The five-time Olympic gold medalist and 14-time world champion Katie Ledecky can add one more accolade to her resume—2017 Female Athlete of the Year. The Associated Press chose Ledecky, with 351 votes, over world-class tennis player Serena Williams (343 votes) and track star Allyson Felix (248 votes).

Finishing second last year in voting to gymnast Simone Biles, her candidacy was strengthened this time around by her performance at the 2017 World Aquatics Championships is Budapest, where she won five gold medals and a silver.

According to the AP, Ledecky is the eighth female swimmer to win the award and the first since Amy Van Dyken in 1996. Among others is 1969 winner Debbie Meyer who Ledecky mirrored at last year’s Rio games by swimming the 200, 400, and 800 freestyles in a single Olympics. She is also the first active college athlete to win since UConn basketball player Rebecca Lobo in 1995.

“It’s a really great history of women swimmers and freestylers,” she told AP. “I really look up to a lot of those women.”

The 20-year-old Stanford sophomore got her start in swimming at age 6 because she wanted to make friends. Over the years, she has spent time training at Michael Phelps’ alma mater, the North Baltimore Aquatic Club in Mt. Washington. Now, she is one of the most decorated American female swimmers in history and is favored to win big at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

Despite the pressure of living in a performance-driven and results-driven world, Ledecky enjoys her journey from start to finish and always puts in her best effort.

She is remaining levelheaded and trying to enjoy a normal college experience—living in dorms, swimming with friends, and trying to decide on a major.

“Just being in the college environment has kind of added another layer of fun,” she said. “Being with teammates and working toward NCAA championships and having that team goal, that’s another thing that is fun. I know the four years goes by very quickly and I want to do everything I can to prepare.”

Under Armour inks deal with MLB for uniforms in 2020.
Kevin Plank’s sports apparel empire has had tentacles in almost every major sport—and now it can add baseball to that roster. In its first major professional sports uniform deal, UA will take over for Majestic Athletic as the official on-field uniform provider for Major League Baseball starting in 2020. New Era will continue to provide hats for the league.

Based on the flashy uniforms that Under Armour has produced for University of Maryland, Northwestern, and Team USA, baseball teams in 2020 will likely get quite spruced up. We see many flag patterns in our future.

Ryan Mallett says he’ll be ready to fill in for Flacco on Sunday.
These haven’t been the best few weeks for the Ravens offense, which is why you might see the team switch things up on Sunday against the Jets. Ravens backup quarterback Ryan Mallett practiced with the team this week as Joe Flacco was nursing a right shoulder injury. Both head coach John Harbaugh and new offensive coordinator Marty Mornhinweg seem to think that Flacco will be ready come game day, but Mallett says he is prepared either way.

“You’ve got to be ready at a drop of a hat,” Mallett told The Baltimore Sun. “Something can happen during a game, any week of the season. So you’ve just always got to be ready.”

Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad speaks at Morgan State.
After becoming the first Muslim-American woman to compete and medal in the Olympic games wearing a hijab, fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad came to Morgan State University to discuss race in sports and culture.

The symposium, titled “The Impact of Negative Images on Black Women Athletes,” also featured ESPN’s Jemele Hill, former WNBA All-Star Kara Lawson, and former Washington Post columnist Lonnae O’Neal.

“When I qualified [for the Olympics] . . . immediately, my life and my experiences in sport just kind of felt bigger than me,” Muhammad said according to The Sun. “I feel the same way when we think of firsts in swimming with Simone Manuel being the first African-American woman to medal in an Olympic swimming event. Those moments in our history are so much bigger than we are.”

But Muhammad was very candid when talking about how she is treated differently compared to some other athletes on Team USA. “As a black woman and as an African-American Muslim woman . . . everything we do is under a microscope,” she said. “We have to watch what we say. We have to watch how we act. We have to watch what we tweet. We’re being policed more than others. Michael Phelps laughs during the medal ceremony. . . Even with Ryan Lochte, it was ‘Well, boys will be boys.'”

Muhammad continued to come back to the importance of sharing her narrative with the goal of inspiring young athletes.

