For 14 seconds, Jordan Chiles paused and looked down to collect her thoughts and emotions.

The question — about what Chiles felt she lost when the International Olympic Committee stripped her of her bronze medal in the Olympic women’s gymnastics floor exercise — forced her to stop mid-answer. The audience at the Forbes Power Women’s Summit in New York applauded her as she regrouped and held the microphone back up to her mouth.

Holding back tears, Chiles said she lost more than a bronze medal through the controversy that dominated the end of last month’s Paris Games. The controversy “wasn’t about the medal,” she said, but other realities that made her feel “stripped.”

“The biggest thing that was taken from me was the recognition of who I was, not just my sport, but the person I am,” Chiles said.

“It’s about my skin color,” Chiles added. “It’s about the fact there were things that have led up to this position of being an athlete.”

The on-stage interview Wednesday — which occurred before Chiles appeared at MTV’s Video Music Awards at night — marked the gymnast’s most extensive comments since the IOC said it would reallocate Chiles’ bronze to Romania’s Ana Bărbosu following an appeal by the Romanian Gymnastics Federation.

At the floor final on Aug. 5, Chiles originally finished fifth but rose to third after her coach, Cecile Landi, submitted a successful inquiry to raise her score by one-tenth of a point. Five days later, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that Landi’s inquiry should be invalidated because it came four seconds after the one-minute window for such an appeal. After the ruling, the International Gymnastics Federation dropped Chiles to fifth, and the IOC reallocated the medal. USA Gymnastics has said it is appealing the CAS decision to the Swiss Federal Tribunal.

Chiles said she felt “left in the dark” and unsupported during the controversy. She felt her voice wasn’t heard during the appeal process and compared her emotions to 2018, when she said an emotionally and verbally abusive coach caused her to lose her love for gymnastics.

“No one was listening to the fact that there are things that we have in place,” Chiles said. “There are things that we have that should’ve been seen but weren’t taken for realization.”

“The biggest thing that was taken from me was the recognition of who I was, not just my sport, but the person I am.”

Olympic Gymnast @ChilesJordan spoke with @MoiraForbes about being stripped of her bronze medal at the 2024 #PowerWomensSummit. https://t.co/gRF3MBW6J9 pic.twitter.com/Fjett19aDY

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— ForbesWomen (@ForbesWomen) September 11, 2024

USA Gymnastics has argued that it has video evidence showing Landi made the appeal 47 seconds after Chiles’ score was posted, 13 seconds before the inquiry window closed, and that it did not have enough time to properly make its case to CAS.

Chiles previously referred to the decision as “unjust.”

“(It) comes as a significant blow, not just to me, but to everyone who has championed my journey,” Chiles said in a post on X on Aug. 15. “To add to the heartbreak, the unprompted racially driven attacks on social media are wrong and extremely hurtful.”

Almost a month later, Chiles maintains that she and her coach followed the rules and did “everything that was totally and completely right” in the floor exercise competition.

“I made history and I will always continue to make history,” said Chiles, who won gold in the Olympic women’s team competition.

Chiles, who will return to UCLA for the upcoming college gymnastics season, received a bronze clock at the VMAs as a gift from Flavor Flav, who promised to make her one after her medal was stripped.

Required reading

(Photo: Steven Ferdman / Getty Images)

At first, his screams were met with silence. Stunned silence, really.

This rookie was standing there, two weeks into his NFL career, moments after a humiliating loss at home, and he was calling out … the entire team?

“Where my leaders at?!?” C.J. Stroud shouted, grabbing the attention of everyone inside the home locker room at NRG Stadium. “I need some leaders! Right now! Where they at? Speak up!”

The Texans were 0-2. They’d just been routed at home by the Colts. They hadn’t won more than four games in three years. “We got waxed that day,” remembers tight end Brevin Jordan, “and we all had the same question, like, ‘Are we gonna have one those seasons again?’”

Stroud was livid, not merely at the loss but at the fact that he was the only one willing to step up and say something about it.

This was last September, six weeks before Stroud would throw for more passing yards in a game than any rookie ever, four months before he’d become the youngest quarterback in NFL history to win a playoff game. This was before belief in Houston really started to build, before the rest of the league started to realize this team wasn’t just coming — it was coming fast.

Few inside the building saw a turnaround happening this quickly or this dramatically. But the margins are painfully small in the NFL, and sometimes seasons come down to little moments, like when a rookie punctures the silence of a somber locker room and changes how his teammates see him — and themselves.

