Transcriber: Simon Chou Reviewer: Taher Koja
Imagine witnessing a moment so monumental that it completely changes
the entire trajectory of your life.
Well, that happened to me when I was four years old.
I was watching the Olympics for the very first time in front and center
on my screen. I see this woman by the name of Flo-Jo.
She has this long, gorgeous hair and these radiant nails that shown red,
white and blue. She stood up behind her starting blocks,
stared at the finish line and propelled down the track towards Olympic glory.
When she crossed the finish line,
she had just broken the Olympic record in 10.6 2 seconds,
and she was led to an Olympic podium where they put
a gold medal around her neck,
and then they played the United States national anthem for
the entire world to hear. At that moment, I was hooked.
I knew that I wanted Olympic glory just like her.
So I go to my mom and I say, Mom,
what's it going to take for me to be like this Flo-Jo lady?
And she said, Hard work, perseverance. I said, I was four. Right?
Did you remember? I was four.
But as time went on, it was my mom who was right.
We lived in a type of environment where there was poverty,
homelessness and displacement.
And I learned through those times that perseverance meant no matter how hard
or how long, you never give up.
I held on to my faith in athletics because I knew that that was truly
the only way I was going to break this cycle of poverty in my life.
I like to say that my Olympic training started when I was in high school,
but it was my junior year in high school when our team was preparing to go to
the national championships and one of our relay team members got injured.
Now, my coach had this athlete slated to run on the four by one,
the four by two, and the four by four. So I knew that I had to step up.
I knew that I had to be there for my team.
And I knew that you cannot run a three man relay or four man relay,
which is three athletes. So I stepped in. Now I'm watching my team.
They're handing the baton from one athlete to the next.
And I see it getting closer to me and I'm kind of scared.
But I stand there and my teammate comes towards me and she hands me the baton
and she says. Oh. And I felt a source of power and a source of fuel.
I was able to run faster than my fitness.
See, I had left sprinting a long time ago.
I was singularly focused only on the high jump,
and I was not ready to run a relay. But I tapped into this unimaginable strength.
At that competition, I was slated to only win one national title,
but I ended up walking away with four. Yeah, you guys can call me Thanos.
Two years later, I had my first opportunity to try out for
the Olympic trials. I achieved my goal of getting a college scholarship.
And so I'm at the Olympic trials.
I am lined up against the nation's best the nation's best high jumpers.
Many of them who had already been Olympians.
And so I stand at my mark like I had seen Flo-Jo do so many years before.
I leaned back and I barreled towards the bar and I jumped again and again
and again and again. And I cleared
a bar after bar after bar until there were only three women standing.
I have made my first Olympic team.
I traveled to Athens, Greece, the Olympic Games,
where they were talking about the wild street dogs.
And while everybody was talking about the wild street dogs,
I was struggling to clear the bar.
I crashed and I burned, failing to get an Olympic medal.
I didn't even make it out of the final. And then I persevered.
Like my mom had taught me so many years before.
And in Beijing in 2008, I once again got to represent Team USA in
the Bird's Nest, where everybody was clamoring about this guy named Usain Bolt,
who was breaking three world records.
I was sitting there weaning a nursing one year old, jumping in the rain,
trying my best, but only coming away with sixth place. And yet I persevered.
And then I went to London in 2012,
where the Queen of England had a stunt double parachute out of a helicopter.
And I went and competed and yet again, short of the medal stand.
In 2016, I was able to compete in the Rio Olympic Games.
Now this was the most dramatic of all my Olympic Games.
I made it past the prelims.
I got to the final and I get to
the point where there are only four women left in the competition.
I'm the last jumper of the competition
and every other woman failed all three of their attempts. So it was my turn.
So once again, I lean back.
Now let me tell you, if I clear this bar, I am an Olympic gold medallist,
but if I miss it, I am the dreaded first place loser,
which is fourth place to all Olympians.
So I lean back and I power towards the bar, just like Flo-Jo,
just like I had done that first Olympic trials.
And I clear my head, my shoulders, my back , my bum, my hamstrings, my calves,
and I pick up just for a little bit of a second to see if
the bar is still standing. And to my amazement, guess it's still there.
And so I celebrate in the air just a little bit. And then it was a mistake.
I knocked the bar off with my heel and it wiggled
and wobbled in one side fell. And then the other. I was devastated.
28 years of hard work amounted to nothing.
I went home and while I was a mother of three amazing children,
I had a successful marriage. I had won world championships.
I was the two time American record holder.
I failed to get an Olympic medal after four tries,
and I felt like such a failure.
So I went home and I did with most of us will do.
I called my old friends that I hadn't spoken to in 16 years, Ben and Jerry.
And so I'm online shopping for bigger pants, eating gallon after gallon.
And then my messages on my phone started ringing.
Congratulations, Olympic medalist. Like, what are you talking about?
It wasn't until my phone rang that I understood what had happened.
When I had a nursing one year old at home eight years earlier at
the Olympic Games in Beijing,
it was determined that three women that finished in front of me had actually
cheated. And the medal would be reallocated to me. Yeah.
I had this amazing ceremony where I went to an amphitheater in Beverly Hills,
and they took this medal and they gave it to my three year old son,
who gave it to my five year old daughter,
who gave it to my nine year old daughter who gave it to my husband,
who gave it to Mr. Probes, who put it around my neck. And I was so happy.
But something was missing.
Now, I don't want to take away from this moment,
but what I thought would be experience,
like the fireworks that I saw at Walt Disney World just driving down
the highway, felt more like that drunk uncle in a Speedo on
the 4th of July twirling with rollerblades and sparklers in his hand.
And so I decided that I was going to do what the next logical step and
I was going to go went into the workforce.
And so I ended up getting a job at a Fortune 100 company as
a financial consultant. And I learned that self-help and self-care was
a huge part of my life. I had to prioritize it.
So in addition to going on fishing trips like this with my family,
I started doing self-breast exams.
Now, for two years, these exams were uneventful.
But one time I found this itsy bitsy, tiny right sized lump.
I went to the doctor and the doctor told me not to worry about it.
It's just a lymph node. But a year later, that lump had tripled in size.
So I went back and this time I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Now. I had an important decision to make.
Was I going to allow this diagnosis to take me under? Or was I going to fight?
I'm kind of petty, you guys know.
I will train for four years to jump over a bar for 2 hours.
So, of course, I decided to fight.
They say when you are facing a life or death situation,
it is your life that flashes before your eyes.
But in my case, it wasn't my life that flashed before my eyes.
It was the lives of my children and my husband without me.
And I could not live with that.
I went into my garage and I began recording.
I grabbed my phone and I said,
This is not the message that I thought I'd be recording today.
I thought that I'd be telling you that I might be going
for my fifth Olympic Games,
but instead I'm telling you that I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Please do yourself breast exams because
I found out early it was treatable and I had a lot of options.
And I stopped recording and I posted it online.
But then I started to dive deep and understand what this really meant.
I learned that one in eight women in their lifetime in
the U.S. will be diagnosed with breast cancer and that men get breast cancer.
And I knew that I had to do something.
I would use my platform to galvanize women all over
the world to help them understand that they have to advocate for themselves.
But what was my platform? I was a number cruncher.
And then I realized exactly what I had to do.
I had to dive back into the Olympic ring,
and I had to train for my fifth Olympic Games so that I could use
the media conglomerate that the Olympic Games are
and bring awareness to breast cancer.
My treatment would require a double mastectomy and months of chemotherapy.
I needed to use this platform to bring attention to this disease.
And I started to feel the responsibility not just for myself,
but for your family,
for your mother, for your sons, for your daughters, for your parents,
and for what it might mean to you if you were facing this diagnosis.
And then I begin to feel energized,
just as I did just one time before when I was running that relay
and they handed me that baton. I felt strength. Unimaginable strength
that I didn’t even know it was there.
And so after getting the blessing of my doctors,
I begin to train through chemotherapy.
I push through the nausea, the vomiting, the hair loss,
the rashes and unimaginable places, the shedding fingernails.
I pushed through it all, and some days my training would just be walking with
a walker. Sometimes it would just be getting out of bed.
But other days I had the energy to do stadium runs, to lift weights, to sprint.
I felt the power and energy that came with carrying all of you on my back.
This was the day that I decided that I no longer wanted to sit
and watch my hair slide off of my scalp.
I decided that it was time to let go of the old shanty and embrace the new.
Everything was going according to plan.
I was training well, I was in the right position.
I knew that I was ready and there was nothing that was going to stop me from
getting back to that Olympic stage. COVID 19 hit my family.
Everyone in my house was diagnosed just when vaccinations were becoming widely
available to everybody, and I tried to train,
but my lungs could just not take the bashing.
And for the first time in my life,
I failed to qualify for the Olympic trials.
And so as I'm watching all of the media that I have recorded months before,
I see a news anchor say, normally we go to the Olympics
for stories of inspiration,
but Shaun T Lo didn't even have to go to the Olympics to inspire us all.
I hope that he was right. I was watching the opening ceremonies for
the first time from my house with my kids instead of in the infield with my team.
When the opening ceremonies came on, they show this video called What Agnes Saw.
It was a media documentary of what Hungarian gymnast Agnes Keleti saw during
her 100 years of life. And in between,
legends like Jesse Owens and Simone Biles was me.
And it wasn’t just me figuratively,
it’s me jumping over the bar, that last jump in Rio.
And my kids looked at me and they said, Mummy, you made it to the Olympics.
I cried so deeply because I knew they were right.
In a moment that should have felt like a massive failure,
a time where I failed to make it back to the Olympic Games,
I felt a sense of pride. I captured that elusive feeling,
but I thought that I was going to feel
so many years ago from getting that Olympic medal.
I felt the strength of carrying a community on my back and knowing that
I was one part of a bigger picture.
When I reflect over the last two years,
I know that sharing my story in my most vulnerable moment was the key.
It wasn't a moment where I had perfect flo-jo nails.
I didn't have perfect flo-jo hair.
I realized that who I was before cancer was transfixed
on wanting to beat everyone. I needed everybody to know my name.
I wanted them to know I was great.
But the me who emerged from that cancer journey
was one that understood
that the fight of my life was not just for myself.
That there's a tremendous amount of pride fighting for everyone else.
And that when children see my story and they realize that
the best thing that athletics can do for us is to lift us up,
and that with hard work, determination and grit,
you can get out of difficult situations. But that is just the beginning.
When we step back and realize that we are stronger together and we take up
the plight of our brothers and sisters,
we are truly understanding the meaning of life in
a time when we are inundated with self-help and selfies and selfies
and self-help. We are missing out on a huge opportunity to fight
for one another, to tap into
an infinite source of strength in power that will propel us all.
I just want you to understand that when we fight for one another,
we're fighting for a greater cause that has a deeper fulfillment that will change
the world.
The me that emerged from the fight of my life understands this,
and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart
for allowing me to be that for you.