Grace, Gold and Glory

Grace, Gold and Glory: My Leap of Faith is a work of autobiographical nonfiction by Gabrielle Douglas and celebrity ghostwriter Michelle Burford. Published in 2012 by Zondervan, the book covers Douglas’s gymnastics career and the personal struggles she endured prior to becoming a U.S. Olympic Gold Medalist. The book has been awarded the Street Literature Book Award and is popular with her fanbase. However, critics and professional gymnasts note that there are many factual inconsistencies. Douglas made U.S. history at the 2012 Summer Olympics when she became the first U.S. gymnast to win both a team and individual gold medal.

Grace, Gold and Glory begins with Douglas writing a text message to her mother, Natalie Hawkins, seven months before the London 2012 Summer Olympics begin. In this message, she explains that she’s not passionate about gymnastics anymore and that she wants to quit the sport altogether. She instead wants to be a normal teenager and get a regular job while trying a different sport.

Although she understands the sacrifices her mother makes for her gymnastics, she simply doesn’t have the will to win anymore. She’s very homesick after leaving her family to train with Liang Chow, an elite trainer based in Iowa. She can’t even have regular family time without training interfering with it. Douglas struggles without her siblings and mother to keep her motivated when she gets injured or tired. She doesn’t see how she can keep going.



Douglas gets little sympathy from her mother, who reminds her how the host family she stays with, and all these coaches around her, are helping to make her dream a reality. This is the first she’s mentioned disliking gymnastics, and her mother isn’t interested in hearing about it. Hawkins works long hours and has slaved for many years to pay for this dream, and if her daughter comes home, she’ll return a disappointment.

Throughout the book, Douglas emphasizes that her story is not a simple one and that she couldn’t have succeeded or gotten through low points like this without her family around her. She admits that she did lose her passion and questioned why she continued to compete, which makes her ability to see it through and achieve Olympic gold especially impressive.

Douglas does not come from a wealthy family, which makes their sacrifices particularly admirable. Her mother put aside her own dreams of becoming a lawyer when she had her first daughter, and they all end up living in their cramped Dodge van when they can’t afford anywhere to stay. Her mother won’t ask her family for financial help because she believes in trying to make your own way. When her daughter decides she has a dream, Hawkins does anything to ensure it comes true. She wants her children to have the opportunities she didn’t have.



The Douglas family is religious and spiritual by nature and believes that God has a plan for everyone. It’s this fervent belief in a greater purpose which keeps them going—and which gets Douglas herself through the hard times. Douglas explains what the words “grace, gold and glory” mean to her and why she’s chosen them for her book title. “Grace” stands for love, mercy, and her family’s abundant forgiveness. “Gold” refers to her medals but also to the standard she tries to hold herself to. Finally, “glory” relates to giving joy back to God.

The book attributes much of Douglas’s success to her host family and how they keep her spirits up when she’s feeling down. In a sense, Grace, Gold and Glory reads as if Douglas herself did very little to achieve her dream and relied on the “grace” of other people, which is unlikely the case given how intensive the American coaching system is. This has led critics to question whether Douglas’s family had too much of an influence over the book’s content.

Grace, Gold and Glory gives us little insight into the day in the life of an elite gymnast prepping for Olympic trials and competitive selection processes. Instead, most of the book focuses on tumultuous family relationships and how so many people were invested in Douglas’s dream to the extent that she couldn’t give it up even when she wanted it to. It’s unclear if this is how Douglas feels or if that’s how her family feels.



Douglas’s siblings had to give up their own sports and leisure activities to pay for her training, especially since their father made limited financial contributions. Her family members’ schedules are dictated around gymnastics, but they stop minding because Douglas excels and progresses at an unprecedented rate. When Douglas wants Chow to be her Olympics prep coach, she finds a way to make it happen even though he is an expensive trainer, and Chow makes an incredible difference to her training.

Ultimately, the message in Grace, Gold and Glory is that dreams are attainable with a strong belief and a willingness to do what it takes to make them a reality. As Douglas posits in her book, "…with strong faith in God and some serious determination, every dream is possible—especially if your mama refuses to let you fly home, fry chicken, and give up.”