speedy.

Most children are allowed to decide what they want to be when they grow up. In Morgan's case, it was decided for her. The only saving grace in her particular case was that Elizabeth Davenport didn't have beauty pageants or child stardom in mind for her youngest daughter. To her, those dreams were too small, too impersonal. She wanted Morgan to achieve the dreams of Olympic stardom that she herself had never been able to achieve. Sidelined by an injury in her youth, she had been chasing that dream with her children ever since. The combination of Morgan's natural talent and need to impress her mother was exactly what she needed to make that dream come true.

Morgan's rise to the top wasn't without some controversy. Shortly before the 2008 games, news broke that her longtime coach had been engaging in inappropriate relations with his young ingenues. The news was heartbreaking to Morgan - not because it was a horrible truth about a man she trusted, but because she thought what the two of them had was special. Constant pressure from her parents and her training taking up so much time she hardly had a social life had sent her running into the arms of her coach, something the man had clearly taken advantage of before. The nature of Morgan's relationship with Richard Miller was never made public, but there were suspicions that she had been one of the unnamed girls in the case.

Richard's conviction was hard on Morgan, she felt lost without him. She began to act out, blowing off practices to party and spend time with older men. At the games, she didn't place in a single event, and the USA's silver win was not what her mother had in mind when she started down this path. Conflicts at home following her return from Beijing to Boston led to Morgan getting emancipated and cutting off ties with her parents at the tender age of 17. Her small endorsements were enough for her to support herself. She was finally free of the constant pressure she faced at home.

The next few years were a blur of parties, drugs, and boys. It often slipped her mind that her career was the thing supporting her lifestyle, her immaturity leading her to not fully make the connection. While she may have been able to play grown up for the sake of the emancipation, she was far from it. With the qualifiers quickly approaching, it was clear that she wasn't in fighting shape. She was named an alternate. Unfortunately, during a practice she later sustained a career ending knee injury. It may have been the fact that she hadn't been training as hard as she should have been, but more likely, it was because she hadn't been as serious about training. No Wheaties box for this girl.

At 21 years old, her career was over. It wasn't uncommon to retire at that age, but she would have preferred to do it on her own terms, not end up an embarrassing YouTube video. The only good to come out of the disaster in San Jose was her wake up call. Defeated and hungover in her hotel room, Morgan made the choice to try to focus on her sobriety and not let it rip away any more of her dreams. She had been avoiding her problems by trying to numb them for too long, and it was time to deal with them.

Currently, Morgan works as a gymnastics coach. She takes great care is making sure the hyper competitive girls she trains don't end up going down the same path she went down. She doesn't let her past haunt her, she owns up to it. Retirement may have meant leaving competition behind, but she's happy to help her girls chase their own dreams. That's what she tells herself, anyway.

Morgan is highly competitive. When she says she'll race you to the end of the street and loser buys coffee, she means it. Her competitive streak has made her hard to get along with both on and off the competitive circuit. She is extremely extroverted, and would probably find a way to have a conversation with a brick wall, left to her own devices. She doesn't always get the hint when someone doesn't want to talk. In fact, she sees it as her personal mission to bring people out of their shells.