: SO Amazing.
AMIRA: I’m not gonna lie: I wasn’t dressed in a leotard, but I was pretty damn excited, too. I’m Amira Rose Davis. I’m a professor and podcaster and I study the intersection of race, gender, sports, and politics. Black women athletes in particular – like Simone Biles – are right up my alley. So, when I heard Simone was hosting her own post-Olympics tour, in her hometown of Houston - which is just 45 minutes from where I was born in Beaumont, Texas – I knew I had to be there. Now, I didn’t go unprepared.
JORDAN CHILES: Just think of it as a pop concert, but gymnastics-style.
AMIRA: That’s Jordan Chiles – fresh off of her Olympic silver medal in Tokyo. She was a headliner for the show. And before I drove down to Houston, I checked in with her about what I could expect.
JORDAN CHILES: We have LED lights, there’s gonna be a spoken word… The mix of international gymnasts to US gymnasts as well, like, there's a bunch of amazing athletes. You might cry! I’m just gonna put that out there…
AMIRA: Oh I’m gonna cry, I already know that…
JORDAN CHILES: You're going to cry. You're also going to have some happy moments, and maybe some funny moments. So, just be prepared for that. But, there’s just a lot that—
AMIRA: Okay Girl, I just said, we're coming on Friday don’t spoil it all.
JORDAN CHILES: I'm not going to spoil it!
AMIRA: I’m kidding I’m kidding I’m kidding. [laughing]
JORDAN CHILES: I'm just giving you the little spiel-
AMIRA: The teaser.
JORDAN CHILES: The teaser, OK? Man! [laughing]
AMIRA: [laughing] I’m just kidding with you. So, it’s a tour that like you’ve never seen—you know, you see these like Kellogg...
JORDAN CHILES: Don't even bring those up. This is far from that.
AMIRA: The thing I’m not supposed to bring up is every other post-Olympics gymnastics tour of champions.
TV Commentator 1 (Archival): Here she is in Houston, Kathy Johnson and the balance beam.
AMIRA: Past tours, like this one that aired on ABC, were organized by USA Gymnastics, the national governing body of the sport. And even though Jordan doesn’t want to go there, we have to. Because these unspeakable tours? They help us understand what American gymnastics was, and for the most part, still is.
TV Announcer 1 (Archival): Our athletes, through years of never ending will power and dedicated training, brought home what many of us thought to be the impossible dream. Our athletes brought home... the gold!]
AMIRA: These previous tours occurred right after the Olympics. Gymnasts would literally hobble in with all of the ailments they nursed throughout their run up to the Olympic Games. They often looked tired and really depleted…
TV Commentator 2 (Archival): I wanna mention she didn’t take much time off after the Olympics, she was right back in training with coach Steve Nunno.
TV Commentator 4 (Archival): I think she said she took one day off [laughs]...
AMIRA: And look, the tours were hella white. They featured a sprinkling of gymnasts of color. But by and large, they reflected the state of elite gymnastics at the time. You hear it from so many Black gymnasts:
ANGIE DENKINS: It is no joke. It's a predominantly white sport. It's a white sport.
COURTNEY JOHNSON: My white coaches, like, pulled me aside and just said, like, you know, some of these meets we’re going to you may not get the scores that you deserve because you're Black.
JOYCE WILBORNE: We have to work twice as hard than everybody else to prove we belong to be there.
JASMINE SWYNINGAN: This is not just a white person sport, but it is owned and administered by white people. And that's a huge problem.
AMIRA: That was like Angie Denkins, Dr. Courtney Johnson, Joyce Wilborn, and Jasmine Swyningan. Their collective careers in gymnastics span from the mid-80s to early 2000s. Black girls and women like them have always been in and around this sport. But usually at the margins, not the core. And for decades, gymnastics was marketed as pretty little white girls flipping and bouncing around, being effortlessly entertaining - no matter how they felt or what was happening to them.
Today Show Host (Archival): You know, Simone Biles’ golden performance was one of the major highlights of the Olympics in Rio but now the gymnastics superstar is opening up about a low point in her life, adding her name to the list of more than one hundred athletes accusing Dr. Larry Nassar of sexual abuse.
AMIRA: The 2016 Kellogg’s Tour of Champions happened right as news about Larry Nassar was breaking.
