Chapter 4
The night before the men’s all-around final at the Russian Cup, Sasha’s standing on his balcony at the hotel in Penza, staring out across the city and trying not to panic over how important tomorrow is; when Danny calls, he can’t pick up fast enough.
“Hey,” Danny says, and some of the knots in Sasha’s stomach untangle, although he still feels like he might throw up. “How are you doing?”
“I…” Sasha hunches over, holding the phone close; it’s a warm summer night and he can’t stop shivering. “Okay.”
Danny’s nice enough not to call him on his bullshit. “You’re gonna slice and dice ‘em,” he says, and Sasha has no idea what that means, but he wants Danny to keep talking. “Six for six. I’m feeling it.”
Sasha lets out a weak laugh. There’s no other option—he has to hit all six of his routines tomorrow. The Olympics are just over a month away, and the Russian Cup is their last competition before the team gets selected. If he makes any mistakes…
“How is home?” he asks, desperate for a distraction.
Danny exhales, then yawns, even though it’s still morning in California. “It’s been pretty crazy. I’ve had all these interviews, and then it’s, like, trying to see all my friends before I leave…”
Last weekend, Danny had won the American men’s Olympic trials by an almost absurd margin, the rest of the field scrambling for second behind him.
Sasha hadn’t been able to watch, since it wasn’t aired on any Russian channels, but he’d seen some clips on YouTube: Danny blowing kisses to the crowd after every routine, the commentators excitedly predicting an all-around podium finish in Rio.
As Danny talks about the send-off party his mother’s planning, and how much he’s going to miss Buddy and Luna (“I feel like the worst dog dad ever”), Sasha takes several deep breaths and tries not to think of anything else.
He wants to close his eyes and just listen to Danny, but instead he sits on the balcony floor, his back to the railing so he’ll be able to see if Kirill returns early from dinner with his parents.
“…oh, and my mom says good luck, by the way,” Danny says, and Sasha blinks.
“You told her?” he asks, only to regret, a second later, how accusing he sounds.
He thinks Danny noticed, too, because there’s a slight pause before he responds. “Yeah. She wanted to go to breakfast tomorrow, but I told her I was gonna be watching you. Don’t worry,” he adds while Sasha’s still processing this, “I just said I was checking out the competition.”
Something flutters in Sasha’s stomach. “You… you are watching?”
“Yeah, Yulien hooked me up with this, like, VPN thing? I don’t even know. But whatever, I’m gonna stream it.”
Sasha doesn’t have the vocabulary, in Russian or English, to describe how he feels at that moment. If Danny were here, he wouldn’t bother with words at all—he would just grab him and kiss him, and hope Danny understood.
“I mean, I don’t have to,” Danny says, as several seconds pass and Sasha still hasn’t replied. “If you don’t want me to.”
Sasha quickly unsticks his throat. “No, I… I do. Thank you.”
“Okay, sweet. Cause I really wanna see you do the Hartman.”
Sasha smiles, because he wants Danny to see the Hartman, too. It’s not like he’ll ever do it at the Olympics—even if he makes the team, they won’t put him in the pommel horse lineup—so this might be the only chance he has to compete it with Danny watching.
“But you said they’re not gonna announce the team for a few weeks, right?” Danny asks, and Sasha mmhms, his stomach in knots again. “That sucks. Why don’t they just do it at the end of the competition? That’s what we did.”
“Kirill thinks they make us wait because they are…” Sasha pauses, trying to come up with a translation for sadistic assholes. “I don’t know how you say. But we all have to go to Round Lake and train, and they pretend they are not decided. Everyone is very stressed. It is horrible.”
He’d hated the experience in 2012, when he was only hoping to be an alternate; this year, he’s already having nightmares about it.
“I’m sorry.” Danny’s quiet for a moment, and Sasha doesn’t blame him; there’s nothing he could say that would even come close to making it better. “What is it, like a selection committee? Or the coaches?”
“Coaches, yes. But Maxim Obolensky—that is first coach—he has final choice. Then government has to approve.”
The last part is basically a formality—someone from the Russian Olympic Committee signs off on the list—but Sasha has no idea how to explain this in English, so he doesn’t.
“Damn. That’s intense.” Danny pauses again, then asks, “It’s just you and that Felix guy, isn’t it?”
Sasha’s throat tightens, and it’s an effort to force the words out. “Yes. I think so.”
The results of the Russian Championships and the European Championships earlier this year have made it crystal clear: Kirill, Ilya, and Oleg are headed to Rio.