“Some people needed to be called out. The captains needed to be called out,” says defensive end Will Anderson Jr., like Stroud a rookie captain at the time.

Jimmie Ward, a veteran safety who’d come over from San Francisco that spring, sat at his stall that afternoon and watched from across the room. He was injured and didn’t play in the loss; in his mind, it didn’t feel right to rip into his new teammates, not with him in street clothes and them in shoulder pads.

When Stroud was finished, Ward walked up to him.

“You’re a rookie,” he told him, “and that took some balls.”

The Texans were learning the kid who oozed California cool also had what Ward calls “this asshole side to him.” They won their next two games by 44 points.

It’s early August. On a high school field outside of Cleveland, a half hour after a training camp practice has wrapped and two days before the Texans face the Steelers in a preseason game, Nico Collins is wearing out the JUGS machine. Most of his teammates have boarded the bus and headed back to the hotel. A few linger on the sideline. Collins works alone.

The fourth-year wideout is eight feet from the machine, jogging in place, waiting for a football to be fired. Snap. He snares it with one hand. These are coming out hot. Snap. He grabs another, then taps his feet down, like he’s inches from the sideline. He adds to the total in his head. He’s nearing 20 without a drop. Snap.

What looks ridiculously difficult — what is ridiculously difficult — Collins wants to turn into second nature.

“Man,” he says a few moments later, shaking his head, “C.J. was on us today.”

It was a sloppy practice. The offense looked awful. Stroud missed throws and threw picks. Receivers broke off some routes early, others too late. The defense dominated, then gloated. At one point, after he was intercepted along the sideline, Stroud slammed his towel to the ground in disgust. Then he called his unit together.

“Slow it down!” Collins remembers Stroud screaming in the huddle. “How many times have we run this play? How many times?

“Now lock in.”

That’s the side to the young quarterback teammates hadn’t seen until his eruption after the early-season loss to the Colts last year. Stroud’s soft-spoken, laid-back persona belies an edge he’s always played with — and now leads with. He doesn’t unleash it often, preferring to pick his spots. But when he does, teammates feel the fire. Quarterbacks don’t get far in this league being polite.

“Oh, he’ll snap at us,” Collins says. “Way more than you think.”

“At practice you see glimpses of it,” new Texans receiver Stefon Diggs says of C.J. Stroud. “But come game time, he’s the real deal.” (Justin Casterline / Getty Images)

Stroud made it a point last summer to work quietly and earn the locker room’s respect. He was a rookie. He knew his place. Then the Texans stumbled to 0-2, and what irritated Stroud most during that loss to the Colts was how quiet the huddles were. When the team gathered before kickoff, he was the only one who said anything. When they did so again after halftime, same thing. So after coach DeMeco Ryans finished in the locker room, Stroud unloaded on them.

He knew he couldn’t be the only voice.

“Look, C.J.’s a great dude, all the guys like him, but there’s just enough prick to him, you know what I mean? He’s got some dog in him,” says Texans defensive coordinator Matt Burke. “We’ve all been on teams where the quarterback is separate from the rest of the group — he sorta does his own thing, and when he gets on guys, no one really listens, right? But when you’ve got a guy who’s got some s— about him, the team responds.”

Wideout Stefon Diggs, the team’s marquee offseason acquisition, felt it during Sunday’s season opener in Indianapolis. “At practice you see glimpses of it,” Diggs said after catching two touchdowns. “He’ll sprinkle a little emotion on you, he’ll get on you a little bit. But come game time, he’s the real deal.”

That intensity, Diggs said, is essential. Everyone on the offense knows what the expectation is, full stop. Stroud demands it.

“He makes it easy to be a receiver,” Diggs added.

Diggs’ arrival this spring via trade with the Bills, plus the additions of running back Joe Mixon and defensive end Danielle Hunter, made it clear: the Texans are going for it. Last season’s 10-7 regular season and surprise run to the divisional round of the playoffs was enough to scrap the slog of a long rebuild.

The window had opened. They weren’t going to wait. With Stroud still on his rookie contract, Houston wants to take its shot in the crowded AFC.

The QB opened training camp in late July welcoming the hype, mindful that the spotlight shines most on the teams that matter. “Pressure is a privilege,” Stroud likes to say, and it’s something he learned from his time at Ohio State. The Buckeyes would get every team’s best shot every single week. He knows Houston isn’t sneaking up on anyone in 2024.

