How does a new Olympic silver medal winner celebrate? Mohini Bhardwaj is tattooing the five rings to her wrists and exchanging rings of a different color by getting engaged. It’s a far cry from surviving on PowerBars:
“… [A]fter practice, I’ll grab all the pennies and go to the Coinstar and get like $12 off the Coinstar and be so excited that I could buy some soy milk and cereal…” [The coach] became aware of Bhardwaj’s fun-loving side in 1997, she said, when Bhardwaj stayed out late with the members of the Russian team at the world championships in Switzerland. She partied too much and studied too little, once coming to the coach in tears, proud that she had finally earned a B in a class. “Her peak of being a rebel was probably in the late 90’s, so it really wasn’t her time,” Kondos Field said. “This time, she did it for herself…”
By the way, that multi-culti paragon The New York Times thinks a desi with a nose ring is ‘walking on the wild side’:
She has walked on the balance beam and walked on the wild side; she still has a subtle piece of jewelry pierced into the left side of her nose.
It’s a great story, but I’m skeptical. Gymnasts are professional anorexics, and this sounds like something you tell your coach to justify a drop in weight but still get them off the hook. If this did happen for real, it was probably occassional, not regular.
She also wasn’t very good at making her dollar stretch. Paying coinstar to count your change, and then buying soy milk and cereal (some of the highest markup items in terms of dollar per nutritional unit) is not very smart. If you’ve been poor, or you know somebody who has, you know to go for the bulk items, like the oats and the powdered milk. You can probably eat … 5-10x as long that way.
Given that calories are mission critical for a gymnast (not too many and not too few), and given her seriousness about training, I would be surprised if this was a regular occurrence. It sounds more like Schwarzenegger’s Soviet tanks, something poetic you tell the media to glorify your rise.