Cathy Rigby
Cathy Rigby
Cathleen Roxanne Rigby, known as Cathy Rigby, is an actress, speaker, and former gymnast. Her performance in the 1968 Summer Olympics helped to popularize the sport of gymnastics in the United States. After her retirement, she became a stage and television actress. She is most noted for the role of Peter Pan, which she played for more than 30 years. She also became a public speaker on the subject of eating disorders, which she struggled with and overcame...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionGymnast
Date of Birth12 December 1952
CityLos Alamitos, CA
CountryUnited States of America
Cathy Rigby quotes about
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.
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.
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?'
You see your peers weighing 80 pounds and you think, 'Oh, my God, I've got to be 80 pounds or I'll fail.'
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.
I'll talk to kids afterward and somebody will always say, 'I'll leave my bedroom window open for you.
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!
I never realized until recently how much my life parallels Peter Pan.
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.
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.
You're just into it at that point and you're alive on stage and you get away with mischief and good stuff and you know, I don't know many adults who get to do that.
They are sweating as much as anyone onstage. Their focus has to be that of somebody working on the balance beam. We're all three in sync. We have to feel what the other is doing. One lifts me up, the other, side to side. They're like puppeteers almost.
This is so much better than flying on a balance beam or on the uneven bars, where you don't have the fairy dust to keep you up. And it was just such a great sense of freedom.
Nowadays a gold medal is a $1 million contract. Our athletes are our heroes.