“I remember being a kid and being told that I didn’t belong in my sport,” she said, “For me, it has always been really important to try to reach our youth, specifically to let them know there is no limit to what you can do as long as you’re willing to work.”

And he wasn’t quite done. On Thursday night, Kim reached based three more times, going 2-for-3 with a walk and an RBI to raise his average to .308 for the year. His biggest moment came in the seventh inning, when he grounded a ball into right field, driving in Michael Bourn from second to give the Orioles a 3-0 lead.

The Orioles moved into a tie for the first AL Wild Card spot and last night’s win eliminated the Yankees from the playoffs altogether. We’re not sure about you, but that makes us want to mimic Kim’s dance moves in this amazing Korean music video.

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Joe Flacco has fourth baby, and first daughter.
Maybe it’s just us, but it seems like the Flacco family is having kids at the same rate Joe was throwing consecutive completions on Sunday. And on Tuesday at 2:19 p.m., they added another one to the clan—but this time it was a baby girl. Joe and Dana welcomed Evelyn Renee to join brothers Stephen (4), Daniel (3), and Francis (1).

“It was definitely different. Seeing a girl come out after three boys was a bit of a shock,” Joe told BaltimoreRavens.com. “Everybody is beyond overjoyed, beyond pumped.” During every pregnancy, the couple has waited to find out the sex of their baby. “I was keeping my fingers crossed,” Joe said. “You hear fathers getting scared about not having boys, but I was starting to get to the point that I was scared about not having a little girl. It’s just something I wanted.” Congrats to the Flacco family on the new addition!

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Arnold Palmer had many Baltimore connections.
Legendary golfer Arnold Palmer passed away on Sunday at age 87 and The Sun‘s Don Markus chronicled Palmer’s various connections to Baltimore over the years. Markus recounted that Palmer earned his first professional win in the 1956 Eastern Invitations Open at Mt. Pleasant, played for more than 1,000 people in 1972 at the Pine Ridge Golf Course for a charity event, and made his last public appearance five years ago for a Maryland Special Olympics fundraiser at Martin’s West.

“I love Baltimore,” Palmer told The Sun prior to that 2011 event. “I think it’s one of the great cities in America. I’m big on the seafood.”

Another fun piece of trivia is that the iced tea/lemonade hybrid drink named after Palmer was rumored to be first invented at a local pub here in town.

“[People at the next table] asked what he was drinking, and he said, ‘Half iced tea and half lemonade,’ and she said ‘That sounds, great, what do you call it?,” PR executive David Nevins told The Sun. “Arnie said, ‘It doesn’t have a name, it’s just that she ran out of ice tea when she was pouring it. The woman said, ‘I’m going to order the same thing and call it ‘The Arnold Palmer.’ From that day on, it caught fire.”

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Barack Obama talks about the “Phelps face.”
Thursday was Team USA Day at the White House and many of the American Olympians who competed in Rio were present, including Bethesda’s Katie Ledecky and Clarkesville native and Paralympian Tatyana McFadden. President Barack Obama gave a speech in which he discussed specific accomplishments of the athletes and a couple of Marylanders got a shout-out. First he talked about Ledecky’s phenomenal swimming performance.

“Then then there’s this young woman named Katie Ledecky,” Obama said. “She obliterates her own records in the 400- and 800-freestyle, and lapped the field in the 800. Did you watch it on TV? Like there was nobody else in the pool. Crazy!”

A few minutes later, President Obama mentioned Michael Phelps, who wasn’t in attendance, presumably still at the Ryder Cup in Minnesota. (I guess the White House is old hat at this point.)

“Michael Phelps became the greatest Olympian of all time, breaking a 2,000-year-old record for most individual titles,” Obama said. “If you’re breaking a 2,000-year record, that’s pretty impressive. If they have to go back to the Greeks, that’s an impressive record.”

The President—on stage with First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, and Paralympic soccer player Josh Brunais—went on for 15 minutes about how proud he is of Team USA before cracking just one more joke.

“I could talk about this forever,” he said. “But if I keep going longer, I could get ‘Phelps Face’ from you guys.”

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One event is held per day, starting with timed envelope stuffing on Monday, a lobby obstacle course on Tuesday, a costume change competition on Wednesday, and continuing today with a speed-reading of Hamlet’s famous monologue before wrapping up tomorrow with a time scenery change competition on the stage at Everyman.

