While Leyva competed in qualifying Saturday, even when hiding under his lucky green towel to shut himself off from the world, he could hear that man cry out, “You’re the best, baby!” And those words, as usual, made Leyva believe it. “Everybody thinks it’s an embarrassment because he acts so crazy, but it’s actually a big help,” Leyva said of his stepfather and coach, Yin Alvarez, who is known for his antics at meets. “I love hearing him. I love his energy and passion. I feed off of 正品 it. It definitely makes me better.” Leyva, 20, who came to the United States from Cuba when he was a toddler, led qualifying in the all-around event and also helped pull the United States men’s team to the top of the standings. None of those scores carry over to Monday’s final. But to Leyva, that does not matter. He still has extra confidence going into the biggest week of his life, a week that he and Alvarez have been envisioning for years. Alvarez said he first dreamed of opening a gym and coaching an Olympian when he was a boy in Cuba, a country he knew would never let him reach that goal. “I was a dreaming person, and people that dream, there’s no room for them in Cuba, so you feel dead and more dead because you know things aren’t going to get better,” Alvarez said. “That’s something me and Dani have similar. Even though he’s not my real biological MBT 摇摇鞋 kid, we dream the same.” The seeds of their Olympic hopes were planted when Alvarez and Leyva’s mother, Maria Gonzalez, attended a Cuban sports school together, leaving their families as children so they could train for Castro’s national team. Alvarez already had boundless energy and was a troublemaker, once spraying an entire classroom with fire extinguisher foam. Gonzalez was a prim goody-goody who rolled her eyes at Alvarez’s pranks. When their gymnastics careers ended, their lives diverged. Alvarez joined a gymnastics troupe that traveled internationally. Gonzalez coached in Cuba and had two children. Alvarez could not shake those pesky Olympic dreams from his head. So on a trip to Mexico, on Jan. 15, 1992, at about 4:30 a.m., he stole out of his hotel and headed for the Rio Grande. He stuffed his clothes in a plastic bag and braved the freezing water to swim to the United States — toward a place where he knew no one and to a life filled with scary unknowns and thrilling possibilities. “I always wanted to have my own gym,” Alvarez said. “So that was pushing me to swim faster and faster.” Back home, Gonzalez was facing the struggles of an average Cuban. In the sports school, she was given everything: food, shelter, medical care. Outside of it, she discovered that she had long had it easy. The recurring power outages were not the worst part; Danell’s asthma was. She often could not obtain medicine for him because the hospitals were out of it. “I 松糕鞋 was so sad and frightened because Dani got sick so many, many times I thought he would die,” she said. “I knew I had to leave Cuba.” Her father had fled to Miami two years earlier and had told her to send him a telegram saying, “Everything is perfect,” if she wanted to leave Cuba because the government often monitored correspondence. So she took the leap. Because Gonzalez was a respected gymnastics coach, she was able to take Danell and his sister Dayanis to Peru to coach there. She soon sneaked away to Venezuela, then Ecuador, then Nicaragua until she secured a way to the United States. When Danell was barely 2, she boarded a plane for Miami, though she did not have official papers to do so. Upon arrival, she avoided penalty because Danell had been so ill. When she and Alvarez finally reconnected, he had already saved money by washing dishes, cleaning bathrooms and selling cemetery plots to buy gymnastics equipment. He took her to a storage facility where he kept the gear.