And with that comes the burden of expectation, something that’s buried teams before them, teams that thought they were ready to contend only to find out the hard way they weren’t even close. “We have that big red target on our back,” Stroud says. “That’s something we didn’t have last year.”

Last season, Houston didn’t have a single regular-season game scheduled for a national television window; this year the Texans are slated for five, including a marquee Christmas Day matchup with the Ravens, the team that bounced them from the playoffs in January. Season tickets sold out by July, a first for the franchise in five years. Entering Week 1, only five teams had better Super Bowl odds. Stroud currently has the fourth-shortest odds for MVP.

So much has changed for this city, this franchise and this quarterback in 12 short months.

“It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be harder,” Stroud says. “That’s how you should want it.”

It started Sunday in Indianapolis. The Colts were desperate to steal this one — they haven’t won a Week 1 game since 2013 and haven’t won an AFC South title since 2014. At the moment, Houston remains Indy’s biggest roadblock.

In the first quarter, the Colts’ Anthony Richardson made the throw of the game, maybe the year.

With two minutes left in the fourth, Stroud made the throw that won it.

A false start turned a third-and-6 into a third-and-11. Leading by two, the Texans needed a conversion to prevent Richardson from getting another chance. After the snap, Collins peeled toward the sideline, blanketed by Colts’ corner Jaylon Jones.

If there was a window, Stroud might’ve been the only person inside Lucas Oil Stadium to see it. The coverage was superb.

Stroud fired. Jones got a finger on it. Collins kept his concentration — the byproduct of all those reps on the JUGS machine — and somehow snagged it. Then he got a foot down. Then a knee. The ridiculously difficult had become second nature.

One Mixon run later, it was over. After the 29-27 win, Stroud was asked about the completion to Collins. How in the world did he fit it in there?

He smiled. Then he repeated an old quote Peyton Manning used to say all the time.

“There’s no defense for the perfect throw.”

Nico Collins’ third-down sideline catch all but sealed the Texans’ victory over the Colts. (Christine Tannous / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)

Nine months ago, after their divisional playoff game in Baltimore, Stroud stood before a lectern on the bottom floor of M&T Bank Stadium, wearing a sweatsuit, beanie and Asics running shoes. It was his first lesson about how punishing postseason football can be. A tie game at the half had ballooned into a 34-10 Ravens’ triumph.

One minute, the game’s tight. The next, you’re getting steamrolled out of the stadium.

“It’s tough getting embarrassed like that,” Stroud said.

His face told the story. He was drained.

“I’ve been going hard since I was like 12 years old,” he said. “AAU tournaments. Baseball. Football. 7-on-7. High school. It’s been a blessing. It’s been a ball. I’m 22 years old, and this is my first time ever having freedom away from school, away from college.”

The climb was so quick, so consuming, that he’d never taken a minute to breathe. That cramped apartment 40 miles east of Los Angeles that Stroud lived in with his mom and siblings, where he cried after getting his first Division 1 offer, still feels like yesterday. Then came Ohio State. The draft. The S2 drama. Training camp. The season. And now, at just 22 years old, he was already one of the young faces of the league, the quarterback some were starting to think might be good enough to do what Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson so far haven’t. That is, beat Patrick Mahomes in the playoffs.

But first, before the rest of his career could start, Stroud needed to get away. So he did. He played in the Pro Bowl. He swung by media row at the Super Bowl and broke down his own film. He hopped on podcasts. He taught football to high schoolers in China as part of an Asian tour with Cowboys edge rusher Micah Parsons, threw out the first pitch before a baseball game in Japan, then trained with — well, sort of trained with — sumo wrestlers.

GO DEEPER

Troy Aikman ‘never lost at anything.’ He’s just now starting to enjoy it.

By the spring, Stroud couldn’t help himself: he was lighting up the text thread again, the same one he used to send teammates film clips last season. Pretty soon, the Texans’ skill position players, including Diggs, were meeting up for throwing sessions. In Los Angeles. In Miami. Finally, in Houston.

“Come on, you know who planned those,” says receiver Tank Dell. “Of course 7 did.”

Burke, the Texans’ DC, felt Stroud’s urgency and inquisitiveness after all of one practice last year. After Stroud threw his first pick, he hunted down Burke after the workout and asked him to explain how he’d disguised the coverage. The QB didn’t wanna get beat on that play again. Burke was floored. “I was like, ‘Are you kidding?’” he says. “You love that. That piece of it, that desire to learn that stuff, that’s so important.”

