The captain of the first U.S. women's team to win Olympic gold looked back on Atlanta: the vote she did not cast for herself, the body she had to learn on her own, and the thing that lasted longer than the medal.
Amanda Borden was 19 years old, and she did not vote for herself.
Seven American women were stretching at the end of practice in a local gym in Atlanta (not a big facility, just the gym they were training in) when they were asked to write down who they wanted as captain.
"I wrote down our fearless leader, in my mind, Shannon Miller," Borden told The MedGym Podcast. "And everybody else voted for me."
Days later, that team won the first Olympic team gold in the history of American women's gymnastics. Borden, Amy Chow, Dominique Dawes, Shannon Miller, Dominique Moceanu, Jaycie Phelps and Kerri Strug. The Magnificent Seven, on 23 July 1996.
She had been on the elite scene in 1992 and narrowly missed out the Games. Four years later, she made it knowing exactly where she stood.
"When my dream came true, I also realized I was not the best athlete on the team," she said. "But I knew in my heart that I had something more to contribute. I didn't really have a title to that or knew what that was gonna look like."
Three of the seven were already Olympians. Dawes had won the Olympic Trials. Miller had, in Borden's words, racks of medals.
"The fact that these girls that I looked up to and admired and was amazed with in so many ways, saw something special," she said. "That I think I knew I had, but I just didn't know what that looked like when you're not the most experienced."
Ask what made seven teenagers work under that much pressure and Borden does not reach for anything technical.
She reaches for a conversation at training camp.
"Mary Lou Retton actually came in and talked to us," Borden said. "She was the one that said the Olympics is in your country, press is gonna be all over, it's gonna be back then the newspaper and on TV, that was our press. But she's like, 'Don't listen, don't watch. Just stay into you guys.'"
Borden took that literally.
"When I say I walked into the Georgia Dome just saying I'm Amanda from Finneytown, Ohio, which is a small part of Cincinnati, that was my mentality," she said. "The small town girl had worked her way to get here. So just keep doing what you've been doing."
They finished day one in second. Most people, she said, assumed a U.S. medal was going to be bronze or silver anyway.
"That didn't phase us. We didn't feel like we were going into day two playing from behind or anything like that. We just kept staying in the day, staying in the moment."
One detail she keeps returning to is logistical rather than emotional: the team had the whole gym to train in, rather than being split into squads the way an off-site setup usually forces.
"Our coaches kept us on our training plans," she said. "Those are all lead ups that kept us in our little bubble, in our little world, doing our little thing, that when you brought all those little things together, it just made one of the greatest teams."
Borden's era had almost none of the medical infrastructure a Level 10 gymnast now takes for granted. She names her own build first (strong by nature, durable) and then names the gap.
"My pitfall was flexibility. So early on I had quite a few injuries that had flexibility issues, like I had the avulsion fracture hamstring, then I pulled the other one, then I hurt a calf muscle."
An avulsion fracture is not a strain. It is the tendon pulling off the bone, often taking bone with it.
"And we didn't even barely know what that was," Borden said.
There were no MRIs available in two seconds for a few hundred dollars. There was no load-management vocabulary. What there was, in her case, was a coach and a set of parents who listened.
"I felt like I always knew my body. I could always talk to my parents about it, number one. And I felt like I could talk to my coach about it," she said. "If my coach was like, 'Well, can you push through or can you work?' I was able to give that a yes or no versus like, am I in trouble?"
That is the whole thing. An athlete who can answer that question honestly, without calculating the cost of the honest answer, is an athlete who reports pain on day two instead of day forty.
Borden credits Mary Lee Tracy with teaching her to ask why rather than push through.
"If you have tight hamstrings, we're not gonna just pull your leg and stretch you until you're more flexible, like, why? Why is it tight? What do we need to do differently? What are we doing different in your training?"
By her final year of training, her assignments had become negotiations she was allowed to win.
"Our assignments turned into, I want you to hit ten beam routines that you'd want to compete at trials or whatever. And then I would be like, yeah, that wasn't it. And she'd be like, what do you mean?"
"It got to the point where then I was the one making the decision of, was that good enough? Do I need another one? Or am I done?"
She is clear that she does not know how much of that decision was truly hers.
"I don't know that it was truly my decision. But that's how I believed and felt. And so on the bad days, it made it manageable, and on the great days it made it manageable, emotionally."
Not everyone on that team trained the same way. Borden has watched both extremes from inside the same gym.
"I watched girls on my Olympic team do twenty beam routines a day, with some serious level of gymnastics."
Twenty would have broken her. Two would have terrified them.
Borden has now spent far longer coaching gymnastics than competing in it. She and her husband have run Gold Medal Gymnastics in the Phoenix area for 22 years, with locations in Tempe and Chandler. Phelps runs her own gym. Miller has spent her post-career years in athlete health and cancer advocacy.
For the record, the best thing about the Atlanta Games, in the captain's memory, was the food: personal chefs, a fraternity house at Emory University, and enormous plates of it.
But the anniversary has landed on her differently than the ten-year mark did.
"We were dubbed the Mag Seven back then because of what we accomplished right then in that moment," Borden said. "But I think my bigger takeaway thirty years later is that I would say that we're more magnificent women now, in the things that we've done since the Olympics. And I think that's pretty impressive.
"And one of them being that we have stayed in touch, and I would consider them my friends."
Read next: Positive Coaching in Gymnastics: What Amanda Borden's Gym Sounds Like
