Today (January 19th) is the four year anniversary of the knee injury that changed my life. Most people I know have heard bits and pieces, and finally I’m putting the whole thing together in one place. This story is for every anyone (athlete or not) who’s struggled with an injury – yeah it sucks big time, but do ALL your physical therapy and be unreasonably optimistic. Things can and will get better.

The Synopsis

On January 19th, 2007, while competing for Stanford Men’s Gymnastics at the UC Berkeley, I suffered a total knee dislocation while performing a double-twisting Yurchenko. My ACL, PCL, MCL, LCL and meniscus were instantly torn. It hurt a lot.

I underwent multiple surgeries, required the use of crutches for months and spent a couple hundred hour in physical therapy. One year later, I was back in the arena as an active competitor. In my final season, I was elected a team captain and helped lead our team to win the 2009 NCAA Team Championship – our first victory in over 14 years.

It was at once the worst thing, and the best thing to ever happen to me. The permanent damage has kept me from enjoying many normal physical activities – but the experience overall has helped me develop an inner strength that cannot be measured.

I started a Substack! New issues go out every Saturday

This is my story.

1. Get ’em while they’re young

Hanging out with some of my gymnastics summer campers.

You really need to start doing Gymnastics at a young age in order to train your body and your mind properly so I’m glad I started classes early. I was about six years old.

My mom is a gymnastics coach so I was in the gym all the time, but she didn’t want me involved in the sport at first. Her training in China was grueling and tough – she didn’t want such a hard life for her only son. Before my injury I would laugh when she expressed this sentiment. Here in America, we do sports for fun!

Now I just nod and say “it was worth it”.

I sucked as a kid and in the off chance I placed at a meet, it was 5th or 6th. But I loved it and worked it. When I turned 10, something happened and I started improving a lot faster. I jumped a level, and participated in the Future Stars program, which was created by USA Gymnastics to identify young talent.

I ended up earning a place on the “Junior Development Team” which meant I got to go to a camp in Colorado Springs. I trained with other “Future Stars” like Jonathan Horton (2008 Beijing Olympic team member) and got to see how US National team members trained. It was at this time that I realized “Man, not only is gymnastics a lot of fun, but I could actually become really good someday!”

On a side note – if you can provide children opportunities to legitimately experience that feeling, you are doing them a huge favor.

Of course it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.

2. Getting hurt isn’t necessarily a bad thing

I think injuries are a healthy part of participation in sports. I think it’s important for kids to suffer some kind of minor injury when they are young. Break arm, twist an ankle, sprain a shoulder. Kids recover quickly and it teaches them about enduring pain, understanding safety and valuing their health and mobility.

Gymnastics is a sport that lends itself to injury. You are engaged in a ton of flipping and twisting and putting your body into positions that are quite unnatural. (This gymnastics blooper reel is illustrative of what can go wrong). You make sure to take as many precautions as you can and prepare yourself physically and mentally as much as possible – but at some point, you’ve just got to freaking go for it.

Over 16 years of gymnastics, I’ve personally:

broken an ankle

dislocated multiple fingers

landed directly on my neck multiple times (including after a botched one-and-a-half flipping dismount off the high bar)

straddled the parallel bars right onto my you-know-whats

split my forehead skin open with my shin (got a Harry Potter-esque scar out of it!)

endured countless bruises, scrapes, blisters and rips

I think gymnasts have a very special relationship with pain because we experience such a high amount of it on a day to day basis.

For example, I knew guys that would pop 4-6 ibuprofen pills *everyday* just to manage normal training pain. My shins looked like a battlefield from all the times I had smashed them into the wood on the pommel. It was not uncommon for me to step into the shower and wince at some part of my body that I had scraped during practice and was not even aware of until it started burning from the water. (“Oh! I guess I must have scraped myself over there).

But all of that was just a warmup for what was to come.

3. The year of the double twisting Yurchenko

When I was preparing to graduate high school, a teammate gave me a clock that counted down to 2008. It was to remind me of the time left until the next Olympics – which was a goal of mine. I had done fairly well my freshman year and had even reached a number 9 ranking in the all-around at one point for the entire NCAA. Pretty cool. Sophomore year was also a good year – I had gotten stronger, more consistent and learned some new skills. But I was worried about plateauing. I needed to take it to the next level.

Junior year was supposed to be my blow out year. Well … I certainy blew out something.

The summer between my sophomore and junior year I was training a new vault. For several years, I had been competing a Yurchenko 1.5 Twist (this is a round off onto the board, back handspring onto the horse into about one and a half flips … with one and a half twists). Something clicked that summer and after a lot of drills and a lot of false starts, I was finally able to add another half twist – making it a Double Twisting Yurchenko.

This was a big deal to me because I’ve never been considered an “explosive” athlete and I felt like I had made a breakthrough. This was one of the many signs for me that 2007 would be a big year for me and I was excited to compete the Yurchenko.

Little did I know I’d only do it twice in competition, ever.

4. “Felt good in warmups – I should be fine”

I remember being annoyed because my coach wouldn’t let me spike my hair into a faux-hawk. He thought it looked unprofessional – but of course I thought I looked stupid with my hair down and ungelled. You can see my hair in this video of my pommel horse routine (the vaulting horse is in the background).

Warm ups went fine. I think I completed one double twisting Yurchenko and it felt alright. Not great but good enough.

The thing about vault is that you typically train onto lower and softer landing surfaces than the actual competition. We practice our vaults on mats that are stacked on a big soft “resi-pit” or “whale mat” as we sometimes called it. We’d try to made the landing harder when doing mock-competitions, but it is still worlds away from having two 8-inch mats ontop of basketball floor as your landing surface.

