“When I left France, they told me I was going to fail. I was not going to make it. I was going to come back crying and asking for my job back,” Cecile Landi had said to Olympics.com last year. The couple that landed in the US in 2004 without knowing how to speak English, has done more than just prove them wrong for all these years. As a part of the World Champions Center (WCC), Simone Biles’ family-run gym since 2017, they brought radical changes in the coaching scenario in the country.

In a welcome departure from the dreaded Karolyi Ranch era, when the gymnasts were pushed to the extremes of their abilities without any effort to address the athletes’ mental wellness, Landi broke the shackles and kept the overall well-being at the forefront. That did miracles as the WCC became a powerhouse of champions during Landi’s 7-year tenure. As she leaves the gym to take up her role as the co-head coach of Georgia, those champions, whom she has nurtured with utmost care, can not stop being emotional and grateful to their mortherly figure.

• Reposting a status from InsideGym, Joscelyn Roberson expressed her feelings by saying, “I’m going to miss you so much… Love you @cecilelandi.” Soon her gym mates chimed in with their bits.
• 2x state all-around champion Paislee Bell reposted a post from Gymnastics Now.
• 2024 State, regional, and National Bar champion Brooke Reingold posted a picture of herself with Cecile Landi in her Instagram story while writing “Goodbye is not forever, it’s see you soon”
• Renata Martinez wrote: “Forever grateful for you @cecile landi. You are an amazing coach and an even better person. Thank you for always being there for me and all you have taught me. Georgia is so lucky to have you!!”
• University of Arizona gymnast Sophia Maisel emphatically wrote, “Forever thankful for you.”

Among the others soaking in the moment were, Autumn Reingold, Paislee Bell, Addi Watson, Reese Esponda, Jordis Eichman, Halle Shea Wittenberg, Dulcy Caylor, Tiana Sumanasekera, Nicole Olivia, Nancy McCracken, Shania McIver, and Ari Lennox, who all posted heartfelt messages for Cecile Landi as she embarks on a new journey. Looking at all the love, Cecile had to acknowledge that. So after paying a last visit to the WCC, Landi posted an emotional message to mark the end of her time. 

“Thank you to the entire WCC family for your endless support and love I’ve felt these past 7 years 🥹 Thank you to all of my athletes and their families for your trust and commitment to our program! I can’t wait to see what the future holds for y’all ❤️ Forever WCC PROUD 😘,” the 44-year-old coach wrote in an Instagram post. Jordan Chiles’ mother Gina Chiles was quick to react to it.

“”The dopest people I know” -Jordan Chiles. I couldn’t agree more. Thank you for everything!” Gina wrote. This seems quite obvious, considering where Cecile and her husband had pulled Jordan up from. It was in 2017 when Jordan’s confidence was shattered by the draconian regime of the Martha Karolyi era. She was body-shamed for her ‘muscular’ appearance, and her thick textured hair. With utmost frustration, Jordan narrated the horror of the coaches as she returned from a national team training camp.

A coach had cut Jordan’s braids so that her neck looked longer, something that Martha Karolyi, then the national team coordinator, was believed to prefer. Jordan was also slammed for her so-called ‘bad attitude’. With all the scars, toward the end of 2018, Jordan landed in WCC. From there, Landis were in charge. The 2020 Olympics were approaching and Jordan was a little late in the race to prepare for that. But Landis had other plans.

The first thing they did was to believe in Jordan and bring back the same in her as well. “We always knew she was super talented, but I remember seeing her at Classic [that Jordan attended 4 weeks after joining WCC] and being shocked at how good she looked. Laurent and I were like, ‘Wait, hold on, wow, this is just the beginning,” Cecile Landi had said. With that, they ran a race against the time to get Jordan ready for the 2020 Olympics. Rest is history.

The girl who had once lost her love for the sport, stepped up for Simone Biles to lead the team to earn a silver in the team finals. “I discovered that gymnastics doesn’t always have to be about strictness and being so hard on yourself and having so much doubt,” Jordan had said, explaining what the WCC and the Landis brought to her. Joscelyn Roberson can not agree more.

