you see me rolling up, pops, you step aside

some sports feels

sometimes i think about how gym fandom was neutral to or liked gabby douglas back when they felt comfortable writing her off as an uneven bars specialist headcase who might suddenly crash at any moment on anything beyond bars

and then she showed up in early 2012 looking like a world beater and they still wrote her off and talked about how jordyn had an asthma attack so that’s why gabby outscored her not like gabby had done that at multiple camps before and put up fucking 63s and shit and they talked about what would happen in london because obviously her scores (5TH IN THE WORLD) when she was injured and not doing full difficulty at worlds in 2011 would be the exact same scores she would get in london when neither of those things was the case

and when she won trials she was suddenly so overscored

and when she went into olympic prelims and flubbed floor but still came in third in the world and made fucking beam finals it was like their minds still couldn’t conceive of it

because oh where did she come from (let’s forget about how people had been watching her since 2010 when she was on national television at the nastia liukin cup) and no one just goes from falling half a dozen times at nats to doing one event at worlds to olympic all around champion in less than a year that just doesn’t happen and we haven’t been predicting her for london since she was 12 so how can this beeeee

then she killed team finals (did every fucking apparatus, contributed a full third of the team score, didn’t have the low score on any event)

and she killed all around finals (led from the beginning and through every fucking event never a single moment in doubt)

and suddenly gabby is the worst, gabby is so arrogant, oh she doesn’t even look emotional about it, does she even understand what this means, did she even really want it, i feel nothing at this win, this is so disappointing, she’s a flash in a pan, this just feels Wrong, where did she come from, who does she think she is

who does she think she is snatching up that gold medal from our white faves we’ve been obsessing over since they were 12 (she was great at 12 too but who cares about little black girls and their potential) without even pushing the limits of her ability (because she did her SAFE routines is the thing; because she’s capable of so much more)

and months and months later they’re still trying to pick apart her performance and “prove” that komova ACTUALLY won and obviously gabby is the worst aa champion ever with her huge ability across all four apparatuses and her power married with flexibility and excellent form

and they’re still going IT FEELS SO UNREAL THIS JUST DOESN’T HAPPEN 

as if the fact that she went so far so fast, the fact that she took her chance when it was there even though she should have been too young and too inexperienced, the fact that when someone actually gave her top-tier training she blew everyone away with a smile on her face like it wasn’t shit is a mark AGAINST HER

because her level of greatness being legitimately beyond their conception of how things work somehow makes her NOT a great but an anomaly

i think about all of that sometimes and i laugh and i laugh

and i hope gym fandom stay pressed forever and i hope she gets back in the gym in may like she said and i hope she spends the rest of this quad stomping on people and goes back to rio and repeats and shows them all one more time that how people THINK things are supposed to work has no bearing whatsoever on her