ABC News Anchor (Archival): Right now, that doctor is sitting inside a jail cell in Ingham County in Mason, he’s scheduled to be arraigned sometime tomorrow morning, most likely around eight-thirty.
AMIRA: Nassar worked as a USAG doctor for two decades. He sexually abused more than three hundred athletes, most of them gymnasts—including Gabrielle Douglas and Simone Biles – who were both on that 2016 tour. Many people in positions of power within USAG were eventually implicated in the coverup for Nassar’s crimes.
Texas Prosecutor (Archival): It is our belief that there was a total failure by USAG to protect the athletes that were part of their program.
Simone Biles (Archival): You had one job, you literally had one job and you couldn’t protect us.
AMIRA: But in 2016, as the public first learned about Nassar, that post-Olympics tour of champions…rolled right along.
Tour Commentator (Archival): Now, on the Kellogg’s Tour, it’s party time!
AMIRA: There was no room in the sport for anything other than sparkles and smiles. But some gymnasts have set out to change that. Which brings us back to the Gold Over America Tour. It’s the first of its kind. This first post-Olympics show wasn’t run by USAG. And, it’s about all of it: the joy... and the messiness of elite gymnastics.
Tour Announcer (Archival): Welcome to the Athleta presents Gold Over America Tour!
[crowd cheers]
AMIRA: And Jordan tried to warn me, but I was blown away. The show had LED lights, incredible tricks, and Black girls everywhere – it was joyous for sure. But there were also moments that explicitly addressed mental health issues and abuse. Like Katelyn Ohashi’s spoken word poem, a letter to her younger self…
Katelyn Ohashi (Archival): There will be days when you’ll want to quit but you’ll feel out of place when you’re not in the gym—and even in the gym, you’ll feel small. Rooted in fear and abuse at times you can’t even recognize. But I want to tell you: please don’t believe all those lies. As of right now, that’s the only thing you know, but it won’t always be.
AMIRA: Gold Over America is the brainchild of Simone Biles. Is run by the gymnasts performing in it—her friends – like Jordan. The girls who have gone through what she’s gone through, and are ready to tell the world.
JORDAN CHILES: For her, it's showing that we don't have to be controlled by others to do something that we want to do, and it's giving the world a chance to see that things can be very successful without being ruled by others.
Katelyn Ohashi (Archival): But lastly, I want to say: good job. And I love you.
[crowd cheers]
AMIRA: So, how did we get here—from mostly white girls and women being paraded across the country while people in power ignored accusations of their abuse—to the Gold Over America Tour, a celebration of gymnastics joys that comes with an acknowledgement of pain and healing? How did gymnastics transform so much to give us a melanated show written in gymnasts’ words, danced to their beat, containing their voices and bursting with their identities?
JASMINE SWYNINGAN: Gymnastics... I know what it can be and that's what keeps me in. It's not a sport that's going away and it's not a sport that's only for white people. And we're seeing that more and more.
ANGIE DENKINS: It's just a wonderful feeling for me to see more sisters and young ladies of different cultures that are up there and that are really doing the doggone thing.
AMIRA: As a professor of history and African American studies, I really care about change over time. And as the co-host of a feminist sports podcast, I love hearing people tell their own stories. And so, I spent the last year trying to do both. I talked to Black girls and Black women in and around the sport to try to figure out how gymnastics has changed. To start, I traced the careers of the trailblazers. Like Betty Okino.
BETTY OKINO: I wanted a voice. I wanted to speak out. I wanted to like, be emotional and for it to be OK. I wanted…I wanted the opposite of restricting. [laughs] Yeah.
AMIRA: You wanted freedom.
BETTY OKINO: I wanted freedom.
AMIRA: And I thought about the golden girls…
MEGAN METZGER: I wanted to be Dominique Dawes.
LEXI: Gabby was the first person that so many people of color could actually say, like, oh, shit, we do fucking gymnastics. Like, that's cool as shit.
AMIRA: And of course, I had to talk with viral sensations…
NIA DENNIS: And it felt so surreal to actually be getting the credit that I felt like I deserved. It was a breath of fresh air to have support and love and gain love from people who were not a part of the sport at all.
