What do you think?
Rate this book
Breaking Through My Limits: An Olympian Uncovered
Alexandra Orlando is an Olympic athlete who dedicated seventeen years of her life to the sport of rhythmic gymnastics, winning almost two hundred medals. Despite injury, she competed at the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008, and retired from the sport at the age of twenty-one as one of the top ten gymnasts in the world. Her incredible story is one of struggle and strength. Through it all, her family and friends watched the sport consume her; and every person that came into her life was affected by the constant fight for perfection, and the mental and physical exhaustion. Those who had the strength never left her side. And when the dust settled, a woman emerged who was stronger than she ever thought she could be. Reflecting back on her life as "Alex the Gymnast," Alexandra takes a deeper look on who she was during her career, who she had to be, and how this made her the person she is today.
200 pages, Paperback
First published October 4, 2011
5 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 17, 2022
Orlando is a gymnast—but a rhythmic gymnast, a sport that doesn't get nearly as much attention as artistic gymnastics. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of gymnastics in this book. The first half of the book is a fairly chronological memoir of her time in the sport, but I came out knowing very little more about rhythmic gymnastics than I did at the beginning. Even when Orlando talks about the 2006 Commonwealth Games—a competition at which she dominated, breaking multiple records—the story is devoid of details: I finished that last event and took my time walking off the carpet (47). But...what event? She doesn't tell us about any of them, just the medals. Only rarely does Orlando discuss the different apparatuses (rope, hoop, ball, clubs, and ribbon) used in rhythmic gymnastics, and I don't think she ever describes what any given routine looked like or how it felt to practice and perform it.
The second half of the book is more or less broken into topic-based chapters along the lines of 'here is a person who is important to me'. (This includes two long but vague chapters about exes that periodically devolve into the second person.) This is where a ghostwriter could have been especially useful—bringing that 'people' content into the rest of the book so that it felt more naturally integrated.
There is a lot of potentially interesting stuff here—like that Orlando, as a high-level Canadian athlete, faced a unique set of pressures:
The second half of the book is more or less broken into topic-based chapters along the lines of 'here is a person who is important to me'. (This includes two long but vague chapters about exes that periodically devolve into the second person.) This is where a ghostwriter could have been especially useful—bringing that 'people' content into the rest of the book so that it felt more naturally integrated.
There is a lot of potentially interesting stuff here—like that Orlando, as a high-level Canadian athlete, faced a unique set of pressures:
...I was conflicted with wanting to be a normal teenager and not having to compete when I went to university. I had gotten into schools all across Canada, and was ready to follow my friends to London or Kingston. But there was a little snag in my plans. The world championships were coming up in September, a month into university. We needed to finish well to be guaranteed funding from the government the next year, and it all came down to me. It would be my second Worlds. If I wasn't there, our team wasn't developed enough internationally to get the results we needed. (40)If I remember correctly, Kyle Shewelt talks about something similar in Make It Happen—that pressure to perform not just for the current competition and your own future but for the future of the sport in (in these cases) Canada. It's a sort of pressure that's hard for me to imagine, honestly, and one that probably only a small number of people face. And this is to say nothing of the pressures that female gymnasts are under in general—Orlando talks very vaguely, for example, about a scandal involving an unnamed former coach (I can guess at who the coach is, thanks to Wikipedia, but can't find anything else), and it definitely sounds like there was the female-gymnastics-standard 'if we don't like the way you or your weight perform we will belittle you until you conform'. She might not want to burn bridges, which is fair, but there is a lot left to be discussed even then.
December 9, 2020
I picked up this biography because the ebook was only a few dollars and I thought it might be interesting to read the perspective of an athlete in a niche sport like rhythmic gymnastics, and that I might learn a bit more about this difficult-to-understand sport. Unfortunately, I can't recommend it on either measure, or at all.
One of the book's main problems is that it is really poorly written on the sentence level. It needed a better editor. There are a lot of very long, multi-topic paragraphs that are difficult to read and should have been broken up. Commas, semi-colons, and colons are often mixed up with each other or misused.
Another issue is that the book as a whole is not well-organized. It begins with a chronological telling of her story and experiences from when she was a gymnast, but that part ends less than halfway through the book after her last competition. The rest of the chapters are on disparate themes, all of which jump around the timeline within their own chapter. In the hands of a stronger writer, perhaps this could work. However, here it simply felt disorganized and made it more difficult to understand when everything was happening. I think the book would have been stronger if those themes were integrated into her athletic story rather than being treated separately.
