Chapter 66 2018
“Just go out there and do what you do best,” Botan said, clasping my hands over the wall of the kiss-and-cry box in the Gangneung Ice Arena in Pyeongchang, South Korea. “You’ve got this.”
Because Meryl had married Elwood six months earlier and Elwood was still president of US Figure Skating, she thought it best to bow out as my sidelines coach. Enough hoopla already surrounded me, and she didn’t want to add to it with any sort of appearance of impropriety.
I was happy for Meryl. Elwood made her laugh, and she was happier than I’d ever seen her. It was her fourth marriage. His third. I don’t think either believed it would be forever, but they were determined to have a grand old time while it lasted. I hoped they were wrong and stayed together.
The press was abuzz that I was no longer skating for Team USA.
Once again, they assumed my actions were civically motivated when they were nothing of the sort.
I was skating for no other reason than to prove to myself I could do it and to fulfill the dream I’d had since I was a child.
And I was skating for Profe, who always believed I was going to be the greatest figure skater in the world.
And in part, I skated for a rabbit. Which, of course, was the hardest part to explain, even to myself.
But the truth was, the hurt little girl from all those years ago continued to live in my soul, and I was determined not to let Bart write the ending to my story.
I was going to write my own ending, for myself and Profe and Nick and Dylan and Ivy.
“What a statement she’s making with this bold and empowered move,” Maria Lindsey, the principal NBC figure skating commentator, said.
“How brave of her to turn her nose up at the country she believes violated the human rights of her mentor and to stand up against injustice toward immigrants in this way.”
I paid the hoopla no mind and turned down every interview request.
“Skate clean and have fun,” Botan said.
He was positively lit up. It was impossible not to be.
The crowd was chanting my name. Many of them had come specifically for me, to watch what would likely be the final performance of my career.
For two years, since making the decision to return to the ice, he’d helped me train relentlessly.
He’d watched me shed blood, sweat, and tears.
We’d done everything we could to prepare, and now it was time to put on one last show and enjoy it.
“Patch! Patch! Patch . . .”
I’d nailed my short program the day before, and I was going into the long program in fourth, which put me in solid contention for a medal.
Thanks to having two triple axel combos in my program along with the Patch Catch, my technical start value was higher than any female skater in Olympic history.
Which meant if I skated clean, and the judges scored me fairly, I even had a shot at gold.
“Next to skate, Olympic athlete from Somalia, Patch” boomed over the loudspeakers.
I gave Botan’s hands a squeeze and skated away, the beads of my wonderful outfit swinging against my hips.
I waved to the audience as I circled the rink.
The applause was thunderous, and I soaked it in.
There were a large number of Somalis in the stands, including Boodo, Astur, Tiny, and Diamond, and an almost equal number of Mexicans.
Some held signs with Profe’s face on them.
He is here with you. Mr. Jeffries and Coach Lee had made the trip.
And of course, Esma and Heinrich were there.
They had competed the week before and placed fourth.
Kai was deployed in Afghanistan, where things were really heating up, so he couldn’t make it, but he’d been texting me nonstop for a week. I’d gotten his last text at two thirty in the morning as I was pacing my hotel room.
You’re going to do great. Get some sleep!!!
I laughed and forced myself to climb back under the covers, feeling as if I’d been given a warm glass of milk and patted on the bum and sent back to bed.
Dylan sent his support in a long email the week before.
It was a stunning recollection of the journey I’d taken to get to that moment that brought tears to my eyes.
He’d become quite the writer over the past few years.
His emails, while infrequent, were thoughtful and expressive, as if he took a long time considering his words before hitting send.
He wrote about the first time he saw me and about how hitting me in the face with the basketball might have been the greatest thing he’d ever done. He ended it with:
. . . some people are born for greatness.
Others create it. The second is so much more difficult—distinction earned through tenacity few possess.
Unwittingly just by being you, a girl relentlessly chasing a dream, you’ve managed to become an example to so many—the face of what it means to be different and the symbol of what it means to succeed against the odds.
Skate your heart out next week and show the world what you’ve got.
The jewelry doesn’t matter. No amount of gold or fanfare has a chance against the illusions of the mind. Enjoy the moment. You deserve it.
Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!
Dylan
Knowing it was the last time I would compete in front of an audience, I prolonged the moment, breathing the icy air deep into my lungs and looking up at the Olympic rings on the wall as I skated to the center of the ice.
The audience murmured when I took my starting pose, my back deliberately to the judges and my smile beaming at the audience in the less expensive seats, the rows high in the back where most of the Somalis and Mexicans sat.
It was the final four minutes of my career, the final countdown to the end of the dream I’d worked toward for more than half my life, and I was determined to make the most of it.
The music started, and for a full six seconds, I did not move.
I’d chosen the crazy cool song “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson, and the bright notes ricocheted throughout the arena, bouncing off the enormous steel ceiling and crystalline ice.
I felt the anticipation, a united holding of breath as the audience waited, and finally, when the note I was waiting for sounded, I came alive.
The audience laughed as I hoped they would when I started to breakdance, my body herking and jerking as if my limbs were made of rusted metal. I’d only decided to change the opening the day before when yet another commentator referred to my skating as “robotic.”
“It’s like watching an automaton mechanically executing a series of movements, and while I might agree that athletically it’s impressive, it isn’t moving. And figure skating, above all, should move you.”
The music shifted, becoming more melodic, and I morphed with it, my body liquefying to molten lava as I sailed around the rink.
I flew with enormous speed and ticked off the required elements as if reciting the ABC’s—check, check, check.
The cold frosted my teeth, and my heart soared with the same joy I felt when I was nine and Meryl had pulled me in my oversize skates across Black Hollow Pond.
I was not angry or defiant or sad. I was just a girl flying across the ice.
As I went into my final pass, the thought of standing on the podium flashed briefly in my mind, but the notion was fleeting, my brain going white as I jabbed my toe into the ice for the Patch Catch.
I whipped my leg down a fraction slower than I’d hoped and barely got my blade beneath me.
I let out a yip of relief followed by a high-pitched giggle, and the audience went wild.
“Patch! Patch! Patch . . .” And I heard Boodo, somewhere in the crowd, screaming, “Go, Dhoola, go!”
All that was left was to glide to the center and take my final pose.
I skated past the judges, deep frowns of disapproval on several of their faces, and perhaps that’s why I did it, or perhaps I’d planned on doing it all along.
It’s hard to know, history tending to have a way of rewriting itself into more heroic versions of the past. Whatever the case, in the final act of the final skate of my career, I threw myself backward into a fully laid-out backflip, the exact move the great Surya Bonaly performed at the 1994 Olympics that disqualified her from the competition.
I landed it perfectly and glided to a stop with my back once again to the judges and my smile beaming at the people who loved me, all of them on their feet whooping and stomping and hollering up a storm.
Lungs heaving, I skated to the kiss-and-cry box, where Botan stood, his mouth hung open and his black eyes wide in disbelief.
I reached up and took his cheeks between my hands.
“Thank you,” I said. “For everything.”
I put on my skate guards—the same ones Heinrich had given me all those years ago—and, with the thunderous applause at my back, walked into the tunnel, the smile still on my face and cloaked in the thick satisfaction of knowing I’d done something perfectly right, exactly as I’d wanted.