Thirty Years After Olympic Gold, Dominique Dawes Is Still Changing Gymnastics

ROCKVILLE, Maryland — Thirty years ago this summer, Dominique Dawes beamed atop an Olympic podium in Atlanta, clutching a bouquet and waving to the crowd that had packed inside the Georgia Dome. Minutes later, she placed a hand over her heart as the national anthem played. 

She was celebrating a first: The 19-year-old from Maryland had just helped the U.S. women’s gymnastics team to win a gold medal, a feat that had never been achieved before.

Dawes also became the first Black American woman to take home an individual Olympic medal in the sport. She and her “Magnificent Seven” teammates soon appeared on a box of Wheaties, a staple of kitchens across the country and another sign that Dawes had been immortalized in gymnastics lore.

At least, this is how many Americans remember the story. Dawes recalls something more complicated: a victory laced with disappointment, including a mistake on floor, her signature event. And as happy as she was to have won gold in Atlanta — a city once again gearing up to host a global sporting spectacle as the World Cup begins this month — the medal also was a reminder of the harsh culture that she had endured to earn it.

Since then, Dawes, 49, has sought to remake the culture of the sport that turned her into a household name. Through her network of Dominique Dawes Academies in Georgia, Maryland, Texas, and Virginia, she’s trying to establish a new vision of gymnastics: one that prizes health, community, and joy as much as excellence and is more welcoming to girls of all backgrounds, especially Black girls, who have often been left on the margins. Her project, at its core, is an attempt to transform a sport that’s long been organized around individual achievement and cutthroat competition.

“We’re trying to do things differently,” Dawes, now the mother of four children, told Capital B. “It means nothing if your child is a great gymnast — standing on top of the podium — but yet, their self-esteem is shot, their mental health is shot, and they don’t know how to make relationships in this world. I believe that if that is the outcome, then we’ve failed.”

This punishing culture was famously chronicled by the journalist Joan Ryan in her book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters, which was published the year before Dawes won gold. Ryan describes an environment in which girls were isolated from their loved ones and taught to disregard injury and suppress individuality as they attempted to shape themselves into ferociously disciplined athletes — borderline robots.

In the five years before Ryan’s book was published, Julissa Gomez and Christy Henrich, two elite gymnasts pursuing Olympic glory, died. They suffered the kinds of catastrophic injuries (a broken neck) and eating disorders (anorexia nervosa) that had become synonymous with the sport’s demands.

This culture was on display during the most popular moment of the 1996 Olympics. After clearly hurting her ankle on the vault, Kerri Strug performed a second vault — she then collapsed on the mat in pain. While Strug remains proud of her performance, the moment divides observers. For some, it’s a symbol of grit. For others, it exemplifies a sport that conditioned girls to alchemize pain, to turn it into fuel as they chased perfection. As Dawes said of that moment in a 2024 documentary, “I think if we look back now, we’re like, ‘That was not right.’”

Dawes has also spoken publicly about the physical and emotional strain that she endured as a young gymnast.

“I had bow legs, so I was constantly told that you would get a deduction for your bow legs and your legs being apart,” Dawes said in a 2022 interview. People attempted to hyperextend her legs because they wanted her to conform to what could be seen as a more white European aesthetic. They wanted her legs to “look like the Russian gymnast or Russian ballerina I would never become,” she said.

Wendy Hilliard, a pioneering rhythmic gymnast who became the first Black woman to represent the U.S. internationally in that sport, is intimately familiar with the culture that Dawes, whom she has known for decades, describes.

She recalled practices where she and her teammates would be thirsty after training for several hours, only for their coach to send them to the water fountain to gargle rather than drink. The athletes viewed this behavior as normal.

There were other challenges, too. Hilliard — who in 1996 founded the Wendy Hilliard Gymnastics Foundation, which provides gymnastics classes to youth in New York City and Detroit — told Capital B that she remembers coaches fussing over Black girls’ hair because they didn’t know how to style it for competitions. For Black girls who already stood out in an overwhelmingly white sport, these experiences intensified their sense of loneliness.

Hilliard applauds Dawes’ effort to dramatically shift the culture of gymnastics — to give athletes more joy and agency, to create the kind of environment that neither woman experienced.

“She’s definitely a rock star for what she stands for,” Hilliard said. “It was harder in Dominique’s time, no doubt about it. She had to work really, really hard. And people need to give her her due: My girl made three Olympic teams — Barcelona in 1992, Atlanta in 1996, and Sydney in 2000. That’s not easy.”