Some of the events, like the obstacle course and Friday’s scene change, are hosted at Everyman, while the others are conducted by the individual staffs at their respective theaters and shared via Facebook Live videos, which have generated thousands of views already.

“I’ve been filming the events and we’re having lots of people from different departments participating, so it’s generating a lot of excitement internally as well as building some great camaraderie with other theater companies in town,” says Lisa Lance, the public relations manager at Center Stage. “I think there’s a healthy sense of competition but everybody’s having a lot of fun with it.”

Indeed, the videos emit a contagious sense of high-spirited hijinks as coworkers cheer each other on and engage rivals with quasi-ironic posturing and trash talk. But there is real affection underneath the bravado, maintains Horan, who used to work at Center Stage as a box office manager before accepting his current position at Everyman.

“We’re all trying to elevate the theater scene together . . . and we’re all friends,” he says.

The event will wrap up on Friday when all the participants will head to Westside restaurant Forno for happy hour, a final medal count, and a closing ceremony that Horan jokes will be “a high five in a sort of ’80s freeze-frame kind of way.”

As for whether or not this is a one-off, Horan says he doesn’t know for sure, but he’s already dreaming big.

“Maybe if we do it again, it will be even bigger.”

“I just want to take it all in this last time around.”

This is what Michael Phelps told us in 2012, referring to the London Olympics and his impending retirement. That, of course, did not pan out and, while many ordinary people do not announce their retirement twice, Phelps’ story is far from ordinary.

It may have started out that way, as an 8-year-old swimming for the Meadowbrook Tomatoes in Mt. Washington. That’s when Phelps first met his lifelong coach Bob Bowman and his talent was obvious from the start.

“If you go and look at the Preakness horses, they look a certain way,” Bowman told us. “They have a certain body type. Michael’s put together like an ideal swimmer. You could see when he was in the water he had a tremendous feel, meaning he moved through the water without excess motion. He was efficient.”

Phelps made the trip to the 2000 Olympics while he was just a sophomore at Towson High School, becoming the youngest U.S. male swimmer to do so in 86 years. Though he didn’t medal, his career was propelling as fast as his butterfly stroke.

He first met with his lifelong agent, Peter Carlisle, in 2002 and proceeded to rack up medal after medal in the Olympic games in Athens, Beijing, London, and most recently Rio. USA Swimming saw its membership jump up exponentially and, from 2008-2012, airtime on NBC for swimming increased 35.5 hours.

“The goal I had was to change the sport of swimming and take it to a new level,” Phelps told us. “It’s amazing to see how its popularity has increased over the years.”

Phelps’ popularity certainly sky-rocketed, too. He has appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated five times. He has made tens of millions of dollars in endorsement deals alone, signing with the likes of Visa, Subway, Under Armour, and Speedo. He now has his own line of swimwear called MP. That original swim school in Mt. Washington? It’s now named in his honor. Not to mention, he’s become the most decorated Olympian, by far, along the way.

But his path, as many know, has not been without its hurdles. In 2009, a photo of him smoking marijuana went viral, but he and his image came out relatively unscathed.

“It’s impossible to know what opportunities didn’t come because of it,” Carlisle told us. “I’m sure it had an effect, but most of the sponsors he had he still has, and he’s added to it. Fortunately, his brand has been resilient.”

Resilience is certainly what it took in September 2014 when Phelps was arrested for a DUI after being pulled over at 1:40 a.m. in the Fort McHenry Tunnel and clocking a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit. After the arrest, Phelps didn’t leave his house for days and, in this revealing 2015 Sports Illustrated article, he admits he was depressed.

“I was in a really dark place,” Phelps told Sports Illustrated. “Not wanting to be alive anymore.”

In the article, friends and family, including Ray Lewis, whom Phelps describes as “like a brother to me,” convinced him to go to rehab. “’I gave him some harsh reality,’ Lewis said. ‘I said, ‘Bro, what are you doing with your life?’ Phelps’s recollection of that conversation? ‘He tore me a new one.’”

