Special Episode: American Prodigies Preview

In this episode, Jessica Luther and Amira Rose Davis preview their upcoming miniseries about Black gymnasts on the next season of American Prodigy from Blue Wire.

This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website wizard. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.

Transcript

Jessica: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. I'm Jessica Luther, and today I'm joined by my co-host, Dr. Amira Rose Davis. 

Amira: Hi!

Jessica: You’re hearing this, it's releasing on Tuesday, January 11th. We'll be returning to our regular episodes as you know them next week. But for now we wanted to take this opportunity, this space in the calendar, to talk to you about a project that Amira and I have been working on for the last…Eight months? [laughs]

Amira: Uh, eight months. [laughs] 

Jessica: So, if you are not familiar, Blue Wire – the podcast network that Burn It All Down is on – they have a series called American Prodigy. The first season was about Freddy Adu, the soccer player. The second season was Ken Griffey Jr. I feel like I don't need to tell people who that is!

Amira: The baseball player. [laughs] 

Jessica: The baseball player. And the host of the third season of American Prodigy – which, we'll tell you a little bit about that title in a second – is our own Dr. Amira Rose Davis, and I'm helping to produce on the back end. And just right at the top, I want to give a shoutout to Kelly Jones and Jessica Bodiford, our two audio producers that we're working with. 

Amira: Woo!

Jessica: The show will release sometime in February. We'll let you know as soon as we lock down that date. Amira, please tell us, what is the third season of American Prodigy going to be about?

Amira: Yes. Well, from the get-go, I will tell you that it's not American Prodigy, but rather it's American Prodigies, and that's because we are spending the entire season looking at Black girls in gymnastics. So, we will be talking through many stories – some trailblazers, some superstars, some folks you don't know, some little girls, everybody in between. But we're going to talk about gymnastics, and we're going to talk about what it means to be a Black girl in this sport.

Jessica: Can you tell me…I want to get into specifics in a second, to tell you guys a little bit more about what, like, the real things that they are going to hear here, but like you pitched this, this was your idea. Why did you want to do this topic on this series?

Amira: Yeah, I mean, I think that…I’m going to bring you into it and give you credit where it should absolutely go and not let you write yourself out of this narrative too, because it really was this kind of group thing. So, way back, actually a year ago, we talked about doing American Prodigy centered on Gabby Douglas, and we had a lot of ideas there and a lot of themes that we were interested in – symbol, injury, success, media scrutiny, all of these things.

Jessica: Disposability.

Amira: Disposability. And anybody who knows my work knows that I really do a lot with Black girls in sport, around symbol, around visibility and around disposability. So, things that really drew me to Gabby's story. And in the process of doing that, Jessica Luther was like, isn't every gymnast a prodigy though? Because every story we were getting of folks were occurring when they were 8, when they were 9, when they were 11, when there were 16. And so really kind of sitting with Jess's amazing point there about what it meant to be a prodigy and what it meant to be in gymnastics…And as we thought about that framework and we continued to think of Gabby’s story, we started interviewing other Black girls in gymnastics to kind of fill it out, and everybody's story was at once so compelling, and they also all overlapped and intersected and reverberated. Sometimes because they were competing with each other. Sometimes it was they were coming up right after, or they were pulling the next person up.

But people who didn't even know each other, right? So, we're talking people who were elite gymnasts and people who, you know, stopped competing at level eight, all had very, very similar stories about what it meant to be the only Black girl in the gym, or what it meant to love a sport and then really grow disillusioned with it because of the racial politics and the other kind of things that go along with gymnastics. And I think one of the conclusions we started to really see is that gymnastics in general is exacting, whether it’s mental, emotional, physical anguish. There's a lot. And we know, and we've covered on this show some of the structural institutional issues with gymnastics in the United States, but also just on an individual level, there was a lot there. And then when you took that and you layered onto it the micro-aggressions, just regular-ass aggressions about being the only Black girl in these spaces and about all of these kinds of racial politics, it just felt like there was an opportunity to really give space for these voices that we oftentimes don't hear, unless we're kind of celebrating it in a one dimensional way. 

And I think that that was really the guiding light here, is just the premise of the questions we've heard about and scrutinized gymnastics through Netflix or, you know…Well, Netflix movies too, from documentaries, even Lifetime movies, things like Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, things like that. Like, we've done that work. And we've never done it centered on a Black girl in this sport. And I just started by asking, does it look different? What does it look like? What's there? And then we got to work.