AMIRA: And gymnasts that you may not know yet. Previous seasons of American Prodigy have focused one person. But this season, we’re going to have a ton of people telling their stories. Because tons of Black girls made this transformation possible. And in a sport that divided and conquered and isolated athletes from each other for so long, there’s power in bringing these voices together. They’ll consider the burden of visibility, the weight of expectation, the anguish of injury, and the triumph of winning -- all while we tell their stories alongside the history of gymnastics in the United States.
JOYCE WILBORN: Being a Black gymnast in a white gymnasts’ world was one of the hardest and toughest things that I've ever had to accomplish.
AMIRA: Their stories echo and reverberate off each other, and help us understand what it took, and still takes—to find one’s voice, to thrive, and to heal—as a Black gymnast.
ANGIE DENKINS: But I didn't let it bother me. I just carried myself lovely, handled my business and kept on moving.
JOYCE WILBORN: I don't put nothing past any Black gymnast, male or female, prevailing and handling their business because that's what we are, we’re great. You know?
AMIRA: These girls—now women—they’re the Black girls who few wanted in this sport. But they ended up changing the game.
JASMINE SWYNINGAN: These young women are definitely saying, “Hey, I'm here. I’m here to stay. Hey, I'm going to do gymnastics this way and it's good. And you need to understand that it's good.”
AMIRA: These are their stories. And this is American Prodigies.
ANGIE DENKINS It's inevitable. We damn good. So move over. Go sit down and enjoy the show…and embrace us!
[AD]
AMIRA: Under everything you’re going to hear in this series is a constant love letter to gymnastics.
JASMINE SWYNINGAN: My favorite part of gymnastics is just like feeling free in the air.
SIX YEAR OLD 1: Like, how you do those like, flips. And do backflips and stuff.
GYMNAST 1: I like tumbling. I like being in the air. I just, I just love it.
NIA DENNIS: But my favorite part of gymnastics is honestly feeling like I'm flying.
JASMINE SWYNINGAN: just like being suspended in the air for a long time and knowing that my body did that...
GYMNAST 2: Just because I feel like it's so fun to fly…
JASMINE SWYNINGAN: When I look back on my fondest memories, it's just like very plainly just being in the air that I loved.
SIX YEAR OLD 2: And how they do the backflips.
SIX YEAR OLD 1: That’s what I said! Stop copying me.
SIX YEAR OLD 2: You just said ‘flips’!
SIX YEAR OLD 1: I said backflips!
SIX YEAR OLD 2: No, I said backflips! Don’t argue with me! [laughs]
SIX YEAR OLD 1: I said backflips also! [laughs]
JORDAN CHILES: I think my favorite part is honestly just being able to go out there and have fun.
AMIRA: Jordan Chiles’ story maps onto the stories of almost all the Black gymnasts we talked to: from the 1980s, through to the next generation just now emerging.
JORDAN CHILES: When I look back, I'm like, I wish it was still like that where I was just like, “Oh yeah, let's go into the gym, just jump around.” But you know, everything changes and that's what happened to me.
AMIRA: All the Black gymnasts I spoke with find joy in flipping and frustration in injury. There are Olympic victories—and there are the shitty microaggressions about hair and body type that build up over their entire careers (and beyond). There’s community in being on the floor with other Black gymnasts—and there’s the devastation of putting all of their trust in faulty adults. There’s a decades-long struggle of trying to find and amplify their voices. To build a safe environment for themselves and each other, where their love of gymnastics can be the priority. Because like Jordan said, gymnastics is supposed to be fun. And it was for her. At first.
JORDAN CHILES: Gymnastics actually saved me. Like, I could not sit still at all whatsoever. My dad one day was just like, “I can't control her anymore!” Like,
This is getting too out of hand. We need to do something about it.” And so then they put me in gymnastics, and then right away, I started teaching myself skills. I was seeing all the other girls like, “Oh my goodness, I want to do that.” Like, “This is so cool…”
AMIRA: Jordan was good. So good that, pretty soon, gymnastics started to feel like work. She skipped a bunch of levels and her training increased. We’re talking twenty-five to thirty hours a week—while she was in middle school.
JORDAN CHILES: So at the age of eleven, I went to elite. And that's really young. I didn't know anything at that time at all. Didn't know what I put myself through was just like, OK, like, everybody else is doing it, why not me?