Though rehab was “probably the most afraid I’ve ever felt in my life,” the group therapy worked. Before that, “I saw myself as the athlete that I was, but not as a human being.” After, he began to value himself as a person.

Following rehab, many pieces of Phelps’ life came back together, including reconciling with his estranged father, Fred. He also got engaged to his longtime on-again-off-again girlfriend Nicole Johnson. The two had son Boomer in May and plan on marrying in the fall.

“I’m back to being the little kid who once said anything is possible,” Phelps told Sports Illustrated. “You’re going to see a different me than you saw in any of the other Olympics.”

And, boy, was he right. This past Olympics in Rio, Phelps looked like he could do no wrong. Even when he was trailing, a crucial turn or extended amount of time underwater pushed him ahead of the pack. He won races by a body length—all 6-foot-4-inches of it. In all, he added another five gold medals and one silver to his belt, which adds up to a staggering 27 Olympic medals in total.

“It’s rather amazing to think of Michael’s journey since 2000,” his mom, Debbie, said on the Today Show Friday morning. “Starting from age 15 and now 31, it’s just remarkable . . . Michael is very driven to correct thing that have gone wrong. I’ve never seen him as happy as he is now.”

As for the next phase of Phelps’ life, we can only go by what he told us he had planned back in 2012.

“After I retire, I want to take time for myself, golfing, and doing things I haven’t been able to experience,” he said. “I’ve never really taken a vacation. I want to travel and experience the world. I know that may sound strange, but while I have been to a lot of great countries, I’ve only seen the airport, pool, and hotel. We never have a chance to get out and explore. I’ll always be involved in swimming, just in a different way.”

We can also assume that he’d add one more thing to the roster of golf, travel, and swim: spending time with his brand new family.

Ravens win first preseason game, but there’s still work to be done.
Speaking of the Ravens, they went on to win the preseason opener 22-19. (Call it fate, but it seems that 22 was the magic number last night.) No 28 must’ve been a hot number as well. Baltimore native Terrance West had an impressive game, running for 25 yards including a diving touchdown at the one-yard line and an exciting rushing touchdown on a reverse. (Read more about West in our upcoming September issue.) Buck Allen and rookie Kenneth Dixon were not to be ignored. Allen scored a touchdown at the end of the second half with a 19-yard catch and run and Dixon averaged 4.9 yards per carry.

Backup quarterback Ryan Mallett a bit less impressive. He went 11-for-15 in completions, yet ended the first half with the Ravens in the lead. As long as Joe Flacco remains healthy, we don’t anticipate Mallett hitting the field during the regular season. Ronnie Stanley—the Ravens 6th overall pick in the 2016 draft—surprised us all by starting the game at left tackle and staying in until the middle of the second quarter. Stanley left practice last week with a soft-tissue knee injury, se we didn’t expect to see him suit up. Mallett wasn’t under too much pressure in the pocket, so job well done.

The Ravens defense, however, was a little shaky. The secondary struggled to keep Carolina from marching up the field in the first series with reigning league MVP Newton leading the attack. The Ravens red-zone defense was ever reliable, but the secondary definitely needs some work before the regular season starts.

Oh, and by the way, Phelps beat a 2,000-year-old Olympic record.
Not to bury the lede, but upon that amazing performing in the 200-meter IM last night, Phelps became the greatest athlete in the world—both ancient and modern. More than 2,000 years ago, Leonidas of Rhodes competed in four successive Olympiads in 164BC, 160BC, 156BC, and 152BC and in each of these he won three different foot races. While Phelps has a total of 22 Olympic gold medals (which is record-breaking in itself), nine of those have come in relays. So, in terms of individual titles, Leonidas still had him beat. That was until last night, when Phelps won his 13th individual gold.

According to the BBC, Leonidas left quite the legacy, being worshipped as a deity after his death, venerated in Greek literature, and a statue of Rhodes was erected with this inscription: “He had the speed of a God.” Nothing against Leonidas, but we can think of a certain Towson native who more aptly fits that description.

Watch Phelps compete in his final Olympic race tonight, his signature 100-meter butterfly, at 9:12 p.m. on NBC.