Jessica: And no one that listens to Burn It All Down will be surprised by this, but Amira is an amazing interviewer. And so we had just had a slew of amazing interviews. But one of the things that's been really amazing for me through this whole process is I came into it and I knew Gabby, I had watched Gabby Douglas…Obviously Simone Biles is going to be part of this. You can't tell this story without her. And then for me, ’96 was such a touchstone in Dominique Dawes, but I've figured out that I don't really know much about any of these people, and I certainly did not know the history of Black girls in gymnastics. Like, I would like to walk our listeners through just the basic framework. So, we'll have our intro episode starring an Olympian, Ms. Jordan Chiles!

Amira: Woo hoo!

Jessica: But then tell us about the next six episodes. They will each feature a different…Will focus on, perhaps is the best way to say it, a different Black gymnast. 

Amira: Absolutely. So, yeah, structurally each week we'll be focused on another Black gymnast. We move semi-chronologically and we also move thematically. And so you'll have one person kind of being the lead, if you will, of that story that week. But other voices are going to be layered into that. And so obviously I'm a historian, so it was really important to start with some of those historical roots of Black girls in the sport. And to do so we had to dig into the life of Dianne Durham, who was a trailblazer, and who of course recently passed, around this time last year. We worked with her family; our producer Kelly went to the memorial. And we also talked to Black girls who were in the sport in the 80s and in the early 90s, that competed alongside and just after Dianne as well. And so that first episode will be her story, will be a story that features people like Joyce Wilborn and Angie Denkins, who, by the way, is probably my favorite person.

Jessica: Like, if you listen to this season for no other reason, you just have to hear Angie, like, it's just…

Amira: Angie's amazing.

Jessica: Her energy comes through full force in the audio.

Amira: Absolutely. And then of course, Wendy Hilliard, who was a rhythmic gymnast, but was a contemporary of the folks on the artistic side and now runs the Wendy Hilliard Gymnastics Foundation in New York, and is really influential in the gymnastics scene. And putting all of their stories together gives us the lay of the land right at a really critical time in gymnastics. And it's really compelling to dig into their stories and to talk to them now, those who I was able to talk to who are still alive – Joyce and Wendy and Angie – because they're all living with the scars of gymnastics in a myriad of ways. And so that's where we start. We start with those early barrier breakers, and we go back to the 80s and we have some fun in the 80s, and honoring the life of Dianne Durham.

Jessica: Yeah. And then we jump to the early 90s, and this is one of our great interviews, Amira talked with–

Amira: Yes! The one and only Betty Okino, who, by the way, is my birthday twin. [Jessica laughs] Literally. Like, I told…I forget who was producing that call, but I was like, “I have a secret question.” And no producer ever wants to hear that you have a secret question that they can't know, and you're going to start the interview with it. But I really just wanted to ask Betty if she was born on June 4th. So, me and of course Tressa, our wonderful producer for Burn It All Down, and Betty Okino all share a birthday of June 4th.

Jessica: Birthday triplets.

Amira: We're triplets. Me and Betty had the best time. We both have a kind of very similar energy, and we talked about some hard shit, but we did so through a lot of laughter as well. And I mean, obviously Betty is just amazing, and talking about her journey through gymnastics, the work she does now, her time away from the sport, why the hell she was like, fuck gymnastics.

Jessica: Yeah. She just stopped. 

Amira: She stopped.

Jessica: She said, what? She didn't see Gabby?

Amira: She didn’t see Dominique. Yeah. She was like, I wasn't watching. I'm done.

Jessica: That’s wild. I mean, she went to the Olympics in ’92 – Károlyi student, the whole deal.

Amira: She did everything. And I think my favorite thing about Betty was really documenting her own personal journey and her own relationship with the sport, because it has changed even as recently as the past few years.

Jessica: That’s a theme in the show. 

Amira: It's absolutely a theme. I think that you should know Betty, her mom is Romanian, and so she came into gymnastics with a very interesting relationship to ideas about power and authority and training, and yet she wasn't seen as this, like, epitome of Comăneci, because she was Black. And so navigating that while she was literally actually Romanian was very interesting and reverberates to today in terms of her relationship with the sport. And so I had the best time talking to Betty and, you know, those early 90s, bringing some of those other voices we've already introduced, and also talks about really the rise of the people in power that we've come to know as people in power – the Károlyis of course, the rise of USAG and the control of the sport. We also examine through Betty’s story to get the institutional structure that's going to guide us into the 21st century in the sport.