AMIRA: When you were in gymnastics, when you were younger, were you in gyms that were mostly white or did you have other black girls in gymnastics near you?
JORDAN CHILES: I was the only Black girl on the team, which I thought it was normal. Like at that time, like I went to an all-white school like-
AMIRA: Right.
JORDAN CHILES: That's what I just grew up around. But yeah, I was the only one until I want to say about the age of fourteen, because that's when the whole Biles and Chiles thing went viral.
AMIRA: The “Biles and Chiles” thing was when Simone won the gold medal in the senior division at US Classics in 2014 – and Jordan won the gold in the junior division.
JORDAN CHILES: And that's when a lot of girls really realized “I want to do what they're doing.” And so then I actually attracted more brown girls out there who wanted to come to my gym. And then every day I just saw one. And like some days, I would like tear up because it was just like, “Oh my gosh, like, there's they're loving the fact that I'm doing something so great and so huge and that they're able to do it.”
AMIRA: You mentioned before that there was obviously a period of time in which you lost your joy from the sport. You took a break from gymnastics in 2018. Can you just walk us through what led up to that break and what it was like to walk away from the sport?
JORDAN CHILES: So in 2017, I had a coach situation. She was verbally abusive. She would leave me in airports. It’s like a couple times like I've gotten left at the Houston airport. Like I'd be sitting there at the gate, right? And she’ll be like, “I’ll be back!” I'll be like, “OK”. Three hours later…And I'd be sitting there and then I'd be like, OK, I'm hungry... so I'd walk up. She'd be at a bar. And she's drinking a Corona. Right? I'm like, “Did I just see…?” But then she tried hiding it. She tried hiding the fact she was drinking a Corona.
AMIRA: This is a grown person! And this is what kills me.
JORDAN CHILES: Yes.
AMIRA: Ok keep going.
JORDAN CHILES: I'm like, Lady, what are you doing? We're about to get onto an airplane. Like, Yeah, it was pretty bad. My flight agent or whatever - it got so bad that I would tell her, like, I can't sit next to her on the plane. She would like switch my seat around and everything. But it was pretty bad.
AMIRA: Jordan was sixteen when this happened. Sixteen. And being shipped off with this coach to national and international competitions. No parents allowed. But this is just how gymnastics works. If you want to be at the top of this game, you need to go all-in. And trust your coaches to take you there. That ends up being the downfall of so many gymnasts—like Betty Okino, a Black gymnast from the early 90s. Her coaches overtrained her—pushing her body to the breaking point. More than once. And she couldn’t defend herself.
BETTY OKINO: So the fear was, if I stand up and say something right now like, “Dude, I'm done, I did the assignment, I did it really well. I should be able to go sit down and stretch. Like there's no need for me to do this.” I didn't feel like I could have that conversation. Because anything slightly askew, any little bit of, like, perceived talking back is going to be misjudged because of the color of the skin.
AMIRA: Right. ‘Cause it's not just that “Oh, you're a sassy gymnast, you're a Black girl. You’re ungrateful, you’re… “
BETTY OKINO: Exactly, exactly. You’re all whatever stereotypes they have already laid on you.
AMIRA: And since gymnastics is almost entirely managed by white people—you get young Black girls training, traveling and sometimes living with white coaches. Coaches who might know them well but don’t necessarily know how to take care of them. Their ignorance can run the gamut between leaving a sixteen-year-old to fend for herself in a busy airport—to violently cutting her hair.
JORDAN CHILES: That amazing coach of mine. [sarcastic] LOL. She always said I had two heads because of how big my poof was. One time I had a competition and I had braids in my hair, and she said that it didn't look professional and she cut them.
[scissors snipping]
AMIRA: She cut your hair?
JORDAN CHILES: She cut my braids, yes.
AMIRA: White folks’ ignorance about Black girls’ hair is going to be a theme throughout this series.
JASMINE SWYNINGAN: Like, if I were to go to a gymnastics meet right now with my hair in braids, probably ten people would pet my hair without my permission.
SOPHINA DEJESUS: I think it was the first time I went to the Ranch – I did my baby hairs and like, someone was like, “Oh, ew, do you use that toothbrush on your teeth, too?! That's so disgusting!”
