The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Goals, medals and pain
Elite gymnast Ragan Smith, 18, retains focus even as sport takes toll on her body.
DALLAS — Ragan Smith sees the writing on the walls.
The 2017 U.S. women’s gymnastics all-around champion is 18 years old now and, well, writing on her bedroom walls.
The inspirational quote “She believed she could so she did” stretches across the left side of the dry-erase wall canvas in cursive, reminders to go through each physical therapy rep in “All directions!” on the right.
Then there’s the narrow, underlined column titled “Goals.” Smith erases and supplements the text beneath it about biweekly. She doesn’t hesitate when asked on a late afternoon in July what she’ll write next.
Smith grabs a handy black Expo marker and scribbles “Classics” above goals to indicate the next challenge she’ll meet head on. She adds:
■ Hit 4/4 events my best quality
■ Be the best Ragan I can be.
■ Be Confident in Myself! It’s goals like these that have propelled Smith to win 73 medals since she moved to North Texas to train five years ago. The swaths of hardware and snapshots from old meets lined Smith’s bedroom walls until the dryerase wall replaced it in a recent redesign.
“Now that I’m getting a little older, I kind of separate the two and focus more on my goals not just, ‘Oh, medals, I want to get that medal,’” Smith said.
It’s where she’s headed, not where she’s gone, that 18-year-old Ragan Smith wants to fall asleep to every night.
Leaving Georgia
When Smith uprooted her Georgia life in 2013 and moved to Texas before her family, she was the “baby of the bunch,” Texas Dreams Gymnastics coach Kim Zmeskal said. “So tiny and the youngest.”
She waited eagerly for guidance from Zmeskal and husband Chris Burdette, who co-coach elites at the Coppell powerhouse. They slowly molded Smith as a talent and performer, teaching her to mentally and physically elevate her game.
“When you get a vehicle that can go zero to 60 in two seconds, you have to be measured,” Burdette said. “And that’s what her body is.”
The more coaches calibrated her speedometer, the more Smith took the wheel.
She cracked the U.S. national team in 2014, accepted a scholarship offer from Oklahoma gymnastics in 2015, went to the Rio Olympics as an alternate in 2016 and won both the American Cup and senior championships all-around title in 2017. Soon Smith was teaching herself technique; assessing her own practice routines; realizing on her own where she needed to reset. Own your journey, Zmeskal told her.
“And it is incredibly clear that’s where she is,” Zmeskal said in July. “This is hers.”
Smith has gone from watching teammates to coaching younger girls, encouraging them through skill development and injury alike. She’s not the mom of the group, says fellow elite gymnast and best friend Abi Walker with a laugh, because Smith is the one goading teammates to zoom the cart at Target faster even as they raided aisles and toppled clothing racks. She’s the one daring them to dress like the teenagers they are when they leave the gym.
“I’m open, fun, a spaz, pretty much,” Smith says.
But she did become a leader, the first from Texas Dreams to win senior nationals and a gym model of what it takes to be the elite of the elite. Teammates in Texas-patterned leotards (think: longhorns, cowboy boots and state flags) gaze admiringly as Smith lands a standing full twisting back flip on the beam or rounds off her latest, more mature floor routine while donning the red, white and blue leotard they all hope to wear some day. A white scrunchie keeps her broad bun in place.
The routine isn’t as cutesy, Smith says. Less wiggle. More intention. But Smith stares down the audience “like all right, you clap,” Zmeskal says. The choreography and tunes are catchy.
“It’s still her with big personality,” Zmeskal adds, “but it’s the ‘I’m 18-year-old’ version of fun and energy.”
Practicing in pain
Smith’s personality hasn’t dimmed a watt since she arrived in North Texas. She’s come out of her shell as skills developed, comfortable now both engaging a crowd during routines and speaking with poise when handed the microphone.
But the pounding of tumbling has taken its toll, Smith knows. “Your body’s probably like 100 years old,” Burdette tells her, only joking in part.
Not a day has passed since Smith’s 17th birthday that she’s practiced without pain, she says. Her body “constantly hurts.”
Injuries haven’t helped. Smith fractured her back at the American Cup in March 2016 and tore three ligaments in her ankle on a final pre-competition vault run-through at worlds last October. She still wraps that left ankle in heavy bandage for high-pounding events, bruises and swelling visible when she removes the wraps even nine months later. But she can handle aches and soreness any day in place of injury.