“Gymnastics can actually be fun”

Earlier this spring, Javonda Harrison and her 8-year-old daughter, Leia-Rose, woke up bright and early and drove around two hours to attend the opening of one of Dawes’ academies in the metro Atlanta area. 

Just weeks before, Leia-Rose had picked Dawes as the subject of a Black History Month project at school so that she could tell her classmates all about this athlete she revered. Then came the chance to meet Dawes in person.

“This girl could hardly sleep the night before — she was so excited,” Harrison, a track athlete who looked up to Dawes as a role model, told Capital B. “To be a parent and be able to provide that type of opportunity and see that excitement, it does something to you. It just takes you back and unlocks different childhood dreams.”

Leia-Rose taught herself gymnastics by watching clips of Black champions, including Dawes. Before she ever stepped foot inside a gym, she spent hours trying to recreate the skills she saw online: “My favorite, favorite, favorite event is floor,” she told Capital B, naming the event that Dawes became a standout in because of her explosive, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it tumbling passes. Her parents soon bought her some basic equipment to use at home, and then they enrolled her in classes. Today, she’s first in her division in Georgia.

Through her academies, which she began opening in 2020, Dawes wants to help young gymnasts to hold onto the excitement Leia-Rose feels.

Dawes’ aim is to make gymnastics a source of joy and belonging rather than just a pursuit of medals (maybe more in the vein of college gymnastics, where team cohesion is as important as individual achievement). Children have only one childhood, and she wants it to be healthy. This new culture Dawes is nurturing is detectable in even the smallest details of her academies.

Japera Walker Wilkison, the general manager of the academy in Rockville, pointed out the absence of the glass lobby windows that have long been fixtures of gymnastics facilities. Though these windows offer visibility into the workout area, they also can create distance between parents and their athletes and imply a sense of separation.

“Even today, they still have that glass,” she told Capital B, referring to the barrier at many traditional facilities that can stymie communication. At Dawes’ academies, however, parents are encouraged to remain engaged, a deliberate effort to forge bonds and foster a safer and more compassionate environment.

This general ethos is noticeable in other ways, too. Wilkison said that Black families, in particular, frequently stop to take pictures next to images of Dawes — inside the Rockville academy, there’s the iconic image of Dawes doing the splits on the balance beam at the 1996 Olympics — and tell stories about watching her compete. For these families, the academy isn’t merely a place to learn gymnastics.

“They’re just so proud,” Wilkison said. “They’re so happy to be here, to be able to say, ‘I go to the Dominique Dawes Academy.’ It just means something to have someone doing something real and giving back to the community, because we grew up in a world where nothing was catered to us. So for many Black families, it’s like, ‘If I can choose any place to send my child for gymnastics, why not choose a place started by someone who has my skin color?”

A focus on joy and community starts at the foundations, with the academy’s core values. These values include kindness, empathy, and an eagerness to help every child to find their “gold medal” moment each day. Coaches are hired for their ability to connect with children as well as for their technical knowledge. There are plans to expand, including to New Jersey — a sign of families’ positive response to this model.

“The Olympics is not for everyone to aspire toward,” Dawes said, underscoring her point that gymnastics doesn’t have to be so serious. “What we’re doing at these academies is for more of the population.”

Dawes understands the scale of the task she’s set for herself. The culture she’s trying to reshape has congealed over many generations, reinforced by coaches, parents, and abusive authority figures many believed knew best. Her academies stand as an alternative vision, but one in tension with the sport’s most stubborn assumptions.

There are signs that some assumptions are beginning to soften. Women are competing longer — it’s not just pubescent girls who can enjoy only a short career. Gymnasts’ bodies are less starved. And there’s more emphasis on strength, as the world has seen through the gravity-defying skill of Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast in history. Biles has also been vocal about protecting her mental health, an approach that Dawes salutes.

But three decades after she made history in Atlanta, Dawes not only wants to keep this transformation going — she wants to deepen it. Though the medals and Olympic memories remain, far more important are the communities gravitating toward the academies emblazoned with her name, where parents mingle, friendships blossom, and young gymnasts — including Black girls who once wondered whether they had a place in the sport at all — are taught that their worth extends beyond a judge’s critiques.

“Gymnastics doesn’t have to be this grueling sport,” Dawes said. “Gymnastics can actually be fun. Kids walk into our facilities smiling — and they leave sweating and smiling because they’re working hard, but they’re also enjoying the journey.”

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