SAN JOSE, Calif. — Ashton Locklear was 2 years old when she decided she wanted to be an Olympic gymnast.
That decision – based on watching gymnasts at the Sydney Olympic Games march across her television screen in Hamlet wearing “poofy warmups with USA on their backs” – was made 16 years, a twice-broken back and one shoulder surgery ago.
Friday and Sunday – after living for years in a family separated by her chosen sport and the expenditure of tens of thousands of dollars in coaching and travel expenses – Ashton will tie up her hair in a red-white-and-blue ribbon, sprinkle some glitter in her makeup, tape her floating kneecaps into place and attempt the last steps toward her goal.
It will happen at the U.S. Olympic Trials for women’s gymnastics in San Jose, California, where the team for the Olympics next month in Rio de Janeiro will be announced.
In the 120 years of the modern Olympic Games, the U.S. Olympic Committee has sent 12,355 athletes to compete against those of other nations on tracks, ice rinks and snow-covered mountains, in pools and gymnasiums, on rivers, courts and fields.
Not a single one of them listed Hamlet, North Carolina, as his or her hometown.
“I don’t think any of the people in this town realize the magnitude of what Ashton has done,” said Terry Barrett, the Hamlet gym instructor who taught her to do headstands at 2½.
“It’s been very difficult, especially financially,” said Ashton’s mother, Carrie Locklear. “There was no particular time that we knew that this was exactly what we needed to do. It just came in stages, I guess. But it’s what Ashton has always said she wanted to do.”
Ashton’s father, Terry, works in construction hanging sheet rock and laying tile. Carrie used to work weekends as a registered nurse at Sandhills Regional Medical Center until Ashton, who had moved up over the years through gyms in Aberdeen and Statesville, settled at Everest Gymnastics in Huntersville, where she’s been coached by Qi Han, a former member of the Chinese national team, for the past seven years.
Now Carrie and Ashton live five nights a week rent free in a one-bedroom apartment attached to the Statesville home of Bonnie and Todd Dunavent, whose gymnast daughter Dannette – six years younger than Ashton – became friends with her.
“Some things you just always know about a person because of her passion for it,” Bonnie Dunavent said of the decision to help the Locklears. “You just know. Ashton’s one that has it. She’s going to go places.”
Carrie scrubs and cleans the Everest gym in the morning and teaches tumbling and trampoline classes to little children in the afternoon. That’s in addition to paying $800 a month in gym bills. On Wednesdays, though, Carrie returns to teach at Barrett’s Physical Awareness and Gymnastics on Hamlet Avenue. Barrett lets her keep all the fees for that work. Carrie also homeschools Ashton.
Athletes who make the national team get some financial support from USA Gymnastics, the sport’s national governing body. Ashton was paid for part of 2014, when she was the highest ranked American on the uneven bars, finishing fourth at the World Championships in China, and again this year after missing most of 2015 because of surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff in her shoulder.
“I’m hesitant to say anything,” Carrie said of the payments Ashton receives. “It’s not a lot, I’ll tell you that, but USA Gymnastics doesn’t want it publicized.”
“My mom means the world to me,” Ashton said. “If I didn’t have her, then I wouldn’t be doing any of this. I’m in Hamlet Saturday nights and Sundays. It’s for recovery and resting as much as I can. Sometimes I’ll sit down and watch TV with my dad, because I’m never with him, or we’ll go shopping. He likes it when I go to church with him.”
Church is White Hill Baptist in Pembroke, where Locklears of the Lumbee Tribe are as thick as Johanssons in Sweden or Nguyens in Vietnam.
“She has a massive following here already,” said James Locklear, no relation, the editor and publisher of Native Visions Magazine and a Lumbee historian. “This could be one of the most historic moments in tribal history. She’s carrying whole tribe on her back right now.”
Ashton spoke to nearly 100 children at the Pembroke Boys and Girls Club in March after returning from Italy, where she placed first on bars in an international competition.
The Lumbee diaspora has also reached out to help Ashton.
When Carrie couldn’t accompany her daughter to the Pacific Rim Championships last April in Everett, Washington, Jackie Jacobs, a former Miss Lumbee from Lumberton who now owns her own public relations and marketing firm in Seattle and does work for the Quileute Tribe in Washington State, volunteered to be Ashton’s West Coast mother for the weekend.
But mostly Ashton’s career has been pursued in anonymity, her skills, maturity and fearlessness appreciated only within the small community of coaches and competitors who live 24/7 for balance beams, calluses and chalk dust.
“Ashton was willing to try anything, especially if it had anything to do with flipping,” said Jennifer Ayars, owner of Sandhills Academy of Gymnastics in Aberdeen. That’s where Ashton first began competing in the four disciplines of artistic gymnastics: floor exercise, balance beam, vault and uneven bars, which is now her specialty. “We put up her state championship banners in our gym.”
Joe Neuwirth, the Sandhills coach who first taught her the bars, said he knew 6-year-old Ashton would be special after he saw her do a “cast,” a basic move in which the gymnast pushes herself up and away from the bar.
“I said this kid has potential. This is going to be fun.”
But what few people knew was that Ashton competed despite pain from bone spurs in her heels and with “luxating patellas” – knee caps that dislocate, slide out of position and require special taping to hold in place.
She was able to succeed in spite of all that, and was a national tumbling champion, until 2012 when she began experiencing back pain after her tumbling runs, which are part of the floor exercise.
After Ashton’s breakthrough performance at the elite level in the 2013 Nastia Liukin Cup, she was invited to begin training with the national team one week a month. They meet at the Houston, Texas, gym of Marta and Bela Karolyi, the Romanian coaches who developed Olympic gold medalist Nadia Comaneci in 1976 before defecting to the United States and building the American team into an Olympic power beginning with Mary Lou Retton in 1984.
During a tumbling run, Ashton felt a pain in her back.
“She said it wasn’t that bad that night,” Carrie recalled, “but the next morning I got a call from her saying ‘Momma, my back hurts so bad I can’t get out of the bed.’ It was so very hard because she was there and I was at home.”
An MRI exam found that a stress fracture in her spine, and it found evidence of a poorly healed stress fracture from the year before. There was no way she could continue competing on floor or the vault, where her legs and back take a pounding.
“For most people, that happens and they take up knitting or something,” Bonnie Dunavent said.
Ashton is not most people.
“The doctors told me that if I could handle it, then I could do it,” Ashton said. “And I always told myself I could handle anything if I put my mind to it. I never doubted that it would mess up my Olympic plans.”
After eight weeks in a hard plastic body cast, she returned to the bars and tried a move called a Tkachev (many gymnastics moves are named for the athlete who first performed them, in this case Alexander Tkachev, a double gold medalist for the Soviet Union in the 1980 Moscow Olympics).
“It’s where you straddle and fly over the bar and catch it,” Ashton explained. “The first time I tried it after my back injury, I caught it for the first time. It let me know that I hadn’t lost anything and that I was going to be back on track really fast.”
Friday and Sunday will tell whether Ashton’s track runs all the way to Rio.
Jody Meacham, a journalist for the Silicon Valley Business Journal in San Jose, California, will cover Ashton Locklear in this weekend’s Olympic trials.