NIA DENNIS: It definitely took so much time. It took so much time to really find myself and kind of gain confidence in myself because all my friends, you know, all their hair falls down, it doesn’t stick up. Of course, my hair was the talk of the town. And I also went through a hair phase.
AMIRA: Everybody had a hair phase.
NIA DENNIS: We don't have to get into it. But I went through a hair phase too and they witnessed that.
AMIRA: Meanwhile, Jordan’s coach was proud of what she had done.
JORDAN CHILES: She then called my mom and was like, “Gina, um, I cut your daughter's hair and it looks so much better.” And my mom was heated. Yelling at her like, “Don't you ever touch my daughter's hair ever again!! Because....” dadada and like she was just going off and I was like, “Oh my gosh, what's going on?”
AMIRA: See, [laughs] first of all, it's just like on sight.
JORDAN CHILES: [laughs]
AMIRA: But like. I'm just really amazed, Jordan, like it's so hard to receive messages from such a young age about your hair, about bodies, about all of this stuff in a sport that demands a certain type of robotics.
JORDAN CHILES: It was just a very, very tragic moment... like any other athlete. It’s just my coach. Wasn’t expecting to be anything. Thought it was just part of the sport….
AMIRA: Both micro-aggressions—and aggression aggressions—they compound over time. So much so, that they overpower the moments you spend joyfully flying through the air. That joy feels like nothing—just a speck in comparison to the shit you have to deal with on the ground. And feeling like you can’t speak up about it—either because that’s “just the way the sport is” or “because no one will understand or care” —that makes it all even harder to bear.
JORDAN CHILES: How I describe it is I was just in a box looking at black walls. There was no light even above me, down below or on the sides.
AMIRA: In early 2017, Jordan left her coach and tried a new one. But the impact of those bad experiences were starting to show in her gymnastics. She competed well enough, but she didn’t make the roster for any of USAG international meets that year.
JORDAN CHILES: I stopped going to gym because I just couldn't handle it anymore. So I would skip gym. I would tell my parents that I was going one place and ended up going to a different place because it was just too hard. I couldn’t... like, I walked out of practices because I just couldn't handle it anymore at all. So, in that moment in time, I felt like I was living a life that I missed. And so, that's what happened until 2018. World Selection Camp came around and Simone actually gave me a pep talk, and she was just like, “You know what you need to do.” Like, “It's your mind, your body. There's only so much you can do in your life.” And, “If it's you being done or you continuing, it's just whatever you feel.”
AMIRA: And Simone said: “If you decide you want to keep going—why don’t you come train in Houston with me?”
JORDAN CHILES: And so I took all her advice that she gave to me into consideration, and I went back home and I was like, Look...I want to move.
AMIRA: At the time, Jordan was living in Vancouver, Washington. But thinking about moving across the country – away from your family – for a gymnastics dream was pretty normal. Since the 80s, gymnasts had been flocking to Texas to train.
Dianne Durham (Archival): My next step was a big one. That’s when my family and I decided that I would leave Gary and move to Houston to train with Bela.
National Championship Announcer (Archival): To train with Bela Karolyi, a giant in the field of women’s gymnastics. Karolyi, the former Romanian national coach...
BETTY OKINO: All I knew is this man made Nadia an Olympic champion, Mary Lou an Olympic champion and like all the athletes I look up to today. So this is where– this is where I'm supposed to be.
AMIRA: Bela and Marta Karolyi coached Nadia Comaneci to fame in Romania. And Mary Lou Retton to gold in America. They became coordinators of the US National Team at their ranch 70 miles north of Houston—and dictated the course of gymnastics for decades.
Marta Karolyi (Archival): Down to the very, very last stretch. Mental strength will be very, very important.
AMIRA: That’s Marta Karolyi herself back in 2016. She’s speaking in a documentary about the Ranch that aired on NBC. In an interview with VICE for an HBO documentary, elite gymnast Mattie Larson said:
Mattie Larson (Archival): Marta would kind of look around. And she would comment when people would have very little food on their plate and she’d be like, “Eating so well, I see!”
Marta Karolyi (Archival): Some distractions will arise. Push them aside. Good luck with everything.
Team USA (Archival): Thank you Marta, coaches, National staff. Goodbye.
AMIRA: Now, the Karolyis are disgraced.