Of these chapters, there are several that I honestly think should have been cut out. One looks like it's going to be about finding a new identity after ending a sporting career but is actually about her dad and his brother - I skimmed it, as it didn't seem that relevant to the rest of the book. There's one about how she met a guy she liked but eventually broke up, which soon begins directly addressing the man in question. (I ended up skimming this as well because it made me feel uncomfortable, as some of it seemed quite private.) There's also a second chapter on a different dramatic relationship she had. While these two romantic relationships clearly affected her, and I understand she is a whole person and not only a gymnast, I picked up this book to read about gymnastics, not a bit about gymnastics and a lot about her breakups.
The other chaoters were closer to the main topic of the book, such as the story of a severe injury she suffered soon after retirement (which gets wrapped up with boring platitudes about finding the people you love and knowing your inner strength and so on and so on), and also some material about how her career affected her family and her relationship with her sister. The best of these chapters, and I would say probably the best section of the book, is the one on her relationship with weight through her career as well as the general obsession with it in rhythmic gymnastics. It's dark and genuinely affecting (and also super depressing).
In place of material that I would have cut, I would have appreciated more detail about the competitions and events themselves. For example, when describing the Commonwealth Games where she won six gold medals, Orlando crunches four of her five event medals down into a single sentence. Her emotional state during the last event - she doesn't specify which apparatus it is, let alone anything about what she was actually doing in her routine - is summed up with a cliche 'I was flying'. She spends far more space on telling us how everyone was incredibly impressed with her.
You could easily swap the name of a different sport into most of the sections on specific competitions, even the Olympics, and they would read almost exactly the same because so little is said about her performances. They are written with vagaries like "I made one mistake in my final event and felt so discouraged" - what was the mistake that was so discouraging? What event was it? I felt like I would need to look up her routines on Youtube to understand what she actually did.
By the end of the book, if I hadn't watched any of her routines? I couldn't have told you anything about her gymnastics style, her choice of music, her insights into constructing her routines, her favorite or hated skills or any that she performed at all, her thoughts on how the sport (which she is still involved with as of the time of writing) is changing or should change beyond stopping the focus on weight and body type, or even her thoughts on leotard fashion. All I would be able to say is that she liked ribbon. Some of the sections on training were interesting, but I often felt like I was reading about a generic North American rhythmic gymnast in the early 2000s, rather than this specific one.
A few other issues I had: Orlando apparently participated in group as well as singleton rhythmic and even won medals in it, but this is not mentioned even once. Did she hate her time in group that much? It might have been interesting to read about how she balanced the two for a time and what the difference was like.
She also mixes up details at some points. For example, she misstates her number of medals from the 2003 Pan-American games; the book says "3 silver and 2 bronze medals", but she won 3 silver and 1 bronze as an individual, and a silver and two bronzes with the group. She also references winning an event in Caracas when it was actually situated in San Felipe (and again, no mention of the fact that she was on the bronze medalist group team). It's understandable if she doesn't exactly remember these details after so many years, but these are easy to look up, and it again points to sloppy editing.
Her friend's name seems to be inexplicably changed from Mary to Sarah, which seems odd unless she did go by Sarah when she was young before changing it for some reason. (This friend is another gymnast who was in the public eye and in Olympic competition records. I tried to look her up out of curiosity, which is how I noticed her name was different.)
The book contains plenty of cliche and shallow platitudes about, for example, how you can do anything by believing in yourself. There are several places where a number of these are dumped together into a single paragraph.
Finally, in a time where more and more allegations of physical, mental, and emotional abuse are coming out from all corners of the gymnastics world, it's difficult not to raise an eyebrow at some of the behavior Orlando describes from her coaches. She writes of being repeatedly screamed at by coaches, having things thrown at her, training despite bleeding, and being made to repeat routines to the point of sheer exhaustion. Sometimes, she claims it was all great and helpful, though two main exceptions to this are when she talks about how some words said to her are still difficult to recount because they hurt, and when she talks about how an unspecified 'they' criticized her for gaining weight and pressured her to lose it with unhelpful advice. She rightfully takes 'they' - whoever 'they' are, as she never gets more specific - to task for this attitude more than once.
The main good point of the book is that it does feel very emotionally honest - perhaps too honest in the sections on her failed relationships, but it makes the section on her relationship to weight the highlight of the book. She candidly describes not only her emotional high points, but also her pain at not making the Olympics the first time, her jealousy and how she had to try to overcome it when others won over her or had opportunities that she didn't, and how her Olympic experience was not the giant fun party that might be expected. I did appreciate that aspect of the biography.
One of the book's main problems is that it is really poorly written on the sentence level. It needed a better editor. There are a lot of very long, multi-topic paragraphs that are difficult to read and should have been broken up. Commas, semi-colons, and colons are often mixed up with each other or misused.
Another issue is that the book as a whole is not well-organized. It begins with a chronological telling of her story and experiences from when she was a gymnast, but that part ends less than halfway through the book after her last competition. The rest of the chapters are on disparate themes, all of which jump around the timeline within their own chapter. In the hands of a stronger writer, perhaps this could work. However, here it simply felt disorganized and made it more difficult to understand when everything was happening. I think the book would have been stronger if those themes were integrated into her athletic story rather than being treated separately.