“The young bucks brought tears to our eyes,” Phelps told the Today Show. “I was trying to hold back as much as I could. Nathan started shedding tears, then Ryan was shedding tears. Being a part of the 400-free relay has been a dream of mine. I’ve been on the good side and bad side of it. I was happy we could win that relay as a team.”

Phelps admitted that having his 3-month-old son, Boomer, in the audience while he won his 19th gold medal, made the experience “a lot more emotional.”

“I tried to look for him up there and, when I finally found him, he was asleep,” he said with a laugh. “Hopefully we was awake during the race but, if not, I can play it for him when he’s a bit older. It’s just an inspiration to have him here.”

Kalisz and Phelps, of course, have their training at the North Baltimore Aquatic Club in Mt. Washington to thank. Kalisz has trained at the NBAC since 2000—and, more recently, in Scottsdale, Arizona—with mentor Phelps and coach Bob Bowman. In a 2013 interview, he talked about how rewarding that experience has been.

“Training at NBAC with the greatest swimmer of all time has been probably the best environment for me,” said Kalisz, pictured, clearly enjoying himself in Rio.

“I’ve always dreamed about racing and swimming with him. I never thought that would happen to me.”

Phelps’s work in Rio isn’t done yet. On Tuesday night, he’ll swim the men’s 200-meter fly, on Thursday he’ll swim the 200-meter IM he finishes up on Friday night with his signature 100-meter butterfly.

At 4 years old, Donnell Whittenburg was already turning his mother’s Northeast Baltimore duplex into his personal jungle gym. He’d learned to shimmy to the top of the home’s interior doors. If he found a ceiling rod in the basement or a beam above the patio, he’d find a way to climb and swing himself off of those. He mastered jumps and flips from the stairs and living room cartwheels. He wasn’t a boisterous or rebellious child. In fact, Whittenburg was, and remains, quite shy and soft-spoken—just extraordinarily active.

By 5, he was scaling up the side of the house and walking around the dining room table on his hands. His mom, Sheila Brown, remembers him once taking an accidental tumble down a full flight of stairs—in front of guests, no less—only to watch him land on his feet and shrug it off as if nothing happened.

Today, the 21-year-old is a heading to the Olympics as a U.S. men’s gymnastic team alternate. He has been featured in Time and a television commercial with Michael Phelps, promoting the games in Rio de Janeiro this month. Recently, Sports Illustrated ranked him one of the 50 “fittest” male athletes in the world.

But none of this was ever planned. Or even dreamt. His single mother, a career social worker, didn’t know anything about gymnastics when Whittenburg was a little boy. She was simply looking—prodded by his older sister, who was in high school at the time—for somewhere safer than her house for him to practice his stunts when she enrolled him in youth classes.

“I was like, ‘Mom, you have to do something with him,” Latisha Smith, Whittenburg’s sister, recalls with a laugh.

When Donnell Whittenburg burst onto the international sporting radar eight months ago at the World Gymnastics Championships in Glasgow, Scotland, he seemed to have arrived out of nowhere. Whittenburg’s eighth-place overall finish came only after being added to the qualifying field when a Belarus gymnast withdrew at the last moment. Not only did he finish nine spots higher than his closest teammate in the overall standings, he also garnered one of only two U.S. medals won in Scotland—a bronze in the vault—which was his first-ever world championship individual medal.

“I just wanted to come out and do gymnastics,” the powerfully built Whittenburg said with classic modesty. He added that he simply was happy that the men’s team was able “to bring back some hardware.”

Suffice to say, he was disappointed when he didn’t hear his name called for the five-man, U.S. men’s squad after the Olympic trials in late June, but Whittenburg remains excited to go to Rio. At the 2008 Olympics, two U.S. alternates did compete—injuries are a regular part of the game in gymnastics—and he’s still the second-youngest U.S. male gymnast headed to the games this month. “I’m still pretty happy. I get to travel with these guys and be able to support them, and I still have a role to play. I’m still going to train as hard as these guys do because you never know what’s going to happen,” Whittenburg said in a TeamUsa.org interview.