CBS Anchor (Archival): Some of Larry Nassar’s alleged sexual abuse victims are demanding that the state of Texas take action against two legendary gymnastics coaches. The former gymnasts claim that Bela and Marta Karolyi knew about the abuse and did not try to stop it.
AMIRA: Their careers are attached to an entire era of gymnastics mired in reports of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
Gymnast in Documentary (Archival): I don’t think it’s possible for someone like Larry to get away with doing what he did for twenty plus years if it’s not in a corrupt environment and organization.
AMIRA: Today, Houston is still a destination for gymnasts. But now it’s because of Simone—and the World Champions Centre, a gym her family owns. And the elite team at WCC is almost entirely Black.
Simone Biles (Archival): How rare is it that an entire elite team is Black? And then there’s Olivia!
AMIRA: This Black-ass training space cultivates and sustains gymnasts of all levels, who are in search of a more inclusive gymnastics facility. From Jordan Chiles to nine-year-old Aniyah, who was in the stands with me at the Gold Over America Tour, watching it with her mom.
AMIRA: Do you do gymnastics?
ANIYAH: At WCC
AMIRA: OK at WCC! Yes!
ANIYAH’S MOM: And she’s actually going into a more diverse gym now.
AMIRA: Cause of what?
ANIYAH’S MOM: ‘Cause we just relocated from Wisconsin.
AMIRA: Okay. Girl, did you move for the gym?
ANIYAH’S MOM: Yes.
AMIRA: So Jordan, like Aniyah, uprooted her life to come to Houston.
JORDAN CHILES : So I had told my parents around December of 2018: I want to move. I want to move, I want to go to a place where I know I can be wanted and I can continue my journey because I still believe there's a little light for me left to be able to make this Olympic team. And they were like, “OK!”
[zipper]
AMIRA: After graduating high school the next spring, Jordan packed up and left to train with Simone. Her new coaches, Cecile and Laurent Landi, were immediately impressed. And Jordan started to live life outside of the gym. She started to eat well. She started to smile. And to fall in love with her sport again.
JORDAN CHILES: You know, at the end of the day, it's all about who tells you what and how you want to control your own mind, because that's what you do. You control your own mind. You can't control what others say. You can only control what you do. And that's something that I had to learn. And I found different versions of myself that I wish I found before. And the version that I am today is somebody I wish I was back then. The version I am today is somebody that can speak up, that I can defend themselves. Like, there's a lot of things that I found about myself now that I wish I would have found earlier in life.
AMIRA: In 2021, Jordan won all-around at the Winter Cup in February, came in second behind Simone at Classics in May, and came in third at Nationals in June. At the 2020 Olympic Trials—which were held in 2021 because of the pandemic—Jordan’s name was called as a member of the Olympic team. She dropped to the floor and made a ‘snow angel’ out of the confetti that fell from the stadium ceiling. It was glorious.
Olympic Trials Announcer (Archival): Your team USA!
AMIRA: My favorite part of that was that Jordan could not stop dancing. Or smiling. You see her hitting the whoa and you actually see Simone pulling her away from her private dance party just to get her to pose and settle down for a picture.
JORDAN CHILES: I don’t think a lot of people realized who I am and what I can become. And so showing that in those moments was just amazing thing. I was wanted by those people. And I was just so excited. I was happy that I was going to the next level of what I wanted to become.
NBC Commentator (Archival): It is the women’s Team Final from Tokyo. Team USA looking for their third straight gold medal. You got fourteen members...
JORDAN CHILES: And then! And then Tokyo happened! [laughs]
NBC Commentator (Archival): and we’re just being told by the officials that Simone Biles is out of the competition. And Jordan Chiles is up there, gonna warm up on uneven bars. She’ll replace Simone... Chiles, coming through... It just wasn’t enough in the end... A look at those final standings: the Russians on top of the United States. Great Britain, the bronze medal...
JORDAN CHILES I do have to say Tokyo was the best experience because it's the Olympics, it's being able to show like, OK, where Team USA and all this. I mean, yes, we had some downfalls here and there, but that brought us all back together. Like… three of us who competed. But the fourth one? She supported us. She literally was like our coach. And who can say, yes, Simone Biles was handing me chalk or giving me great advice while I was competing. Like, not a lot of people can say that.
