Chapter 21: World Tour

OF COURSE, my time in Japan was not all working out, but my typical training day was from seven in the morning until seven at night, with breaks for rest, water, and nourishment. I got a day off and went straight to training the next day. On that day off, my hosts made sure I saw the sights around Osaka. Their daughter, Mio, escorted me to clubs and karaoke. I met other athletes and civilians. I didn’t participate in any drinking contests with my new friends, but they understood, even when we went to a club.

I didn’t feel so short in Japan. At five-five, I was only a couple of inches shorter than the average man in Japan. The only place I’d consistently been around short men was at the academy or in competition. Everyplace else, guys seemed to tower over me.

It had been seven months since I was last in regular training. I think I must not have been doing enough to maintain my strength. At any rate, I could feel new strength flowing into my muscles and I began to see the results in my exercises. My iron cross on the still rings was perfectly parallel to the floor. I could hold the position for seven seconds with a neutral expression on my face.

That’s another of the fine points of the differences between men’s and women’s gymnastics. No matter how hard or stressful the exercise is, men are supposed to maintain a neutral expression on their faces and not show the strain. Women in floor exercises are supposed to smile and be flirtatious. They all smile when they land their vault and uneven bars, no matter how serious and fierce their expression is during the performance. Guys aren’t supposed to show emotion or stress in their exercises. Floor exercises for women included dance moves and music. Balance beam had a section of the code of points devoted to dance moves and was sometimes accompanied with music.

Of course, when I was working on acrobatic gymnastics with Tara, it was a whole different world. It was hard to tell where the dance ended and the acrobatics began. Smiles were fine if they went with the music and the storytelling. Our code of points included dancing and showing emotion.

I worked hard, made friends, learned a little Japanese. Six months went by incredibly quickly and, after a visit home, I found myself on a plane to Hong Kong. While The People’s Republic of China owned Hong Kong, the rules there were significantly less restrictive. This was the result of the area being a British colony for a hundred years before being returned to China. Nonetheless, one of China’s top gymnastic coaches had set up a training center in the densely populated city.

Mr. Chen welcomed me in much the same way Mr. Kimura had, though we used a translator when working together. He promised to make my vault a record-breaker.

It nearly broke me, as well.

I cannot say how many times I came out of my vaults in something far less than a stuck landing. Often, on my face or back. When I asked about a spotter, Mr. Chen said, through our translator, “It is a soft landing place. Protect your own head and neck.”

I had my orders.

After four months in Hong Kong, I flew back to Minneapolis for my niece’s birthday.

“Good grief!” Mikey said when she hugged me. “What have they done to you in Asia? You’re bigger and stronger than you were before the Olympics!”

“I’ve been working hard,” I said. “Every trainer wants to add their own layer of muscle to my body. But they all insist that I still remain flexible. Now where’s my little niece, PJ?”

I was presented with the baby and just spent a long time looking at her and then playing with her on the floor as she showed me all her tricks.

Over the course of the next few days, I taught her to turn a somersault on the floor. She was barely standing up, so I couldn’t teach her to do a full flip. It was cute and natural for her to tumble, though. She put her hands on the floor and walked her feet up until she’d made a bridge. Then I helped her tuck her head between her hands and go on over. She thought it was great fun.

“If she grows up to be a gymnast, I don’t think I’ll ever forgive you!” Mikey said.

“Tumbling is a good exercise. Becoming a gymnast requires more hours in a day than any smart person would have,” I answered. “There’s no way to study and dedicate the hours needed for training. I got by on the bare minimum of both.”

“What you did was the minimum? And you still qualified for the Olympics?” Mom asked.

“You have to remember there are ten times as many girls competing for those five spots as there are boys.”

“What’s your next move?” Dad asked. “Competitions coming up?”

“No, not really. I mean there are competitions I was in two or three in Japan and one in Hong Kong, but I’ve been out of the country for almost a year. I resigned my position on Team USA, so any competition I go to now will be as an independent.”

“So, where are you going next?” Mom asked.

“I don’t know if you remember meeting Gerhardt Bohnert when I competed at the European Invitational. He’s invited me to come to Switzerland to train for a while. I think I’ll take him up on it.”

“Meaning you already have your ticket,” Mom snorted. “When do you leave?”

“I thought I’d stick around until after my birthday. The company down in Chicago would like to film me on the rings and vault to use in a new series of advertisements,” I said. “I understand they have a new uniform they want me to wear while training abroad.”

“Well, we have you for a few weeks, then,” Dad said.

“So, tell me about your love life,” Mikey said when I visited her at her home instead of her coming to Mom and Dad’s.

“That’s kind of personal,” I snorted.