Certainly, the U.S. national coaches recognized Whittenburg’s preternatural ability when they first invited him to train full-time at the team’s facility in Colorado Springs several years ago. What no one could’ve predicted, however, was the accelerated pace of his development in the sport—not to mention his physique—which has filled out to Marvel superhero proportions with the benefit of twice-daily practices and top-flight nutrition. On a men’s squad that boasts a number of Olympic veterans and seasoned, world-class competitors, Whittenburg is considered a rising star alongside Sam Mikulak, 23, the defending U.S. all-around champion.

“He can do things that are kind of unexplainable,” says Mazeika.

“We saw him at the junior nationals and we knew he had an unbelievable upside then, but his progress [since training full-time at the Olympic Training Center] has just been dramatic. Just incredibly fast,” men’s senior national team coordinator Kevin Mazeika says. “He can do things that are kind of unexplainable. Obviously, his strength, which is off-the-charts, is a great strength,” Mazeika continues with a chuckle. “What’s really been surprising is how quick he is.”

Whittenburg clearly possesses a combination of explosiveness and body awareness that is rare—even among world-class gymnasts, Mazeika says. That this comes with a deep desire to improve on the six apparatus that make up men’s gymnastics is even better. “As I got older, mastering the different skills in the various events [rings, vault, parallel bars, pommel horse, high bar, floor] started to intrigue me,” says Whittenburg, whose hobbies include skateboarding and drumming. “Taking them to the next level, refining them, that’s been the mindset for me. It is always a challenge.”

But more compelling than his athletic ability—his catapults off the vaulting horse are as thrilling as anything on display at these Olympic Games—is his back-story. For starters, competitive gymnastic skills, if they are to be acquired at all, require well-trained professional coaches and serious equipment in proper gyms. At elite levels, it’s an expensive sport and traditionally associated with affluent suburban kids. The Northeast Baltimore community where Whittenburg grew up isn’t exactly known as a hotbed of world-class gymnastics.

And not only did his single, working mother have Whittenburg and his sister, Latisha, at home, she had another older daughter, Taneisha, who is mentally disabled, deaf, blind, and mute to care for. Whittenburg, his mother, and his younger sister Latisha—a health care provider who is married with four children today—all refer to Taneisha as “the backbone” of their family. “She’s the one who brought us all closer together,” Whittenburg’s mother says. “Everyone had to pitch in to look after her. Donnell or his sister never complained about any of it.”

As Whittenburg got older and continued to progress, the coaching, gym, and travel costs—not to mention the daily commute to work, school, and practice—added up. At 7 years old, after two years in local youth rec classes, his mother enrolled him at Rebounders Gymnastics in Timonium. By 11, he was traveling to compete in out-of-state meets.

Even at a young age, Whittenburg recognized the challenges his mother faced in supporting his athletic pursuits. After all, it’s not like there is the guarantee of an Olympic medal for anyone, whatever their circumstances. “It was a struggle. Growing up and doing gymnastics was definitely hard financially,” Whittenburg says. “My mom sacrificed a lot, in terms of money and time. It’s just not a cheap sport. But she knew I loved it and would do anything she could so I could keep going.

“I was lucky, too, that my old coach would tell my mother that she could pay what she could, when she could,” Whittenburg continues. “I know he waived the fees sometimes, too.”

That “old coach” is longtime mentor Abdul Mammeri, who coached him at three clubs, including his earliest days with Rebounders Gymnastics, ultimately guiding him to the Junior Olympics where he was initially spotted by U.S. national coaches. A former Algerian national team member, Mammeri remembers seeing Whittenburg at Rebounders during one of the youngster’s first classes and immediately knowing that he wanted him for his club team. Mammeri wasn’t just a former gymnast, he’d also studied coaching for five years at the university level in Algeria.

He became, however, more than a coach for Whittenburg.

“Coach Abdul is absolutely an awesome guy. He’s definitely been a father figure for me,” says Whittenburg, who was estranged from his dad for many years. “He always went out of his way to help me.”

Mammeri recalls the early car rides home after practice when Whittenburg’s mom couldn’t pick him up.

“He wouldn’t talk,” says Mammeri, laughing. “I’d ask him a question and get a one-word answer.”

But, Mammeri says, Whittenburg was fearless from the start in the gym. He also never whined or begged off at practice—unlike many kids, he was always ready to tackle the next skill. “Whether it was something he thought he could do or not, it didn’t matter,” Mammeri says. “He listened and then he’d try. And almost always, he could do the move. Not with perfect or even good technique. That only comes with practice. But he could get his body in the right place.”