AMIRA: I also think of you coming up like your specific generation is like the tail end of this generation that has basically gone through such upheaval and had to find their voices and speak to collectively to make their voices heard. To call out not just one person, right, but to really call out a system. And to bring light to some of the things that y’all were dealing with. There's a lot of bullshit, right, that comes y’all’s way. And comes Simone’s way. And comes, just, Black girls in the spotlight’s way. But there's also a lot of people out there who can see how tough y'all are and the love you share. And that, I think, is what has also been so inspiring. Right? To watch y'all find yourselves, but find yourselves together.
JORDAN CHILES: Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. It has been – it's been very, very stressful. But you know, I think we all have such huge hearts. I feel like, yes, we get our hearts, broken – bits and pieces – but not a full-on crack. So like, yes, we go through aches and pains and we have to deal with a lot of things. But there's more to us. We're not just athletes-
AMIRA: Exactly.
JORDAN CHILES: -we're also human beings. We also have that side of us to where we have family and friends who can stitch us back together. And we can enjoy those moments of not worrying about what just happened. We're not quitters at all. Like, we don't quit.
[AD]
SIX YEAR OLD 1: I came to see Simone Biles.
G.O.A.T. SPECTATOR 1: Definitely Simone Biles because she’s an amazing gymnast and she’s shown people that Black gymnasts can be great.
G.O.A.T. SPECTATOR 2: I think many girls see that, “Oh, she’s a woman of color and that she’s gotten that far, I can do it too.”
KELLY JONES (Producer): But she’s also not the first, right? So do you know, like the history of Black gymnastics?
G.O.A.T. SPECTATOR 3: Uh, Gabby Douglas was first…
KELLY JONES: Gabby Douglas...
G.O.A.T. SPECTATOR 4: See, we only learned about Gabby and Simone ‘cause that’s the most popular we know. But we didn’t really go back. Cause people didn’t really say anything about the other people.
AMIRA: Today’s generation of Black gymnasts—the next Simones, Gabbys, and Jordans—they follow a path that was actually laid for them forty years ago.
WENDY HILLIARD: So there’s are all these kind of markers. We've always had this long history.
AMIRA: That’s Wendy Hilliard—a rhythmic gymnast who came up alongside the greats in artistic gymnastics in the 1980s. Greats like Dianne Durham, the gymnast we’re going to follow next in our series. Thirty-seven years before Jordan moved to Houston to try to make it to the Olympics, Dianne did the same.
1983 National Championships Commentator (Archival): Dianne Durham, fourteen years old. One routine away from capturing a national championship.
Dianne Durham (Archival): And to me, it showcased to the entire country that a little Black girl from Gary, Indiana could be the best gymnast in the country.
1983 National Championship Commentator (Archival): As you watch the performance of Dianne Durham, keep in mind we are one year away from the Olympic Games. And not in the last fifty years has an American female gymnast won a medal of any kind in the Olympics...
AMIRA: Like Simone, Dianne became a beacon for other Black elite gymnasts of her time—like Joyce Wilborn and Angie Denkins.
ANGIE DENKINS: When we were in the meets my coach and I, we would encourage her. She would do the same on my part. We showed that love, unconditionally and always. And Dianne was like, shit, that was my girl, that was my sister.
JOYCE WILBORN: I was excited because I wanted to be just like them, I was going to be there someday.
WENDY HILLIARD: Dianne was amazing. And every gymnast will tell you that her gymnastics was off the chain. Off the chain.
AMIRA: But just like Jordan, Dianne dealt with bullshit.
Dianne Durham (Archival): As most of you know, things didn't end up the way I wanted them to.
TOM DRAHOZAL: And she had told me at times, she always felt, you know, maybe America wasn't ready for a Black gymnast to be on a Wheaties box.
WENDY HILLIARD: And you talk about times, you know, Dianne could have been the Olympic champion in 1984. How different would have gymnastics been in that, right?
AMIRA: Dianne’s story sets the stage for understanding what Black gymnasts have had to overcome in the last forty years—in order to stand up for themselves against a system that didn’t want them in the first place. Starting with Dianne, this season of American Prodigies will follow the girls and women who transformed gymnastics—who helped move more and more Black gymnasts from the margins to the core—and who found joy there. We’ll consider the impact that making the Olympic team has for the legacy of Black women in the sport:
MONICA SHARP: And I remember at that age being the only little Black girl in my gymnastics class. It wouldn't be until I was about nine when I found out who Dominique Dawes was. And she was just everything to me.
