Olympic Memories of a Little Girl

As far back as I can remember, I’ve loved watching the Olympics. Summer or Winter, I had my favorite sports to watch. During the Winter Olympics, I watched Ice Skating, and during the Summer Games, I watched Women’s Gymnastics.

Each Olympic year, my family watched the athletes compete. I think most of the time it was on Wide World of Sports. At least, that’s what I remember. After every day’s competition, I would go out on my front yard and pretend I was Dorothy Hamill, spinning and skating and jumping, doing what I thought were intricate turns and routines, but it was nothing more than a little girl running around the yard. That’s the beauty of pretending. I didn’t really know how they got their scores, so I made up my scores. I was never perfect, but that didn’t matter. I was having fun with my friends, the same way we pretended to have horses and ride them all over.

The Summer Olympics were my favorite, however. Women’s Gymnastics would come on and I was glued to the TV. Watching Nadia Comeneci fly through the air—oh, I so wanted to do that. Although she wasn’t the first one I watched, I’m sure, she is the one I remember the most. Everyone wanted to be like Nadia. I would do the same thing as I did for the ice skating—go out onto my front yard and do my routines, pretending to be Nadia.

I took a gymnastics class at one of the local parks during one summer with my niece, and another neighborhood girl. We’d do forward rolls, backward rolls, cartwheels, round-offs, backbends, and walk-overs. We put together a routine with music for the end of class. We chose the theme to the Rockford Files for some reason. When the last day of class came, though, the instructor who had our music didn’t show up, so we did our routine in silence. I didn’t get over on my walk-over the first time, but I tried again and managed to do it that time.

I always wanted to take a real gymnastics class. I’m not sure why I never did. Maybe I didn’t bug my parents enough to go, taking the first “No” for the answer (as kids were supposed to do), or maybe I didn’t have the motivation, or it could have been money. I don’t know.

My niece went on to take gymnastics at the YMCA for a few years. I went along to watch quite a few times. I loved watching her do the things I wanted to do. I took gymnastic classes every chance I could in school. In high school, we didn’t have a team, but one of the PE teachers taught a semester of gymnastics. I loved the uneven bars the best. The teacher thought I was pretty good and was about to start teaching me how to do backflips but we didn’t get to it before the semester ended.

As always, each time the Summer Olympics came on, I was watching. I started to notice that the U.S. finally started getting recognition in gymnastics. Shawn Johnson, Nastia Liukin, Kerri Strug, and Mary Lou Retton became household names. I was way past the prime age of a gymnast by that time, so my dream of doing gymnastics started to fade.

I still enjoy watching gymnastics, and I cheer on the “older” girls (Catalina Ponor from Romania at 28 years old, and Oksana Chusovitina at 41 years old from Russia) as well as the U.S. team. I enjoy watching them all and live vicariously through them.