Finally read the book, and it's definitely a prime example of autobiographies that would have benefited waiting 10-15 years. The lack of fact checking really distracts from the narrative, which is frustrating, and the narrative around the bronze debacle is not flattering.
What she went through with Coach X is clearly described and is absolutely dreadful. Beyond the food restrictions, the drinking the verbal abuse, and the racial comments, reading about her coach forcibly cutting her hair while they were traveling at a competition was absolutely horrifying. And there are a lot of other obvious places where she dealt with a lot of racism, and it's clear how awful the experience has been.
Which makes it more frustrating when there are things she says that absolutely happened, but she gets the details wrong--she has Ferlito's comments happening at a completely different competition. It doesn't take away from what Ferlito said being nasty and wrong, but it takes a level of credibility away from Jordan that she didn't fact check a well-publicized incident that happened to someone else.
Similarly, saying she's drug tested more than other people because she's black, when the data is very easily available to show she's tested at the same frequency as other people with similar accomplishments/at similar levels of competition--the only time she was tested more, it was when she was the only Olympian making podiums at Nationals.
She also says the world wasn't ready for an all-black podium, despite the widely celebrated all-black all around podium at Worlds the previous year. It's frustrating to read because there was racist backlash over the podium, and there is a lot of racism in the sport, and she has so many other things she can and does point to, that having items like these as key points of her argument really weakens a very valid, important argument.
She also doesn't really seem to understand how teams are picked, how it's a puzzle of getting the top scores, or why AA was her best shot at 2017 and why she didn't get selected. Which is again frustrating, because her statements about Valeri's racism, supported by quotes from interviews with him, have a lot of validity--but telling her that AA was a better shot for her than VT specialist was valid advice based on the whole national team picture at the time; it just didn't work out for her because Morgan won Trials. But she doesn't seem to have made any effort to look at that picture--she paints it solely as an attack on her by someone she validly doesn't like. She also made me curious if Valeri considers himself Kazakh-American or Russian American.
Her handling of the bronze medal situation wasn't flattering. It's pretty horrorifying how she found out about the situation with so little time before the trial, nowhere near enough time to hire a lawyer for herself, barely enough time to comprehend the situation. USAG messing up what contact email they put on the form really messed with her situation.
But the statements about the world not being ready for an all black podium, and the implications that Romania was coming after the medals because she was black (possibly a contributing factor, consciously or subconsciously, but again certainly not the whole story). She also frames it as them wanting to strip them of her medal, which was never the argument. She didn't listen into the Trial--she was asleep for it. And then this quote when sharing the medal was proposed rubbed me the wrong way. Immediately after talking about how important sportsmanship is:
"She is not going to care as long as the podium is the podium--her, Simone, and Rebeca--and she is still the bronze winner," she told them, acknowledging that I would be fine with all three of us getting medals--but there could be only one winner."
She also really goes after Ana for celebrating on the podium, also often immediately after talking about how important sportsmanship is. She never acknowledges any of Ana's peacemaking statements. Reading the book, I'm genuinely concerned about the atmosphere at UCLA v Stanford meets next year.
Overall, I felt like this book needed to wait--she's still way too close to the situations involved, especially the bronze situation (especially given that that's completely unresolved). The small inaccuracies and the lack of reflection or attempts to understand broader pictures distract from a very important story that needs to be told. No attempts are made to understand team competition and how her strengths or weaknesses compare, no discussion or reflection on what the gymnastics situation is in Romania and why that bronze is something they're willing to fight so hard for, etc. It seems like a good example of a book where the subject is too close to the situation to reflect on it well, and the athlete and ghostwriter need to do a much better job of fact checking to make their argument as powerful as it should be.
people.com
