We can all be faced with so many challenges in life we never expected. But you're stronger than you think. Dominique Moceanu
During Chardon High School’s Leadership Day Aug. 26, Olympic Gold Medal gymnast Dominique Moceanu talked to student leaders about resilience and strength in overcoming life’s obstacles at Chardon United Methodist Church.
The day included team-building exercises, learning more about leadership styles and helping students get to know their classmates a little better. In addition to the 1996 gold medalist, students were joined by their peers from Mentor Schools.
“At the age of 9 I had the first people outside of (my family) believe that I could be an Olympic hopeful,” Moceanu said, emphasizing to the students the importance of saying their dreams “out loud” in order to see them fulfilled.
But she also told them about the value of hard work.
“I went to the gym on holidays,” Moceanu said, “I went when everyone else was on vacation. Sometimes I saw some of the most talented people just give up. It baffled me because they had all of this talent, and here I was — I had some talent, but I had to work at it, too.”
Moceanu spoke of moving up through national competitions to placing on the Olympic team. She was one of the youngest athletes ever to compete.
In 1996, she was only 14 years old, but due to a stress fracture in her tibia diagnosed only weeks before the games in Atlanta, she sat out the Olympic trials.
“I was devastated,” Moceanu said. “This stress fracture could have changed everything, if my attitude wasn’t in the right place. It could have caused me to not go the Olympics and pursue my dream. But when you work so hard for a goal in your life and when you work so hard and sacrifice so many things — do you think that was going to let me just give up?”
Moceanu’s performance at the Olympics was a pivotal part of the first-ever gold medal win for a United States Olympic women’s gymnastics team.
Along with the other six gymnasts on the team, the group became known as the “Magnificent Seven.”
After their win, they achieved rockstar status at home, embarking on a 100-city bus tour, visiting talk shows and even having a meeting with President Bill Clinton at the White House.
In 2008, all seven members of the team were inducted into the United States Olympic Hall of Fame, which Moceanu describes as one of the highest honors an American Olympic athlete can receive.
But as Moceanu pointed out in her talk to the students, there is always adversity to overcome. She later not only lost her wedding dress in a house fire, but lost most of her Olympic memorabilia in a flood.
In her 2012 memoir “Off Balance,” Moceanu detailed abusive relationships with her coaches and her parents, as well as the discovery of a sister she never knew she had.
Moceanu was nine months pregnant when she was contacted by a woman claiming to be her sister and when she confronted her dying father to find out if this was true and he admitted it, her world was shaken.
But it was upended even further a month later when she discovered in a phone call that her newly found sister had no legs.
“About halfway through the conversation, she said, ‘You know that I was born without legs, right?'” Moceanu recalled.
But her sister’s attitude and perspective — “can’t” isn’t a word she uses — had such an impact on Moceanu’s life their bond has grown deeply in the years since.
“You can never move forward if you keep putting your foot on the brakes,” Moceanu said of forgiving people in her life, including her father from whom she was legally emancipated at the age of 17. “You have to move forward and not have resentment. You’re not going to pursue your destiny if you’re living with a bitter and angry heart.
“When you have something inside your heart — a passion, a desire, a love, a dream, a goal — you’re not going to do anything other than work your tail off to get that goal no matter what obstacle gets in your way. Because you know what, right before you achieve success, you’re going to be hit with every bit of adversity possible and you have to learn how to overcome those things.”
Senior Jarred Karikas attended Leadership Day as a member of the Fresh-man Mentoring program, an advisory group through which high school freshmen at Chardon have a chance to get to know a little more about the school and their fellow students during their first year.
Karikas relished the opportunity to meet with and get to know other students from Chardon High School and from Mentor, and also to hear from the keynote speaker.
“I’m a lot more comfortable with the other kids,” Karikas said. “And I learned a lot from (Moceanu) about perseverance.”
Moceanu lives in the Cleveland area with her husband and two children, one of whom has told her he wants to have more gold medals than her some day.
She left the students with a final thought.
“We can all be faced with so many challenges in life we never expected,” Moceanu said. “But you’re stronger than you think.”