“Well, you knew every detail of my love life,” she said. “It kept me honest. I had to tell Rob about everything from my past—even the attempted rape at that party down in Bloomington. I couldn’t risk something coming up about a boy by accident.”

“How’d he take it?”

“He married me. I’m really past the days of wanting anything other than the guy I married,” she said. “Now spill it. A cute Asian girl got your eye?”

“I admit, there was a girl in Japan I hung out with sometimes. It was nothing serious, though. Everyone knew I was there temporarily and no one wanted to get involved seriously.”

In fact, Mio had been my hosts’ daughter. I’d been reluctant to get involved with her because I didn’t want to lose my lodging. It was almost one of those ridiculous anime settings where I was the boy trying to fend off the beautiful ‘sister’ in the house. The second time we’d been out to a club on a Friday night and she crawled in bed with me afterward, I realized how ridiculous the whole thing was and decided to just enjoy it.

It wasn’t a regular thing—well, maybe most Friday nights—but we did have some fun. Turned out she was kind of using me to get another boy interested in her and I got out of Osaka just in time to avoid a conflict.

“You shouldn’t avoid girls just because you aren’t going to be there a long time. You’re almost twenty-five years old. You shouldn’t have to live without a little company now and then.”

“You know, I’m working my tail off. The training I’ve been on doesn’t leave a lot of time for finding and dating a girl. Mostly, the only girls I meet are in the gym, and they’re in the same boat I am. They work from sun-up to sundown. Everyone is too tired to do anything after we practice. And, I’m not really interested in getting tangled up with someone yet. I still...”

Mikey understood without me having to say it. I was still emotionally attached to Tara. If I made love to a girl, it just reminded me again that Tara was out there and might have a new guy. She never posted a relationship status on her social media, so I didn’t know. I never posted one, either.

The flight to Zurich wasn’t bad. I took off in the evening from Minneapolis, arrived in Iceland early in the morning with just enough time to change planes and take off for Zurich. The total trip took a little over ten hours, but with the time zone changes, the clock showed about eighteen hours elapsed.

My host was waiting for me at the airport and drove directly to a pleasant apartment in town. Inge was a single woman about five or ten years older than me. She lived alone and had a spare bedroom she’d often used to house gymnasts who came to train. She made it clear that her duty as a host ended at providing a room. I had kitchen privileges as long as I cleaned up after myself. She gave me a key and disappeared from the apartment while I got settled in.

The next morning, I followed my instructions to get from the apartment to the gym and spent the next three months under Herr Bohnert’s instruction primarily on the parallel bars and pommel horse. Of course I was also given coaching on the other apparatuses. My gym time was paid for by my teaching several classes of young athletes, both boys and girls, each day.

Herr Bohnert made it clear that as I taught, I was to pay attention to fundamentals, and that I was then to apply those fundamentals in my own training. It was an interesting concept and I discovered several important bits that I’d let slide in my training as I became more advanced. I guess it is true of gymnastics as much as it is of other subjects, that the best way to learn is to teach.

At the end of June, I bade farewell to the Swiss and took a leisurely train trip to Sofia, Bulgaria. That was where things changed drastically for me.

I arrived in Bulgaria the first week of July 2030. I stayed much longer than I planned. Mostly, because of my lovely host.

I thought the arrangement was a little strange. I dragged my bags from the train station about a mile or so over cobblestones into town to a secure apartment building. I called my host and discovered once again that I had a woman with an extra room to let. Unfortunately, she was at work and could not get free for a while. I found a restaurant and had a nice meal of moussaka with a glass of dark beer. I gathered that the moussaka was a Bulgarian adaptation of a popular Greek dish. All I cared about was that it was delicious. It was a rare thing for me to drink anything alcoholic, but I’d been on trains for two days with a couple of layovers and little time to eat or drink.

Teodora met me at the apartment at eight in the evening and conducted me to a top (6th) floor apartment. She was a charming woman about my own age. I found she worked in a tech industry startup company and the hours were often long. She led me upstairs to my room, a fairly large empty space with windows that opened to a rooftop. There was really nothing in the room but a single mattress and springs on the floor and a small dresser. She said to make myself at home and come downstairs to the kitchen for a cup of tea.

There wasn’t much to do. The bed was made and it took about ten minutes to put my clothes in the dresser. I couldn’t complain, really. I would pay 30 Bulgarian leva a day for the room, which was only about $17. When I got to the kitchen, Teodora showed me around, including where tea and coffee lived. The tea was bags and the coffee was instant. But it was nice hospitality. We sat at the table and chatted over the cups of tea she made and she took it upon herself to instruct me in the Bulgarian language.