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Hunter, the veteran defensive end who arrived via free agency this spring, has spent nine seasons chasing quarterbacks in this league. What struck him during training camp was Stroud’s unflappability in the pocket. He’d tick through his reads without hurrying, without letting panic — a weakness game-wreckers like Hunter prey on — set in.

“He just doesn’t fold under pressure, when guys are coming,” Hunter says. “If it’s not there, he doesn’t try to do Superman stuff. You know how big that is for a guy his age?”

Thing is: Stroud can do Superman stuff. He won Offensive Rookie of the Year doing Superman stuff. Richardson’s stunning 60-yard bomb on Sunday overshadowed a 55-yard second-quarter beauty from Stroud to Collins that, per Next Gen Stats, was the most improbable completion of Stroud’s young career. Two Colts defenders were within a yard of Collins when the ball arrived.

CJ STROUD DEEP TO NICO COLLINS FOR 55 YARDS.

📺: #HOUvsIND on CBS/Paramount+
📱: https://t.co/waVpO909ge pic.twitter.com/pIG9hzf0CD

— NFL (@NFL) September 8, 2024

Stroud found the window. Somehow. When it comes to deep balls, few QBs in the league are better.

“It just seems so natural, so easy for him,” Collins says of his quarterback.

“It may seem easy, but it’s not,” Stroud says.

And it won’t be anytime soon. Stroud knows the innocence of his rookie season is gone. Now he needs to win. The Texans’ first primetime game of 2024 arrives Sunday night against the Bears, and with it, another test to see if they’re ready to meet the moment. The quarterback, too.

Stroud seems to relish it, always returning to that word of his: pressure. He refuses to see it as a negative. His story tells us he never has.

“We love that pressure, and we want that pressure,” he says. “There’s no real reward if there’s no pressure.”

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photo: Tim Warner / Getty Images)

At the end of the 2023 WNBA season, after the Las Vegas Aces had captured their second consecutive title and A’ja Wilson earned Finals MVP, Wilson had a message.

“Whoever you are out there that voted me fourth (for MVP), thank you. Thank you so much,” Wilson said during the team’s championship rally. “I wanna say I appreciate you, ’cause that just means that I got a lot more work to do.”

Although the 2024 Aces have disappointed relative to expectation, Wilson has not. Just as she vowed last October, Wilson returned an improved player in her seventh WNBA season.

Already a two-time MVP and Defensive Player of the Year, Wilson is now the record holder for the most points in a single season. Against the Indiana Fever — and rookie Caitlin Clark, who could challenge these marks in the not-so-distant future — Wilson scored her 941st point in the second quarter, breaking Jewell Loyd’s single-season mark of 939 set in 2023.

941 buckets in 2024 and counting…

Most Points Scored In A WNBA Single Season belongs to A’JA WILSON #WelcometotheW pic.twitter.com/ysR3DWubVz

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— WNBA (@WNBA) September 11, 2024

Many single-season WNBA records have been broken over the past two years since the regular season expanded to 40 games. When the league debuted in 1997, the season was 28 games long. The next year, 30, then the year after that, 32, which lasted through 2002. The regular season was 34 games long from 2003-19, during which time Diana Taurasi set the scoring standard that lasted until last season.

Nevertheless, Wilson’s statistics don’t require the extra games to break records. Through 34 games, Wilson had 929 points, more than anyone in league history, comfortably ahead of Taurasi’s 860 in 2006. Wilson was averaging 27.3 points entering Wednesday’s game.

She needs only 83 total points over the final five games to post the highest-scoring average in a WNBA season, passing Taurasi’s mark of 25.3.

In addition to points, Wilson is also leading the league in defensive rebounds, blocks, turnover percentage and win shares. It’s been a tour de force for the runaway MVP favorite.

“I don’t want it to ever get lost on how good (A’ja) is,” Aces coach Becky Hammon said before the Fever game. “She just does it all. She’s in the middle of a run that sometimes I want to shake her and say, do you know how good you are? But then I don’t want to shake her because I don’t want to wake her up. She can just stay in whatever zone she’s in.”

That zone put Wilson in lofty historical company. Through seven seasons of her career, Wilson is also threatening Taurasi’s mark as the league’s all-time leading scorer. She has a better scoring average (20.9 versus 20.7) at this age, and thanks to the WNBA’s expanded schedule, Wilson can get to Taurasi’s total scoring output in fewer seasons.

For now, Wilson and the Aces only have their eyes on a third title. But the all-time great can’t help but set individual records in the process.

Required reading

(Photo: Justin Casterline / NBAE via Getty Images)