Jessica: Right. And which is a total, like, a perfect setup for episode four, which is Dominique Dawes, ’96, the moment that USA Gymnastics hits its stride. 

Amira: Bursts onto the scene.

Jessica: Yeah, where you can’t…It's like the difference between, you know, night and day here with the win in Atlanta. And so we'll be talking about Dominique.

Amira: And Dominique is so interesting because she is like the go-to person. When we ask people their early memories, when we ask gymnasts and laypeople, Dominique, Dominique, Dominique, and it's all centered on ’96. Dominique competed in '92, and she competed in 2000. 

Jessica: That was new information for me! So if you're listening and you're like, what? I have felt that multiple times. [laughs]

Amira: And so what's so interesting about getting to explore Dominique's career is really about this, like, how has she become such a symbol of Black girls in the sport? And so many people named her. But I was really curious if people…

Jessica: Do they know her?

Amira: What was the next sentence about her, right? And so part of that is this quest, is this journey to know and find out more, beyond this figurehead of Black girls in the sport. And to think about ’92 and to think about why ’96? And to think about 2000, and to think about her own separation from the sport and the gym she runs now. And, you know, I think that it's a very particular kind of exploration. There’s, you know, a lot of great voices, including the episodes that raise a lot of questions…Just, it's kind of like my, “Where's Dominique?” Who's Dominique beyond the Dominique Dawes? And so that's what we'll be doing there.

Jessica: And I just appreciate this episode in particular, because it really has pushed me to think about that. Like, Dominique is my person, when I think back. I mean, ’96 was so formative for me as like a 15 year old. And I don't have a second…I didn’t – I now would have a second sentence! But when we started this, I wouldn't have had one, which is kind of wild. Like, that really made me step back and reassess. Episode five then, of course, is the great Gabby Douglas.

Amira: And this was such a treat to me, because obviously when me and Jess started having these conversations about this, it started with Gabby. For me, Gabby, Gabrielle, was my version of Dominique. I was just slightly too young in ’96 to really have Dominique resonate, but Gabby really did. And the thing about Gabby of course is her ascension and how she was disposed of, the scrutiny that came with the spotlight, and that feeling that she kinda clawed her way to the top of the sport and nobody wanted her there, right? Like, she was this outsider and she'd taken Jordyn Wieber's spot and she didn't deserve…And I think part of it is that it resonated so much with me personally, just being a Black woman, and with a lot of Black women I knew as well.

And so part of the joy of that episode is just calling on other Black women who are specialists, friends of the show – Sam Sheppard, Courtney Cox, and other specialists, other voices – people like Ebee Price, who was an alternate in 2012 with Gabby. And just to reflect on media, on that scrutiny, on what it means to be an outsider, what it means to leave your family, what it means to have narratives about your family just going and going and going around you, and to have your utility feel very conditional when you're kind of pushed to the side four years later. And there's a lot to unpack there. We do a lot with that episode.

Jessica: Gabby is so interesting because, I mean, Simone has a level of fame that I think just, you know, it's so straight up in the stratosphere, but I feel like Gabby is the Black gymnast that we talk the most about, right?

Amira: Yeah. She becomes a conduit, right?

Jessica: Oh, yes. So much.

Amira: For these conversations about hair, about dancing…

Jessica: And I'm going to take Amira's line, like, she is the Venus Williams to Simone’s Serena. Like, she really created the space that allowed Simone to not...Not that she hasn't faced scrutiny for being a Black woman, Black girl in the sport, certainly. But Gabby certainly softened the edges.

Amira: Yeah. Well, and she became a foil, right? She deflected a lot of critique on Simone because Simone could be positioned as a foil for her, in ways similar to Serena and Venus, which of course then you see kind of collapsing this past Olympics. But the other thing you saw was people actually revisiting Gabby in this conversation about mental health. So, it was really a lot to dive into in that episode, but to me it is really the heart of what compelled me in the series in the first place, and we get into a lot of that there.

