EIt was Tuesday afternoon in Los Angeles when Nia Dennis made one of those special moments in her life public on her Instagram story. “Oh my God!” Can be heard during the short video, voices bubble up and the camera shakes back and forth. Michelle Obama has just published a tweet on Twitter: “That’s what I call violent! You are a star! @DennisNia! ”Writes the wife of the 44th President of the United States. Nia Dennis can hardly understand her luck at this moment.
There has been a lot of confusion recently in the life of the 21-year-old gymnast, who was appointed to the extended World Cup squad in the United States in 2015, but who has never been in the spotlight as much as in the past few days. The grandstands in the hall in Los Angeles were covered with blue tarpaulins last weekend, spectators were not allowed due to the many corona infections in Los Angeles when Nia Dennis succeeded in a floor choreography that has not only fascinated the gymnastics world since then. “Black Excellence” is how she wrote this extraordinary two minutes. More than ten million people have now watched the video on Twitter.
The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) college competition against the Arizona State Sun Devils shouldn’t just be a sporting performance for them, it should be a statement, an outcry. The soundtrack was provided by a medley of different songs by Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé, Missy Elliott, Tupac Shakur and Megan Thee Stallion. Just a few months after her shoulder operation, Nia Dennis did a powerful double backflip, she showed twists and turns, a little dance, a little hip hop, a lot of freestyle.
She also paid tribute to the disgraced football player Colin Kaepernick as she kneeled down. And she reminded of Tommie Smith and John Carlos when she showed the raised fist, the “Black Power salute”. It was a gig that celebrated black culture. And that in a country in which a struggle is often required to publicly represent this blackness.
Nia Dennis made this fight look very easy, she looks as if she is having the best time of her life in just under two minutes. This achievement was rewarded with a fabulous 9.95 points. “This performance definitely reflects everything I am as a woman today. And of course, I had to include many parts of my culture. I wanted to have a dance party because that’s my personality, “she said afterwards to the Los Angeles Daily News.
For decades, women’s gymnastics was dominated by whites. The music was mostly classical, and it was long an open secret that the international judges preferred female athletes from Russia. Only Simone Biles, the outstanding gymnast of the past decade, turned this world upside down – at least superficially. The old role models are often still raging behind the scenes. It was only last year that Tia Kiaku, a former gymnast from Alabama, made public how often she had endured bullying or racist jokes from her former white teammates or coaches.
Nia Dennis, born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, knows these problems. One of her appearances became a viral hit last year when she was doing gymnastics to Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love”. Shortly thereafter, she was invited to the Ellen DeGeneres talk show. She sat there shyly and said, among other things, that she had almost stopped doing gymnastics.
Because while preparing for the 2016 Olympic Games, she suffered a rupture of her Achilles tendon. “I was desperate,” she said, “I felt that everything I sacrificed, everything my family sacrificed was lost.” She went on, knowing that she would make it to the international level Tip wouldn’t make it. She’s gone to another fight and she doesn’t look like it’s over.
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