This Young Gymnast Was Set To Be A Star – But One Innocent Photo Set Her On A Totally New Path

It must’ve been some photo to alter the course of a sportswoman’s entire career, right? And it’s especially surprising when you consider Maroney’s position within the gymnastics world at the time. As a rising star, followers of the sport had kept their eyes on her as the gymnast to watch. And she was proving them right.

And as Maroney showcased her talents on both the domestic and international stage, she scooped medals aplenty. It was no surprise, then, that American gymnastics fans were getting so excited about her prospects. In fact, it’s not an understatement to say that she was on course to become one of the sport’s biggest stars.

But as Maroney’s reputation continued to grow, a moment was coming that would change her life forever. Of course, we’re referring to the picture that was snapped in 2012. The lasting impact that this photo had can’t be overstated, yet the gymnast didn’t see it coming. At all.

Yes, Maroney had no inkling that the photograph would go on to become one of the most talked-about snaps of the year. Despite any feelings she may have had on the matter, though, it brought her name into the mainstream – making her famous beyond gymnastics and even beyond sports as a whole. That’s pretty incredible when you think about it.

The picture was also enough to take Maroney’s career in an entirely different direction. So, how could one photo completely alter someone’s life like that? And were there any signs that the gymnast was going to pursue a different path? Well, if you had followed her rise up the ranks, you wouldn’t have thought so.

Speaking to the Orange County Register in 2012, Maroney recalled, “When I was younger, I would be watching Tarzan and running around on all fours. My mom was [like], ‘I need to put this child in gymnastics. She’s crazy.’” That’s one way to deal with a hyperactive kid!

But here’s the thing: Maroney really took to gymnastics. And it didn’t go unnoticed by her folks – perhaps because they had been sporty types, too. Dad Mike had once been a former college football player who had lined up for Purdue University as their quarterback.

Mom Erin, on the other hand, had been a high-school figure skater. In any case, the pair saw something in their daughter that other parents may have missed. The girl had promise, for sure, and this led Mike and Erin to decide to home-school her.

That way, Maroney had a better chance of getting her foot in the door to compete at an early age. And the fledgling gymnast had belief in herself, too. She was aiming high, as she would explain during her conversation with the Orange County Register.

Maroney told the newspaper, “I realized that I had a dream that I wanted to go to the Olympics, and I wanted to go as far as I could go. I thought I should probably move to a new gym and start thinking about the Olympics.” How old was she at the time of that personal revelation? Nine. Yes, you read that right!

Then, after switching gyms, Maroney finally competed in her first official event in 2009 – just three years or so before that photo made her a household name. And in the Dallas, Texas, Visa Championships, she finished third in the junior division’s vaulting contest. Not bad, right?

Mind you, Maroney only went from strength to strength following that debut event. She came second in the vault at the CoverGirl Classic in 2010 and finished top of the pile in that year’s Visa Championships. The gymnast began to showcase her talents outside America, too, starting in Guadalajara, Mexico.

At 2010’s Pan American Championships, Maroney won both the individual vault and floor exercise disciplines as well as a gold medal with her team. And her rise showed little sign of stopping as the 2012 Olympics approached. Who’d have thought that an innocuous photo would’ve been the catalyst behind her global fame back then? She seemed to be well on her way without it!

Anyway, in the weeks leading up to the games in London, England, Maroney offered some insight into her gymnastic mindset. Speaking to the Orange County Register, she revealed what had attracted her to the sport and why she was so driven to succeed. Simply put, it was all about extending her physical abilities and fulfilling her personal ambitions.

Maroney explained, “I just loved doing stuff that most people can’t do with their body. I can flip in the air and just fly on certain things. And I just love that feeling of working so hard on something that you really, really want and reaching that goal. It’s the best feeling.”

So that brings us to the Games themselves – the stage where the life-changing photograph was snapped. What was the context behind it? And why did the picture blow up like it did across the world? Well, to better understand the situation, we should probably look at Maroney’s efforts in London that summer.

Prior to the games, Maroney had won three international vaulting titles in the preceding 18 months. Her biggest success arguably came at the World Championships in Japan, when she finished first in both the vault and the team event. To say that the gymnast was on form would be an understatement.

No surprise, then, that Maroney was a hot favorite to pick up Olympic gold in the vault. And her chances of clinching that coveted medal only seemed more certain after she and her fellow U.S. gymnasts bagged golds in the team event. The stage was set for Maroney to emerge as a sporting hero.

Maroney would have a medal placed around her neck – but she pulled a face that strongly hinted she wasn’t happy. And if there was ever a picture worth a thousand words, this was definitely it. No wonder that a photo of her unimpressed expression quickly went viral!

So, what happened? Well, all appeared to be going fine for Maroney at the start of the vault competition. But that soon changed on her second attempt. In what must have been an excruciating moment for the gymnast, she slipped – and opened the door for one of her competitors to surge ahead in the standings.

Sandra Izbasa of Romania capitalized on the mistake to clinch the gold medal herself. That meant Maroney had to settle for second place in the end. A silver medal at the Olympics doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Better than nothing. But Maroney apparently didn’t feel that way.

So, Maroney begrudgingly received her silver. The medal ceremony is obviously a moment that photographers and camera operators always focus on, and that meant all eyes were on the young gymnast at the time. And as the press pack snapped away, they captured how Maroney really felt about being runner up.

But Maroney had no idea that images of her face were spreading across the internet like wildfire. And, if truth be told, she didn’t think that her expression was anything out of the ordinary. That’s what the silver medalist claimed, anyway, when she sat down for a chat with the magazine Inside Gymnastics.

Speaking in June 2014, Maroney said, “I remember doing the face for literally two seconds. Like, if you watch the video, it’s two seconds. And I remember thinking, did I just make a face? Because it’s natural. I do it all the time. I have pictures of me when I’m little doing it. I have it on my Mac computer when I’m, like, 13.”

Maroney continued, “It’s just something I make. My friends were watching the Olympics, [and] they even said, ‘Oh, I didn’t even notice. You make that face so much all the time.’ Because they’re just used to seeing me do that face. But the world wasn’t! So it definitely blew up.”

Apparently, Maroney only found out after a few words from her father that her face was taking the internet by storm. Then she caught a glimpse of the hottest new meme in town – otherwise known as “McKayla Maroney Is Not Impressed.” Given the ubiquity of image-editing software these days, it was inevitable that mischievous social media users had placed versions of her face into various unrelated shots.

So, in pictures of everything from Mozart to the NASA Mars rover, you’d find Maroney with her grimace as visual commentary. What did she think of all this, though? Was it funny to her, or did she take it badly? Well, the gymnast admitted that the craze had left her baffled at the start.

In the Inside Gymnastics interview, Maroney explained, “At the time I was like, I just didn’t get [the meme]. I was like, ‘What does this even mean? I don’t understand.’ Then, a couple of weeks later, it just kept getting more and more, and people were tweeting me about it. I was just like, ‘Let it go, let it go!’ And it just wasn’t going away.”

But Maroney eventually decided to take control of the situation by owning the expression. And she started by posting a shot of herself pulling the famous face when she and the Olympic team went to a swimming pool. After that, the star believed, folks on the internet had looked at her in a more “positive” light.

But at the same time, Maroney didn’t shy away from how she truly felt after coming second in London. The silver medalist said to Inside Gymnastics, “If you really want to think that I’m a bad sport, then go ahead. At the end of the day, I was sad, I was upset and I was not impressed!”

We know what you’re thinking, though. If Maroney finally came to terms with the photo, why did it cause her to pursue a different career? Well, it didn’t at first. Following the Olympics, she recovered by winning another three vault titles in 2013, including one at the World Championships.

It was only in 2016, in fact, that Maroney announced her retirement from athletics for medical reasons. And it’s believed that her online “fame” inspired her to then move into show business. That’s one hell of a jump! A figurative leap that may be equally as impressive as any of her medal-winning vaults.

Maroney has seen success on the small screen, too, after debuting in Hart of Dixie in 2012. The budding actress has also had brief spells on both Bones and Superstore and has appeared in a promo video for the Thirty Seconds to Mars track “Up in the Air” – where she showed off her gymnastic skills yet again.

But there’s a good reason why Maroney has swapped flying through the air for emoting in front of a camera, as she explained to 17 magazine in 2016. There, she said, “Gymnastics, you get one shot. Acting, it’s like, do it again, do it again, do it again. So that was the one thing that I found very different. You’re allowed to get different tries.”

Maroney continued, “And you’re more expressive in a way when you’re working with people. In gymnastics, you’re so on your own and individual.” But the former athlete seemingly wasn’t content with sticking to acting. Oh, no – apparently she was angling for a career in music, too.

“For the last year, I was just figuring out my sound,” Maroney explained. “I’ve loved writing songs since I was really young. I thought I was going to be like Sia and sell my songs to people. But after they were done, I was like, ‘I’m not going to sell these to anybody! I want to sing them.’”

Maroney then added, “I have some demos done, and I’m going to be showing them to some bigger people in the industry. And we’ll see where that takes me. In the next couple of months, I think I’ll have a single out, and I’m excited for people to hop on this new journey of mine.”

Well, it wasn’t quite a “couple of months.” After that interview, Maroney’s fans actually had to wait nearly four years before she dropped her debut single. The aspiring musician shared the track, titled “Wake Up Call,” via Twitter in March 2020. It’s yet another example of Maroney’s versatile talents – and proves once again that she’s more than just a meme.

And Michelle Jenneke may also know a little of what Maroney went through. She’s a champion sprint hurdler, but that’s not the reason her picture went viral all over the internet a few years ago. Before a race, the young Australian did something that the audience hadn’t seen before, and it was caught by a video camera. The footage soon proved compelling to an audience across the globe, and the whole episode set in train a series of events that no one could have predicted...

Athletes doing creative moves in front of spectators is nothing new, of course. Sportspeople do it all the time to win over fans and pump up the crowds. But when she was filmed Jenneke wasn’t actually trying to do either of those things: she was simply trying to prepare herself for the race ahead. Neither she nor anyone else had any idea of what was about to happen.

Jenneke had been doing that particular warm-up since 2009, but no-one had noticed before. Yet at the World Junior Championships in 2012 cameras were there, and they caught everything. Before she had time to catch her breath, Jenneke had gone viral around the globe. Countless people suddenly knew her name.

As many people in the world have discovered for good or ill, if a video of you goes viral there’s not really an awful lot you can do. You can try and take it down of course, but that generally results in more and more people becoming aware of it. That’s the situation in which Jenneke unexpectedly found herself.

Of course, there are some bonuses to having a video go viral. In the case of Jenneke the video made her famous, granted her some newfound fame as an internet meme, and resulted in her becoming a sex symbol, for a little while at least. But was that really what she wanted for her career?

Jenneke’s written in more recent years about the long-term impact of her dalliance with internet fame. Her career has undergone some significant changes since someone pointed that video camera at her back in 2012. She’s made it quite clear about what her intentions were with her warm-up moves, but there’s no doubt that one action accidentally changed everything.

Ever since she was a child Jenneke had been into sports, and she had a particular love of hurdles. She had a perfectly normal childhood, spending her time climbing trees and playing with her family’s pets. But sometimes she would line up her soft toys as makeshift obstacles and practice leaping over them.

Jenneke reminisced to Stellar magazine in 2017, “I was always a very sporty kid – pretty much any sport I could try, I would do. When I was nine years old, I signed up for Little Athletics. I didn’t train that year, I was just competing. Hurdles was always my favorite event, even though I wasn’t particularly good at it back then.”

The young athlete went on, “I started training the next year; only one day a week, but I was ten years old. At that age I still wasn’t anything special – I didn’t think so, anyway. I wasn’t thinking about a career in sport or representing my country.” Yet when she got a little older, a path to international competition opened up to her.

According to Jenneke herself, “It wasn’t until I made my first Australian team in the Youth Olympic Games in 2010, at age 17, that I realized I could compete professionally. My family is incredibly supportive of my career… They come out to every international competition. I’m so lucky to have them; I love making them proud of me.”

And they had many reasons to be proud. Jenneke was an accomplished sprint hurdler at the age of just 15. For two years running she came in fourth at the National All Schools Championships in her home country. And at the later New South Wales All Schools Championships she came second in the 100m hurdles, having achieved the incredible time of 13.07 seconds.

Already making impressive strides in the sport, as 2010 continued – and despite still being a student at the Hills Grammar School in New South Wales – Jenneke racked up even more noteworthy achievements. First she helped break the Australian women’s sprint medley relay record at the Junior Championships. Then she followed that up by taking home a silver medal at the Summer Youth Olympics.

The local media began to take an interest in Jenneke, and in August 2010 the Hills Shire Times newspaper interviewed her about her Youth Olympic Games win. She said, “I’m so excited, I’m almost speechless, I’m so happy. I got away well with the other girls and I felt like I kept gradually pulling away towards the end.”

The Hills Shire Times made note that Jenneke was “bouncing and almost dancing behind the blocks before the start.” When asked about this, the young sportswoman said, “I wasn’t nervous, I was just excited and I felt great warming up. It made a big difference having familiar faces in the crowd.”

And there was even more success to come. In 2011 Jenneke returned to the Australian Junior Championships and finished first in the Under-20s category. Then a little later that year she went to the 89th Australian Athletics Championships and came in third, only just behind the world champion Sally Pearson.

While all athletes compete primarily with the aim of being the very best in the world at what they do, it’s undeniable that to some becoming rich and famous is a further attraction. But it appeared that Jenneke wasn’t really interested in either of these things. Indeed, she competed in hurdles for no other reason than she enjoyed doing it.

Whenever Jenneke raced, she always seemed to bring up her love of sport rather than any desire to be a world champion. On her profile page for the 2010 Youth Olympics website, she answered the “Tips on how to become a top athlete” section with just two words: enjoy yourself.

Jenneke’s talent for the sport she loved was what got her to the World Junior Championships in 2012. It was a big event, and plenty of journalists had come to Barcelona to cover it. And as she waited for the 100m hurdles event to start, a camera happened to film her doing what she’d always done, enjoying herself.

Jenneke did a little dance as part of her warm-up routine. As the cameras watched she jiggled her hips and gyrated, a massive happy smile on her face. Though it wasn’t her intention, it was very attention-grabbing. And guess what? Yep, many onlookers – especially online ones – also thought it was pretty sexy.

Unfortunately Jenneke failed to win big at the championships, and didn’t end up qualifying for the 2012 Olympic Games in London as she’d hoped. But instead, she suddenly found herself a viral superstar. It hadn’t taken long for the dance warm-up footage to work its way around the internet, and people liked what they saw.

Some people immediately sexualized the footage of Jenneke, putting it in slow motion and playing music over it. Business Insider magazine described it as “mesmerizing.” Meanwhile the website of newspaper USA Today focused on Jenneke’s winning smile, saying, “You have to appreciate anyone who enjoys themselves this much.”

This all came as a big shock to Jenneke herself. In 2016 she told the YouTube web channel Beyond the Game, “I got a few Facebook notifications and I was like, ‘This is odd, I’m not generally this popular.’ So I was looking through that and there’s, like, links to this video… That’s me! What’s going on here?”

Things took off for Jenneke and fast. Before long millions of people had watched her video and it’d even featured on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Then at the end of August Australian news website news.com.au reported that the viral star had signed with the high-profile company Six Sides Management.

The news website tracked down Jenneke to see what she had to say, and she was pretty chill about it all. She told them, “My friends have been teasing me a bit more, that’s about it. I never thought my little warm-up would receive so much attention.” Her manager Damian Triffitt seemed to think differently though.