The fourth spot, which the coaches are reserving for a high bar or pommel horse specialist, is likely going to Nikanor Parshikov, their only senior who can reliably score above a 15.
000 on high bar—they’ll need him if they want to be competitive with the Chinese and Japanese teams.
Then there’s that fifth and final spot, a question mark between him and Felix.
“Well, he fell at Euros, right? On pommels?” Danny asks, sounding hopeful.
Sasha remembers how white Felix’s face had been when he’d slid off the horse, the way his hands had shaken as he remounted. If it had been any other year, Sasha would have felt sorry for him. “Yes. But he was better than me at Russian Championships. On high bar, too.”
“Not in the all-around, though,” Danny points out. “And honestly, your pommels are getting pretty close—you’re, like, what, three-tenths lower than him on your D score?”
Except three-tenths is still a lot in gymnastics, a sport where the difference between first place and off the podium can be as little as thousandths.
And Sasha isn’t scoring that much higher than Felix in the all-around; it had been two-tenths in qualifications the other day.
If Coach Maxim wants to prioritize pommel horse and high bar…
“And you can put up a way bigger number on vault,” Danny continues as Sasha squeezes his eyes shut, fighting back a swell of nausea. “Like, if I’m looking at your vault and his pommels—with a fall—I’m picking you, every time. And I’m not just saying that.”
Sasha wishes he could share Danny’s optimism.
But he’s done the same math, over and over—his vault and his all-around, versus Felix’s pommel horse and high bar—and no matter how he looks at the equation, it might as well be a coin toss.
The only unknown variables are Coach Maxim’s inner thoughts… and whatever happens tomorrow.
“Sash? You there?”
It feels like something’s pressing down on him and he can’t breathe, even though he’s outside with nothing but the sky above.
Ever since he was eight years old, watching Alexei Nemov soar over the high bar in Athens—this is what he’s dreamed of, what he’s spent over half his life training for.
Now it’s right in front of him, so close he could graze it with his fingertips, one wrong move and he might never have another chance.
“Danny… I…”
He’s so afraid, he can’t get the words out.
If he doesn’t make the team, it’s not just the last twelve years of his life wasted—it also means he won’t get to see Danny again until…
until… fuck, he doesn’t even know. The next Worlds are in 2017, fall 2017, and that’s assuming they’re both still training.
Lots of athletes retire after the Olympics, either because they’ve achieved their goals or they’ve failed.
“Sasha, you’ve got this.” Danny’s voice wraps around him, steady, keeping him from falling apart. “All you’re doing tomorrow is going out there and showing them everything you’ve already been doing.”
Sasha tries to speak, then just swallows and nods.
“Next time we see each other, it’s gonna be in Rio, okay?”
“Okay,” Sasha manages to whisper.
“Do you want me to stay on the line, or do you need to go to bed?”
“I…” Sasha wants Danny to talk to him until he falls asleep, but he can’t ask for that. “I should go,” he says, glancing at the clock on his phone—Kirill will probably be back soon, and then it’s an early bedtime for both of them. “Thank you. For…”
His gratitude mingles with guilt, because he hadn’t called Danny the night before the Olympic trials. Instead, he’d texted, assuming Danny would be trying to rest. Now he wonders if Danny had hoped he would call, and if he’d been disappointed when Sasha hadn’t.
“Yeah, no problem,” Danny replies, and then he says something Sasha doesn’t catch; it almost sounds like he’s talking in another language.
“What?”
“Boa sorte,” Danny repeats. “It means ‘good luck’ in Brazilian. I mean, Portuguese.”
It’s the first time Sasha’s laughed all week, and when they hang up, he’s surprised by how much lighter he feels.
*
Sasha places fourth at the Russian Cup and doesn’t make the Olympic team.
The selection is announced at Round Lake, after a three-week camp that can only be described as hell, and Sasha stands on the floor, praying to a god he’s not sure he believes in as Coach Maxim reads off the names: Ilya. Kirill. Nikanor. Oleg.
For a heartbeat, he thinks he has it.
And then Coach Maxim says, “Felix.”
Felix, who placed seventh at the Russian Cup. Felix, who scored lower than usual on his pommel horse routine because of a sloppy dismount. Felix, whose knees almost give out when he hears his name, and who stands there, beaming, as something inside of Sasha dies.
Once again, he’s made an alternate.
It’s like someone punching you in the face, then giving you a band-aid for your broken nose. Sasha’s left reeling, his relief at being able to see Danny this year only a tiny, flickering point of consolation as everything else goes dark.