Jessica: Episode six, though, I think is one where people…They might have an idea of these two gymnasts. This is one where we focus on two gymnasts, because you probably watched their viral floor routine when they were a UCLA gymnast. But it is such a fun–

Amira: And hard. [laughs]

Jessica: And yeah, a hard episode, but it's just…I love it so much. Will you tell us about these two gymnasts that you talked to for episode six? 

Amira: So, one of the things coming off of Gabby's episode is that there's a lot of people competing right around the time of her and a few years later, Black girls in the sport who were just at that elite level but didn't go to the Olympics, usually because of an injury. And what they did is they found themselves in college, and while they were in college they reinvented music, floor routines. We know, because we started seeing these routines go viral, and then they would show up on Ellen and all of a sudden it's just been, you know, a thing. And so I went to talk to two of them. Sophina DeJesus, who really kind of kicked off this moment, and then of course Nia Dennis, who just finished out at UCLA, whose most recent routine was like an ode to Black Lives Matter, and was just beautiful.

So I talked to both of them about their journey from elite gymnastics, about injury, about college, about UCLA in particular and what it meant to be in that space, how they found themselves and their voices, how they overcame and continue to heal and overcome some mental health concerns, physical concerns as well. And then the real treat is that I talked to both of their moms as well, who had very different approaches to keeping their daughters safe in the sport. And part of what was so important and also deeply frustrating was seeing the length that both parents went through, Deetra Dennis and Maria DeJesus, to protect their girls in the sport and the strategies they employed.

And some of it was being very strong and, you know, shielding, and being the one to get in somebody's face. And sometimes it was like, I'll play by the rules, I'll be as perfect as I can be. And what you end up with is this tale of two gymnasts and their mothers talking about what was required of them to try to succeed in a sport that very often did not love them back, and the way they found their own joy and made their own joy and displayed their own joy in those viral routines that we think we know – but trust me, when you hear them break it down, watching those routines back with them, I learned something new each time. Like, little things that I will never not see right now.

So, that to me is like one of the anchors and heartbeats of the show, is understanding not just what is required for these gymnasts, but for their families. What it meant to be in that space, not just as somebody tumbling on the floor, but as a Black woman, as a mom, you know, squeezed in that little observation space in those musty gyms as their child, you know, tried to do the impossible and make a way in a sport that was really in hospitable to them. And so that’s episode six, that’s the psychology episode. And I think it also means that every time you see a new viral routine, you'll think about it a little it differently.

Jessica: Yeah. And I absolutely love the parts where Amira watches the routines with each of the gymnasts and they both react to them. I think that is just lovely audio. Episode seven is of course Simone Biles. It's about her ascendancy, but it's also about the unraveling of USAG, sort of these two things happening at the same time. So, it's going to be a bit of a heavy episode. You might hear my voice pop up on that one, [laughs] because that's where we will really be talking about abuse in the sport, even though we talk about it throughout. It's not like it's just contained there.

Amira: But the one thing that I really love about that episode is I talked to Jordan Chiles for a while, and Jordan of course has her own part of this show when she really kicks it off. But she's also in Simone’s episode a lot because the love and joy in which she talks about her best friend is infectious. And one of the things that was such a joy to do was to tell Simone's story and to think about Simone alongside somebody like Jordan, who knows and loves and cares about her so deeply. It felt grounded, you know, in a way that we were able to still with Gabby talk about symbol, and Simone has really – like Serena, right? – become larger than life. But having Jordan to sit with and talk to and unpack some things with also allowed us to ground the story in a way that I really appreciate.

So, you know, in a moment where it feels like Simone is everywhere, it's like, well, how do you do an episode about somebody who's like omnipresent? But I think we go to new places, and I had a joy, an absolute joy, kind of figuring out how we could be holistic and really honor Simone, not just as an epitome of Black girl magic or a mental health advocate or as a survivor, but as a human and a fully realized one in all of those components as well.

Jessica: And the final episode will be the future. We're still nailing all of that down, but we've done some really fun things with this show. Like, we mentioned that Kelly went to Dianne Durham's memorial and got amazing audio there. But Kelly and Jessica both went to Grambling…

Amira: The HBCU in Louisiana where Brown Girls Do Gymnastics was having a meet, and this meet is brown girls from across the country, also Black women who coach, who are judges, who are trainers, all of it, right? It's really a space that–

Jessica: Who make leotards!