AMIRA: Of course, with great visibility comes great scrutiny:
Gabby Douglas (Archival): A lot had went on and I had made history and then then they were talking about my hair!
SAM SHEPARD: But do we want a bunch of Black girls running into this sport? Is that what we want? Perhaps this sport is not compatible with doing just work for Black women - how could it be?
AMIRA: And sometimes, you have to leave elite gymnastics to find your joy. That can mean retiring... as a teenager. Or it can mean competing in college, where floor routines designed to showcase your personality can go viral.
SOPHINA DEJESUS: I absolutely love that the crowd was cheering with me and screaming, Get a 10!” And I was high fiving them like that energy will always stick with me like. I loved that. That was completely different than elite gymnastics. One hundred percent.
AMIRA: And there are still Black women changing the game in elite gymnastics.
Simone Biles (Archival): I don’t want another young gymnast to experience the horror that I and hundreds of others have endured before, during, and continuing to this day…
AMIRA: And empowering the next generation.
YOUNG GYMNAST: And then I saw this girl named Simone Biles and I was like, “Oh, my God, she's so good. I want to be exactly like her.” But then once I kind of got like a little bit older, I'm like, “Nah, nevermind. I don't want to be like Simone Biles. I want to be as good or better.” [laughs]
JORDAN CHILES: I can't be the next Simone Biles. I can't be the next Dominique Dawes. I can only be the next version of myself.
G.O.A.T. ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Athletica presents Gold Over America Tour.
AMIRA: In the end, you’ll see why it felt so moving to be sitting in Houston in 2021—about to cheer on Simone Biles, the greatest gymnast who ever lived—in a tour she created—in an arena filled with little Black girls – with a crowd of people thrilled to watch Black women fly through the air, and ready to support them when they landed.
AMIRA AT G.O.A.T.: Ok, that was way more emotional than I thought I would be. Jess and I were both crying [laughs]...
CREDITS
AMIRA: This episode of American Prodigies was reported and hosted by me, Amira Rose Davis. Jessica Luther is our story editor. Jessica Bodiford and Kelly Hardcastle Jones are our senior producers. Sound design, mix, and mastering by Camille Stennis.
This episode featured archival audio from ABC, TBS, NBC, the USA Gymnastics Region 5 Hall of Fame, CBS, VICE, HBO, and HOT97.
Isabelle Jocelyn, Kayla Stokes and Jordan Ligons provided production assistance. Fact-checking was done by Mary Mathis and Jessica Luther.
Production coordination by Devin Shepherd.
And we had research help from Shwetha Surendran, Mariam Khan, and Mary Mathis.
Special thanks to the Gold Over America Tour, Danielle Dorfman, and the lazy river at the Marriott Marquis in Houston Texas.
American Prodigies is executive produced by Peter Moses and Jon Yales.
POST CREDITS JOY
AMIRA: OK first: say your name.
NEVAEH: Nevaeh.
AMIRA: And how old are you?
NEVAEH: Five years old-six months.
AMIRA: Who’s your favorite gymnast?
NEVAEH: Simone Biles.
AMIRA: And what’s your favorite thing about gymnastics?
NEVAEH: Beams.
AMIRA: Bean?! Why is beam your favorite thing? Beam is scary…
NEVAEH: Not to me!
AMIRA: Not to you! But what happens, do people sometimes fall off beam?
NEVAEH: Yeah.
AMIRA: But what do they do after they fall off?
NEVAEH: They get back up.
AMIRA: Is that the most important part?
NEVAEH: Yes.
AMIRA: Absolutely.
NEVAEH: I’m actually a little bit scared because I never been to the Olympics where there’s a lot of people.
AMIRA: Yeah, I think it would be a little bit scary. But you know sometimes Simone gets scared. And you know what she does when she’s scared?
NEVAEH: No.
AMIRA: She leans on her friends and her family. And so, it’s ok to be scared – that’s why you have courage.
NEVAEH: Okay.
AMIRA: Okay?
NEVAEH: Can I have a sticker?
AMIRA: Okay. So then you just have to say ‘bye’ to the people.
NEVAEH: Bye.
AMIRA: Bye!