And some of them, near the top, with tens of thousands of likes, were not about her at all. They were about the trials.
Isn't this Dara Whitfield? The taekwondo girl? She's ranked like third in the country.
Wait she's a TRAINED FIGHTER and she did this to a random woman?? That's literally assault with a deadly weapon. Her feet are weapons.
Somebody tag the federation. This person should NOT be representing our country.
Dara put the phone down on the dock beside her, screen down, and looked at the lake for a long time.
"Dara," Jasmine said softly. "Are you okay?"
"I don't know," she said.
Behind them, on the porch of the cabin, Coach Imura was standing with his own phone to his ear. He had been standing there for twenty minutes. He was not saying very much. Every so often he said yes, or I understand, or she will be. When he finally lowered the phone, he did not come down to the dock right away. He stood on the porch with his hands in the pockets of his old canvas jacket and looked out at the mist on the lake, and Dara, glancing back over her shoulder, saw his face, and knew.
The national federation's ethics and conduct committee had received, overnight, more than four hundred complaints. Under section eleven of the athlete code of conduct, any athlete who was the subject of a credible allegation of violent behavior outside of sanctioned competition was subject to provisional suspension from all federation events pending a review. The review would be scheduled as soon as practicable. In the meantime, Dara Whitfield's entry in the national team trials was suspended.
"How soon is practicable?" Dara asked. Her voice sounded strange to her, very far away.
"They didn't say," said Coach Imura. He had come down to the dock at last and was standing beside her, looking at the water. "Possibly before the trials. Possibly after."
"If it's after, I miss them."
"Yes."
"And if I miss them, I miss worlds. And if I miss worlds—"
"Yes," said Coach Imura again, quietly. "I know."
They stood there in silence. A loon called somewhere out on the lake, a long eerie rising cry that went on and on and then cut off.
"I want to ask you something," Dara said at last. "And I want you to tell me the truth. Not the coach answer. The real one."
"Ask."
"Was it the right thing? What I did." She turned and looked at him. "You asked me on the phone, did I have to. I didn't know. I still don't know. I've been going over it and over it all night and I can't tell anymore. I keep seeing her hands on the nozzle and smelling the gas and thinking, yes, I had to, there wasn't any other way. And then I think, I could have let go. I could have stepped back. I could have grabbed her wrists. I could have yelled for Mr. Farouk. There were five other things I could have done and I didn't even think of them, I just kicked, because that's what I do, that's what you made me, and now I don't know if I did it because it was right or because it was easy." Her voice broke. "Fifteen years you've been telling me the ring is the only place. And the first time it mattered, I didn't even remember."
Ray Imura did not answer for a long time. He looked at the lake. The mist was beginning to lift now, curling up off the water in long slow ribbons, and the far shore was coming out of it, dark pines and gray rocks.
"When you were seven," he said finally, "you asked me what you should do if you couldn't walk away. And I told you we'd come back to it when you were older. Do you remember?"
"Yes."
"I never really answered you. Not properly. Every time you asked, I gave you rules. Walk away if you can. If you can't, do the least you need to do. Stop when the danger stops." He sighed. "Those are good rules. I believe in them. But they're not the answer. I didn't give you the answer because I don't have it. Nobody does. The answer is that there are moments when you have half a second to decide, and no time to think, and whatever you do in that half second is what fifteen years have made you. And afterward, you will never be completely sure. That's the price. If you were the kind of person who was sure, I wouldn't have taught you." He turned to look at her. "I watched the video. The bad one, and then the other one. The long one. The boy who filmed it sent it to the police and someone at the police sent it to the federation and someone at the federation sent it to me this morning. Very quietly. Unofficially."