Of these chapters, there are several that I honestly think should have been cut out. One looks like it's going to be about finding a new identity after ending a sporting career but is actually about her dad and his brother - I skimmed it, as it didn't seem that relevant to the rest of the book. There's one about how she met a guy she liked but eventually broke up, which soon begins directly addressing the man in question. (I ended up skimming this as well because it made me feel uncomfortable, as some of it seemed quite private.) There's also a second chapter on a different dramatic relationship she had. While these two romantic relationships clearly affected her, and I understand she is a whole person and not only a gymnast, I picked up this book to read about gymnastics, not a bit about gymnastics and a lot about her breakups.
The other chaoters were closer to the main topic of the book, such as the story of a severe injury she suffered soon after retirement (which gets wrapped up with boring platitudes about finding the people you love and knowing your inner strength and so on and so on), and also some material about how her career affected her family and her relationship with her sister. The best of these chapters, and I would say probably the best section of the book, is the one on her relationship with weight through her career as well as the general obsession with it in rhythmic gymnastics. It's dark and genuinely affecting (and also super depressing).
In place of material that I would have cut, I would have appreciated more detail about the competitions and events themselves. For example, when describing the Commonwealth Games where she won six gold medals, Orlando crunches four of her five event medals down into a single sentence. Her emotional state during the last event - she doesn't specify which apparatus it is, let alone anything about what she was actually doing in her routine - is summed up with a cliche 'I was flying'. She spends far more space on telling us how everyone was incredibly impressed with her.
You could easily swap the name of a different sport into most of the sections on specific competitions, even the Olympics, and they would read almost exactly the same because so little is said about her performances. They are written with vagaries like "I made one mistake in my final event and felt so discouraged" - what was the mistake that was so discouraging? What event was it? I felt like I would need to look up her routines on Youtube to understand what she actually did.
By the end of the book, if I hadn't watched any of her routines? I couldn't have told you anything about her gymnastics style, her choice of music, her insights into constructing her routines, her favorite or hated skills or any that she performed at all, her thoughts on how the sport (which she is still involved with as of the time of writing) is changing or should change beyond stopping the focus on weight and body type, or even her thoughts on leotard fashion. All I would be able to say is that she liked ribbon. Some of the sections on training were interesting, but I often felt like I was reading about a generic North American rhythmic gymnast in the early 2000s, rather than this specific one.
A few other issues I had: Orlando apparently participated in group as well as singleton rhythmic and even won medals in it, but this is not mentioned even once. Did she hate her time in group that much? It might have been interesting to read about how she balanced the two for a time and what the difference was like.
She also mixes up details at some points. For example, she misstates her number of medals from the 2003 Pan-American games; the book says "3 silver and 2 bronze medals", but she won 3 silver and 1 bronze as an individual, and a silver and two bronzes with the group. She also references winning an event in Caracas when it was actually situated in San Felipe (and again, no mention of the fact that she was on the bronze medalist group team). It's understandable if she doesn't exactly remember these details after so many years, but these are easy to look up, and it again points to sloppy editing.
Her friend's name seems to be inexplicably changed from Mary to Sarah, which seems odd unless she did go by Sarah when she was young before changing it for some reason. (This friend is another gymnast who was in the public eye and in Olympic competition records. I tried to look her up out of curiosity, which is how I noticed her name was different.)
The book contains plenty of cliche and shallow platitudes about, for example, how you can do anything by believing in yourself. There are several places where a number of these are dumped together into a single paragraph.
Finally, in a time where more and more allegations of physical, mental, and emotional abuse are coming out from all corners of the gymnastics world, it's difficult not to raise an eyebrow at some of the behavior Orlando describes from her coaches. She writes of being repeatedly screamed at by coaches, having things thrown at her, training despite bleeding, and being made to repeat routines to the point of sheer exhaustion. Sometimes, she claims it was all great and helpful, though two main exceptions to this are when she talks about how some words said to her are still difficult to recount because they hurt, and when she talks about how an unspecified 'they' criticized her for gaining weight and pressured her to lose it with unhelpful advice. She rightfully takes 'they' - whoever 'they' are, as she never gets more specific - to task for this attitude more than once.
The main good point of the book is that it does feel very emotionally honest - perhaps too honest in the sections on her failed relationships, but it makes the section on her relationship to weight the highlight of the book. She candidly describes not only her emotional high points, but also her pain at not making the Olympics the first time, her jealousy and how she had to try to overcome it when others won over her or had opportunities that she didn't, and how her Olympic experience was not the giant fun party that might be expected. I did appreciate that aspect of the biography.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews