salute and then jogged off the podium.
Andrei confronted him at the stairs, his habitual scowl deeper than usual. He was still pissed that Barry had pulled rank and overrode him on Tony’s training intensity since the fake-injury-that-was-not-actually-fake. “You crossed your feet. We will work on that.”
Tony raised an eyebrow. “My knee feels fine, thanks.” Then the other guys in the rotation approached, slapping his hand in congratulations. Tony walked over to the chair where he’d parked his gym bag and took a swig from his water bottle. As he waited for his score, he checked the leader board. As he watched, Danny was knocked down a notch and Sol took his place at the top. I knew he could do it. Sol was a magician on horse, his arms just a little longer, and not nearly as beefy as Tony or Danny. His flexibility and fluidity were the best in the world.
Tony’s score flashed up. Not bad. The difficulty on his double-twisting layout Tsukahara was lower than the vaults some of the other guys were doing, but his execution score was… decent. Andrei was right—there was room for improvement, but vault wasn’t his event, so he’d take it. Hell, yeah, he’d take it. And with Solly up there on the top, this was shaping up to be a good day.
A very good day indeed.
Today was a terrible day.
Sol huddled in his chair next to the pommel horse. Yeah, he’d come out in the lead after the preliminary rounds. Danny and Rahul were right behind him, as expected. Tony, however, was in sixth, trailing Eddie by less than a tenth. In fact, only two tenths separated second through seventh places, even though Sol’s lead had grown to over two points after the first five rotations today.
I wish I knew what the coaches were thinking. But the men’s program director and the high-performance director could flash their poker faces in a high stakes game in Vegas and walk away with the pot.
He downed a couple of swallows of water—not too much. It wouldn’t do to have his stomach sloshing around on the horse. A cheer went up from over near the p-bars. The stands were a lot fuller today than they’d been on the first day of the trials, and Sol knew why.
Tony.
Well, indirectly it was Tony’s doing. After Quinn posted that footage of podium training, with all the guys shirtless, ticket sales had picked way up. Six weeks ago, Sol would have copped an attitude about Tony drawing attention away from the team for his own benefit. Except Tony wasn’t the only one benefitting. Danny had his own entourage. Sol did too, for some peculiar reason. He glanced into the stands, amazed at all the fans flashing signs of encouragement with his name on them.
He’d had no chance to see Tony alone since they’d checked into their St. Louis hotel. Sol was rooming with Rahul, and Tony was in with Danny. Andrei had kept Tony apart from the other guys at practice yesterday, and Sol had wanted to kick the damn man in the balls. Even though Barry had imposed limits on Tony’s training, Andrei pushed it right to the edge. At the end of practice, Tony was exhausted—the day before a major competition was not the time to put in the high numbers, especially for Tony. Repetition was not his friend—he got bored, and then he got sloppy, and then he made mistakes and hurt himself. He’d do better with Xiao.
Who was frowning at Sol. Oops. Sol stood up. He still had two more guys on horse before him. He closed his eyes and visualized his routine. He’d seen video of himself doing this—his arms flapping at his sides like he was doing a penguin impression. So what if it looked stupid? It worked.
After two mental run-throughs, he opened his eyes and shouted encouragement to the man who was just mounting the horse—Brandon, one of Sol’s fellow Sooners. He winced when Brandon faltered, his foot brushing the horse as he struggled into his dismount handstand. The judges didn’t even count it as a dismount because his momentum had stopped, so he had to repeat it.
“Come on, Brandon,” Sol called. “Aggressive!”
Brandon managed to fly up to his handstand this time, but his expression when he saluted the judges was grim. Sol met him at the foot of the stairs and slapped his hand anyway, then climbed the stairs to the podium as another cheer erupted from near the p-bars. But Sol