This was our first official meet of the season and I wanted to perform well and of course BEAT CAL. (Incidentally, the Cal team has always been a bunch of outstanding guys – very cool people who are fun to hang out with outside of the competition floor).

Pommels came first, then floor then vault. I remember feeling the sweat evaporating off my hands. Unlike on other events, pre-meet jitters were a good thing for vault – they gave you the additional oomph you needed to go big.

The moment comes. I salute the judge.

The run down the runway felt fine. It was only after the round off and punch did I feel a little concerned. My “block” off the horse wasn’t as strong as I would have liked. I remember thinking “Ooh, this one is going to be a little rough on the landing”.

There was never any question in the air about finishing the skill though. Gymnasts are taught early on to never “balk” on a skill, especially if it’s in a meet. You’re more likely to be injured if you freak out in the middle than if you stay with a skill even if you’re not feeling great about it. No backing out – I was all in.

And like in poker, sometimes going all in doesn’t work out for the best.

5. And here comes the snap

Not everyone feels comfortable watching the video. I’ve watched it at least 50 times at this point but it’s still pretty intense.

It happened really fast. I landed and my left knee gave in. It simply collapsed. I instantly start screaming at the top of my lungs from the massive pain that came on instantly. When I ran out of breath, I inhaled quickly and let loose another gut-wrenching scream.

The pain dialed back from 11 to like an 8. After dispelling all that air, I was able to get a bit of handle on myself, and just rolled around on the mat swearing. Coaches and trainers from both my team and the Cal team come rushing over. I grab a hold of the Cal team trainer’s meaty hand and act like I’m trying to crush it like putty. I knew then that my season was probably over.

As noted earlier, I’ve dislocated several fingers. Your joint feels really tight when it’s dislocated – and while painful, popping the joint back into place feels much better (for obvious, anatomical reasons). I remember wanting to kick my leg straight to “relocate” my knee, but then also thinking this would probably be a bad idea. What ended up happening was since everything was torn, my knee kind of just sagged back into place since nothing was really holding it together besides my hamstring, my patellar tendon and some skin.

Eventually, I hobble off on a pair of crutches, my knee wrapped in tons of ice bags. I make a point of staying to watch the rest of the meet and even eating pizza with the guys before going home. It turned out my vault score still beat every one of the Cal guys who all fall / botch their landings (though without the horrific injuries to boot).

6. Going under

You usually feel pretty lousy after surgery. The best part is that you get breakfast, lunch AND dinner in bed. The worst part is struggling to accurately pee into a container.

You usually feel pretty lousy after surgery. The best part is that you get breakfast, lunch AND dinner in bed. The worst part is struggling to accurately pee into a container.

Our team physician, Dr. Garza, was typically the jokester. While a busy man, he always has time to make fun of your haircut or your non-rigorous major. So when he walked in with a somber look, I knew things were bad.

“We’re going to have to do two different surgeries to repair your knee. There has been major damage to all four ligaments. You see all this dark space here? That’s where your ligaments are supposed to be. Instead there’s nothing.”

Of course the clincher: “We’ll likely need multiple surgeries to repair the damage. You should seriously consider if you want to be doing gymnastics when this is over.”

Sometimes people ask if I regret doing gymnastics, or regret learning the double-twisting Yurchenko. My answer of course is never. I knew my injury was a fluke – my coach had done his best to prepare me but sometimes things just happen. I had worked hard to prepare myself and sure, having stronger leg muscles could have helped – but I blame no one for what happened. My focus was not on the past, but on the future.

For whatever reason – am overly optimistic, read too many comeback stories, thought Dr. Garza was talking about worst-case scenarios – I never seriously doubted that I would come back to gymnastics. It felt like life had just bashed me in the face: all I wanted to do was spit my bloody tooth out and say, “That the best you got? Watch this.” To be honest, the millions of little inconveniences was the worst part of the injury – never the big stuff.

Going into surgery is kind of scary. The worst part is the waiting. You get there super early in the morning (or at least I did because they wanted to do my surgeries first), change into that stupid gown and just lie there forever. It’s chilly, you’re sleep deprived, hungry and pretty much alone.

Eventually the anesthesiologist comes over, sets up your IV, and starts you off with some “warmup” stuff. It feels funky going into your bloodstream and your body starts to feel a little tingly. As everyone finally gets ready, they wheel your gurney over to the operating room. You’re feeling decently woozy at this point but you still recognize your surgeon, even with his mask on. He says some nondescript upbeat words to you and goes back to preparing. You’re moved off the gurney and onto the operating table.

For a brief moment, you are just lying there, listening to all the beeping noises, watching all kinds of surgical assistants buzz around you. Then the anethesiologist adds something to your drip and your head starts to feel heavy.

It’s hard not to make comparisons between going under for an operation, and death. I knew that I had a very high likelihood of coming out fine on the other side, but there’s always that nagging concern in the back of your mind. I always tried to make the most of those final moments and ask myself: “If I never woke up from this, can I be satisfied with what I’ve accomplished? Have I made the world a better place? Will my friends and family know that I cared about them and tried to do right by them?”

Fortunately (or perhaps, through deliberate decisions I’ve made on how to live), the answers to those questions was always “Yes.” But there was never much time to ponder as an oxygen mask would soon come over my mouth and I’d breathe in its cold, weird-tasting air. By the second breath I’d be out.

When I woke up, the real work would begin.

Click here to read PART TWO.