“I’ve just got to suck it up,” Smith said.
She visits Plano-based Performance Medicine and Sports Therapy two to three times weekly for recovery and maintenance, landing box jumps before lying still for acupuncture and cupping as NFL players twice her size recover to her side. They laugh and joke, one player in awe of Smith’s ability to not just land the box jump he repeatedly couldn’t but also to land it with a 90-degree pivot, at ease. The cupping lesions, too, they marvel at, while Smith remains as unfazed by the NFL starpower in the room as she does the needles and welts on her back.
Sixteen-year-old Ragan Smith balked at approaching the pros in Rio two summers back.
“It was just kind of intimidating to see the giants,” she said of Warriors power forward Kevin Durant and now-Mavericks center DeAndre Jordan. “But all of them are really, really nice, like fuzzy teddy bears.”
The Cowboys safety who cheers Smith up at therapy on down days, and the former Cowboys defensive end who tickles her as he jokes and busts dance moves are gentle giants, too, she has learned. Many are NFL free agents looking for a team as Smith collects medals by the dozens.
Eighteen-year-old Ragan Smith is grateful she has the opportunity to chase medals. She wasn’t sure she would last winter.
Only months since she was crowned U.S. women’s all-around champion, three torn ligaments knocked her out of worlds in October and began a rapid spiral.
“I was just more devastated,” Smith said. “I knew I could win worlds.”
Turmoil in her sport
Then she watched USA Gymnastics plunge further into turmoil as more than 150 women and girls said in court in January that ex-team doctor Larry Nassar had sexually assaulted them. Nassar pleaded guilty to seven counts of criminal sexual conduct and was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison.
Active gymnasts wondered about the sport’s future.
“Why am I even doing routines?” Smith remembers asking herself in tears after practices. “It’s just useless. There’s no point.”
But she competed again in April at the City of Jesolo Trophy in Italy, cobbling together four events on a still-swollen ankle to win silver in all-around. Smith emerged with an upgraded bar routine along the way, a boost of confidence after years of turning heads on floor and beam but with self-described sloppy bar technique.
“She grew up feeling she’s spunky on floor, has always been a good beamer,” Zmeskal said. “To add this next piece with bar is big for her.”
The leadership she’s taking on the national team is, too.
In 2016, Smith was still developing her own self, an identity she credits Olympic teammate Aly Raisman with helping her find.
In 2018, as one of three gymnasts from Rio still on the national team, Smith is a de facto leader in a volatile time.
She’s motivated to carry the sport past scandal and dissolution.
“We’re setting the future for the standard of USA Gymnastics,” Smith says resolutely. “We’re not the downfall of it.”
It’s a message Smith preaches from her bedroom, sitting beside the dry-erase walls, her goals clear even as the sport’s future is not.
Heavy responsibility
Sure, she’s 18-year-old Ragan Smith now. But she’s also a teenager who’s shouldered heavy responsibility through USA Gymnastics uncertainty. She’s Kerry and Michael’s daughter, Jackson and Hudson’s older sister, Abi’s best friend. She still can’t connect ball to bat when Jackson wants her to play baseball. Ragan’s shots fly over the backboard when they played sibling basketball.
She chastises Hudson when he messes up the pillow on her bed but agrees with Jackson that they’ve gotten closer since he turned 13.
“She’s sometimes a pain in the butt,” Jackson says, about the best stamp of approval any 18-year-old could ask for.
His jests of “how much longer” when she’s asked to unload and count her 73 boxed-up medals bely his pride.
Sitting between her brothers and best friend Walker in July, Smith was on the brink of 18. Yet her “I define my own success” tanktop hints at wisdom beyond her years. The silhouette of a flipping gymnast beneath the mantra depicts Smith’s own happy place, flying through the air, the rush of adrenaline firing.
“What they’ve lived here is so big,” Zmeskal says wistfully of Smith and fellow elites.
Smith has adjusted her expectations without lowering them, still striving to be the best but no longer looking to coaches or hardware to determine whether she has met that high standard. She is hopeful that meets to come will focus on gymnastics rather than politics, that her floor routine will highlight a newly mastered choreography rather than a bum ankle.
The newly minted barswinger wants to hit all four events at her best quality and be confident in herself, showing off routines honed tirelessly through 37 weekly hours in the gym. Then just one goal remains.
“Be the best Ragan I can be,” the dry-erase wall reads, the first and last thing she sees each day.