After an elite career in public scrutiny, Olivia Greaves gets to define her journey for herself at Auburn
Greaves returned to the all-around last Friday, marking a milestone in the long road for her from junior elite prodigy to Auburn's team veteran.
In the gymnastics world, Olivia Greaves is a bit of a household name.
It’s kind of strange. In Auburn, she could stroll up to Toomer’s and get a lemonade, and no one there would be the wiser. She can walk the concourse and smile to her classmates without getting mobbed like Tahaad Pettiford or, now, Byrum Brown. But in the gymnastics superfandom, in the online corner of “the gymternet,” Greaves was a prodigy: At 14 years old, she won bars as a junior elite at the American Classic. She’d win two more major domestic bars titles as a junior elite. She represented the U.S. on international assignment at 15 at the International Gymnix in Canada, and won team gold. She was invited to national team camps and seemed like every bit a prospect to be a regular on Team USA and maybe, possibly, potentially be an Olympian. So she was watched.
Then, there was the very public suspension of her former coach, and the very public controversy that came with it. Then COVID-19 derailed the Olympic cycle, and at the same time the injury bug hit her, and it hit her a couple of times in a row. She missed Olympic trials. As those whispers of “injury-prone” surely sounded out in certain corners of the gymnastics community, the school she was verbally committed to, Florida, decided to go in a different direction with their scholarship.
After the Olympics came and went without her, she got back to health and represented Team USA on international assignment at the Swiss Cup in November 2021 in Switzerland — where, on her last warmup before the competition, she tore her ACL.
That was the end of her international career.
But it was not the end of her entire career.
It’s not the end of her story.
Greaves returned to the all-around last Friday, competing for the first time in Neville Arena on all four events — vault, bars, beam and floor — completing a long journey back to totally full speed and a long journey back to the driver’s seat of her gymnastics career, and to steering her career on her own terms.
“It’s everything I wanted since the day I came to college, you know?” Greaves said last week. “I came to college and all I wanted was to do all-around and compete. And I think it’s been a long time coming, and I just feel very grateful and excited, and I’ve done a lot of mental work and a lot of physical work to make sure that I’m strong, I’m healthy, and I’m ready for this moment, so I’m really excited.”
She smiled as she spoke then, at the pre-meet press conference, a few days before Auburn’s opener with NC State. She competed on all-around just once before in her collegiate career, in the postseason for an injury-riddled team last season, and this meet marked the first time she’d done it in the regular season or at home. After a slow start on vault, she’d go on to throw down a 9.800 on bars and a 9.825 on beam before closing the night with a stellar 9.950 on floor.
Auburn rolled to a win and a huge season-opening score, and Greaves jumped for joy with her teammates. At the awards ceremony she was named the meet’s floor winner, in a tie with her teammates Sophia Bell. She got to be there for her teammates, and her teammates were there for her. She had gotten the opportunity to be excited about her new floor music, and to debut it. She got to compete. She got to win.
She was back to getting some of the things she wanted out of her gymnastics career, instead of her career taking from her.
“I’ve got sort of a soft spot in my heart for people with a chip on their shoulder,” Auburn head coach Jeff Graba said before the meet. “You know, she was given up on by another school and when she got here, she had a string of injuries; she had a couple more that set her back. So it’s just a lot of work to get where she is. I’m not just saying hard work on gymnastics — I think it’s just been a lot of work, with everything. That’s a lot of public failure, and injury.”
Graba thought back to his own career as a gymnast: “I got injured: Nobody saw that on national TV, you know?” he shrugged. “And nobody in any seriousness talked about me — whether I could make it back, whether I was as good as I used to be, that type of stuff. Liv is just an embodiment of what a lot of these young gymnasts go through with, sort of, the center stage — They asked for it, but they have to live with it. So, it’ll mean a lot to me that she gets out there and can start to prove herself right.”
That discourse really is out there, still visible with a search on old posts, and in the comment sections of the videos of her old routines. But with that scrutiny and that microscope behind her, Greaves’ career now is what she makes it: She’s an experienced team leader and a strong all-around option for the Tigers, and, this season, she can make a new name for herself in a new way — on campus, among the Auburn students and fans.
Her strongest chance to make that name may well be on bars: