In high school I never went to the prom because I was too consumed with gymnastics. Also, with my hair in pigtails and looking about 10, I wasn’t exactly date material. – Cathy Rigby
When you’re on the Olympic team at 15, you don’t do anything else. There’s no normal social development, and your decisions are made for you. – Cathy Rigby
An athlete learns how to hold her breath, but that doesn’t work in singing. You have to learn to relax. – Cathy Rigby
I was always very active as a kid. I would climb on roofs and jump off using my parents’ bed sheet, hoping it would open like a parachute. I was always getting hurt, breaking a leg, you know, bruising, cracking my head open. – Cathy Rigby
I would climb on roofs and jump off using my parents’ bed sheet, hoping it would open like a parachute. I was always getting hurt, breaking a leg, you know, bruising, cracking my head open. – Cathy Rigby
I’ll talk to kids afterward and somebody will always say, ‘I’ll leave my bedroom window open for you. – Cathy Rigby
You see your peers weighing 80 pounds and you think, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve got to be 80 pounds or I’ll fail.’ – Cathy Rigby
There’s so much denial in gymnastics. It’s a beautiful sport but the other part is numbing. You become machinelike. They’ll refute this, but I’ve been around it. I know. – Cathy Rigby
I grew up in a sport that didn’t allow you to grow up. There was always the threat of younger competition. So you had to maintain the image of youth. – Cathy Rigby
I’ve been able to play a kid up to this point and pretend that I’m not a grown-up – well, at least for two hours a night! – Cathy Rigby
Acting allows me the freedom to let go, to be in the moment, to be spontaneous. I no longer have the fear of losing, of failure. – Cathy Rigby
So it really does have a sort of bittersweet quality. Kids like to have adventures and to believe they can fly, but there’s also that fear about people leaving you. – Cathy Rigby
It’s that athlete’s obsessiveness – the need to prove yourself and work harder than anybody else. I think it’s what helped me do well in the theater. – Cathy Rigby
I remember secretly going off and crying. All of a sudden I’m being blocked and have to be intimate in a scene, and I’m going, ‘I can’t even look people in the eye very well. How am I ever going to do this?’ – Cathy Rigby