Amira: Like, Wakanda leotards. 

Jessica: Yeah, just all of it. 

Amira: We have wonderful interviews from Grambling, with young Black girls in the sport.

Jessica: My favorite interviews, because like seven year olds girls talking about–

Amira: About what the sport should be for them, you know?

Jessica: Yes! Oh, it’s the best audio.

Amira: It's gorgeous. We also, all of us, went to the Gold Over America tour, and that was such a treat, and it was so fun to go after talking to Nia and Jordan, and to Val who choreographed it, of course, because we got all these little previews. I mean, Nia and Jordan were like, you're going to cry. I was like, I'm not going to cry! And of course I cried.

Jessica: We cried through the whole thing. [laughs]

Amira: Through the whole thing.

Jessica: [laughs] We were not cool about it at all!

Amira: We were not prepared. So that was really, really fun. The future is also a place where we are able to…So, all throughout this series, we're telling you about these lead voices. But when I tell you we've talked to so many people. We’ve talked to Black women who were in the sport for their whole life and then did it in college and then also left. We've talked to people who came back as judges and are now trying to change the game in terms of how judges deal with their implicit bias. Like, you know, you have to judge how toes are pointed differently because people don't realize Black people have two tones in their feet and that has been something proven to deduct points – little things like that, that we lay people don't even think about. You have Black women out here doing the work to try to transform judging, transform coaching. A lot of people opening up their own gyms and foundations to try to create the place that they didn't have.

We went to Simone's gym where she's doing a lot of that work too, down in Houston. We've talked to young girls and their moms and that next generation about what they hope for in this sport, you know, really trying to capture what it means to come into something at five, at six, and retire from it in your early twenties. And going back to Jess Luther's fabulous question, like, is everybody a prodigy? Because at the core of this, we're dealing with people in such formative years. One of the things I joked with and talked to many people about is about hair, of course, and that every Black girl has awkward hair phrase. [Jessica laughs] It just so happens that your awkward hair phase is happening when you're at the Olympics, you know? [laughs] Not a great match.

But that is throughout the series, but really kind of all crystallizes in the final episode to also give us a glimpse of where we could be going if we continue to do this work, and the importance of centering these voices and putting them together. Gymnastics is a sport that's really, really isolating. You're training, you're in competition with some of your closest friends, the only other people who know what you're going through. There can also be really cutthroat competition. Finding partnership and camaraderie and sisterhood throughout that is really something to behold. And one of the things that we've uncovered is there's people that we've talked to who are competing simultaneously, who didn't even realize that they were having similar experiences. And my biggest wish is that we get a bunch of folks together who participated in this, because I think there's something spectacular about connecting these stories and breaking down some of these barriers to each other as they've broken down barriers in the sport.

And so that's what you can expect of this season of American Prodigies. It's been a pleasure to work on it, of course, with Jess Luther. I can't imagine…I literally could not have done it without you. And Kelly and Jess Bodiford have been tremendous. And of course, when we all were in Houston for the Gold Over America tour, I dragged everybody to an escape room for team building [Jessica laughs] and we escaped in record time. So you know we work well together. So, yeah, it's been a real treat. I can't wait. I can't wait to give it to the world.

Jessica: Yeah, me too. It's very exciting to just be here talking to you about it, like, that other people are going to listen to us talking about it forget they’ll actually get to listen to it soon. 

Amira: Yes! It’s kind of nerve-wracking. I'm kinda scared.

Jessica: It is. I know. Again, it should come out sometime in February – as soon as the date is locked down, we'll let all of our flamethrowers know. But we are just super looking forward to sharing this with everyone. You should go right now to wherever you listen to podcasts, find American Prodigy, subscribe so that you don't miss anything.

That's it for this episode of Burn It All Down. The episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon does our website, episode transcripts and social media. You can find Burn It All Down on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If you want to subscribe to Burn It All Down, you can do so on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play and TuneIn, all the places. For information about the show and links and transcripts for each episode, check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. And from there you can email us directly, or go shopping at our Bonfire store and get some Burn It All Down merch. As always, an evergreen thank you to our patrons for your support. It means the world. You can sign up to be a monthly sustaining donor to Burn It All Down at patreon.com/burnitalldown. On behalf of Amira and myself, burn on and not out.