The pair became even closer as Whittenburg entered Edgewood High School. By eighth grade, Whittenburg was recognizing his genuine passion for the sport—he’d given up baseball and karate and other endeavors by then—but he’d also run into trouble at the end of that school year. “He got jumped and beaten up badly by four boys in the school bathroom and I had to go see him at school,” Brown recalls. “I didn’t know if it was a gang initiation thing or what, but I was getting him out of Baltimore public schools. I had seen enough as a social worker, and that wasn’t going to happen to him. I did what I had to do.”

Brown used her sister’s address in Harford County to send her son to Edgewood High School where he graduated in 2012. Whittenburg did have a key to his aunt’s house, but nearly every night, his mother left her job to pick him up in Harford County and then shuttled him to Timonium where he trained under Mammeri while she returned to work. Afterward, she’d drive back to Timonium to bring him back to Northeast Baltimore. Her mornings with her kids began every day at 5:30 a.m.

“I lost my father when I was 12, and I would have conversations with his mother, who did an incredible job raising her children,” Mammeri says. “I would say to her, ‘Sheila, please keep him coming to the gym no matter what. It’s going to keep him out of trouble. It will save his life.’”

But Mammeri also was tough on Whittenburg. “I never tell him, ‘It’s good,’ unless it’s good. And he knew that,” Mammeri says. “He’s a champion kid, mentally. You can leave him alone in the gym because he wants to get the job done and knows how to focus.”

After graduating from high school, Whittenburg tried to juggle community college with his training, but it wasn’t working out. When a professor told him he couldn’t afford to miss a week’s worth of school to travel to a meet, Whittenburg reached out to the U.S. national team coaches. They immediately invited him out to Colorado Springs.

Mammeri acknowledges it was hard, but it was time to let Whittenburg go. “I told him, ‘They have the best trainers there, doctors, nutritionists—everything you’ll need.’”

Since then, he has literally taken off.

Whittenburg is one of three gymnasts in the world who have pulled off what’s known as a Ri Se Gwang pike—a one-and-a-half back-flip and full twist vault named after the North Korean gymnast who first performed it in competition in 2009. Only one other vault is judged more difficult.

The vault, rings, and floor exercise are Whittenburg’s best disciplines, followed by the parallel bars, pommel horse, and high bar. At the P&G Championships in June, he lost his grip on the high bar and fell after leading the meet early. But he rebounded, won the gold in the vault, and ultimately finished fifth overall.

For all the pressure that the Olympics bring to bear, Whittenburg doesn’t believe he’ll be overcome with nerves or anything like that if he gets the chance to perform.

He mentions that growing up with someone with disabilities, for example, helps provide an appreciation for life and its experiences. “You understand that something like having a disability could happen to anyone,” he says. “It puts things in perspective.

“I just want to go and compete,” he says of Rio. “I want to feel comfortable. I want to do good routines. Whatever happens after that, happens.”

Meanwhile, his mother is a different story. She and her son may share many qualities, but personality-wise, they are night and day. She’s outgoing and talkative, and on the outside, at least, the much more anxious of the two.

Maybe it goes with being a mother.

“Oh, you can’t find me when Donnell’s turn comes,” Brown says. “I can’t stay in my seat. I’m up. I’m walking around the stadium.” And if her son gets the opportunity to compete in Rio? “Those television cameras shouldn’t even bother looking for me.”

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Other Maryland Olympic Athletes

Swimming
Jack Conger, Rockville
Katie Ledecky, Bethesda
Michael Phelps, Baltimore
Chase Kalisz, Bel Air

Basketball
Carmelo Anthony, Baltimore
Angel McCoughtry, Baltimore

Canoe/Kayak
Ashley Nee, Darnestown

Cycling
Bobby Lea, Easton

Sailing
Joe Morris, Annapolis

Triathlon
Katie Zaferesm, Hampstead

Volleyball
Aaron Russell, Ellicott City

Wrestling
Helen Maroulis, Rockville
Kyle Snyder, Woodbine