Triffitt told news.com.au, “In the last three days we’ve already had a lot of big companies come to us and say, ‘What do we have to do to get Michelle?’ Given the profile of the companies we’re talking to already, it’s obvious she’s exactly what a lot of them are looking for.”

By December Jenneke had appeared in another viral video, but this time it was on purpose. She teamed up with Mac Faulkner, also known as Forever Alone, in a video that cast her as the ideal woman. And yes, there were plenty of comments in there about her “bouncy” dance.

This opened up a new door for Jenneke, one into the world of modeling. In February 2013 she appeared in Sports Illustrated magazine’s famous Swimsuit Issue, which naturally increased her appeal even more. In the behind-the-scenes video of the shoot she comments, “I looked at the pictures and I think, wow, is that really me?”

Things were going really well for Jenneke for a while. In 2014 she represented her country at the Commonwealth Games, and in 2016 she qualified for the Rio Olympics. When she arrived there, her image shone down from myriad advertising billboards thanks to a commercial tie-in with a multinational soda giant Coke. But then things took a turn for the worse.

Jenneke finished sixth in the 100m hurdles, a very disappointing result for her fans. Even though she hadn’t come close to winning, a reporter cornered her after the race and asked her to do the famous warm-up dance for him. When she duly obliged, for plenty of people, it became a sign that Jenneke was a gimmick rather than a serious sportswoman.

And head coach Craig Hilliard slammed Jenneke as well. He said, as reported by AAP, “She was certainly one of the athletes that under-performed here. It would be easy to suggest that [outside distractions] was possibly a scenario. It’s something that I need to discuss with her and go through with her... she certainly didn’t arrive here in the shape she should have arrived in.”

Hilliard also questioned Jenneke’s overall commitment to her sport, saying, “If you are going to be half-baked at doing something, why are we investing in you? I can’t justify that.” And unfortunately this spelled trouble for the young athlete. Not long after the remark was made, Jenneke’s funding was cut.

And yet despite everything Jenneke seemed to keep the same upbeat energy that’d made her famous in the first place. She gave an interview to news.com.au once the dust had cleared, and explained that she believed one reason for her poor performance was that the competitors had been stopped from doing on-track warm-ups.

In the interview Jenneke also pointed out, “I’m still young, I still live at home, I’m still very comfortable there, I’m still at university, so at the moment athletics isn’t my only plan.” She was in fact reading engineering at the University of Sydney.

In September 2017 Jenneke told her story in her own words to Stellar magazine. Perhaps surprisingly, she seemed to bear no ill will regarding the viral warm-up video. She said, “I can’t explain why it became so popular. I found it funny people were interested in what I was doing.”

Jenneke went on, “I still get asked to do the dance, but I generally like to leave it to when I’m on the track. It’s not something I feel any pressure to do when I’m out there… that’s just what I like to do. It gets me into a good physical and mental space.”

But Jenneke pointedly concluded, “People think that by doing my dance I’m trying to draw attention to myself. I’m not. It’s just what I do when I’m on the start line. I’m not going to change who I am or what I’m doing because people view it one way or another.” Surely no-one could argue with that?

Jenneke is much more than that one girl who did a sexy dance. Since that one episode in her life went viral, she spent six-and-a-half years studying a combined engineering and electronics degree while simultaneously competing in athletics. Come November 2019 she graduated from the University of Sydney as a Bachelor of Engineering.

No matter what, Jenneke seems determined that enjoyment will always come first in her sporting career. She gave an interview to Australian website The Beast in 2018 and although the subject of her famous filmed warm-up dance did indeed come up, she also got to talk about what hurdling meant to her.

Jenneke said that although the Rio Olympics had been bad for her, “just getting on that start line” had been “a really big deal.” She added, “But I was injured in my preparation leading up to it. I did the best that I could, and some days it just doesn’t work for you.” She had undergone physiotherapy, but it just hadn’t worked in time.

The Beast asked Jenneke if she had any advice for younger athletes, and what she said summed up her whole career so far: “I think the best advice I could give them is just to have fun and enjoy your sport. That’s really all I did. That’s the reason I’m still in the sport, just because I love it.”