Joining WCC was somewhat of a stroke of luck for Robeson. Her mother, Ashley, had found a new job at Houston after the 2022 U.S. championships. Roberson did not miss identifying her opportunity here: joining WCC to train with the Hall-of-Famer coaching duo. After two years with them, she identified the single most important factor that she is grateful to the coaches for.

“[Cecile and Laurent] have given me so much confidence. I feel like that’s the biggest thing. Obviously, they’re so knowledgeable in gymnastics and how it works… but just knowing that they knew I could do it and they believed that I could do it, it just gave me a difference sense of confidence that I hadn’t had before,” Roberson had said in May. Probably this very aspect of the Landis brought them huge success in coaching Simone Biles, who was already an Olympic champion when they took over the reigns.

That was most evident during Simone’s crisis in Tokyo and in the aftermath. “Mental health became more and more [important] in the past five years, I would say, with the scandal in USA Gymnastics and all those athletes that were ab*sed, that’s when we saw that it did affect them way more than we ever thought,” Cecile had said in 2023. So when Simone wanted to come back for the Paris Olympics, Landis did not instantly jump into it.

They took it slow. It was a slow and long process where Landis first assisted Simone in identifying if she still loved the sport at all. The outcomes were visible in Paris. But what is it that made them distinct from others?

Shift from authority to compassion: Cecile Landi’s mantra to succeed in Georgia

To sum it up in a few words, their coaching style was a shift from the authoritative methods of Martha Karolyi to a heart-to-heart relationship with the athletes. “It’s all about you, it’s not about me,” Cecile puts it in this short statement. They have developed this from their experience as competitive gymnasts and coaching in a number of American gyms before coming to the WCC. They learned to pick the better sides of a system and leave the negativities away.

“You need to separate the good from the bad as you can, and only keep the things that made the kids successful: the preparation, the understanding of gymnastics, the [training in handling] pressure. But the things that hurt them, you must put that as far away as possible from the sport,” Laurent explained their strategy. Not only that, but one more factor is the way they stand for their gymnasts.

This was recently evident when Cecile appealed for a revision of Jordan Chiles’ score in the 2024 Olympic floor finals. That was initially accepted to raise Jordan’s score giving her a bronze medal, although that was taken away later. On a similar note, they had their unhindered support for Simone Biles during the Larry Nassar controversy. When Simone told the Ladis about her harrowing experience, what they had offered was quite simple.

“We’ll do whatever you want us to do. If you want us to go scream to the world, ‘USAG, you screwed up big time!’ we’ll do it. If you want us to stand in the background, we’ll do it,” Cecile had said. That unconditional support was all Simone needed at that low point. In the months to come Simone started speaking about it publicly, hurling criticism at the USA Gymnastics. “You have that power, being Simone Biles, to just open your Twitter account, tweet something, and the world changes. So use this power,” Cecile had stood like a rock.

All that being said, Cecile has navigated quite some challenges on American soil after starting at the Bart Conner Gymnastics Academy in Oklahoma. They have been a part of the WOGA, training Alyssa Baumann, a member of the gold-winning 2014 U.S. World Championships team that won gold, and Madison Kocian, who won Olympic gold and silver medals at Rio 2016. Coaching Simone was a different challenge.

“When we started coaching Simone, I would say that we had a different kind of pressure because everyone was waiting for us, maybe, to mess up. ‘How can you get her better? How can you make her better?’ I don’t know, but she can do more. And she did,” Cecile had said. Now, she has one more challenge to conquer.

That is reviving the Georgia gymnastics program. Georgia happened to be a leader in women’s gymnastics at one point. They have five back-to-back national championships from 2005 to 2009. But the performance started to go down during the tenure of the next two coaches. To bring back the golden era the team then brought in Courtney Kupets Carter. But their standing worsened further as they ranked 18th or lower in the last four years. So when their assistant coach, Ryan Roberts, appeared for the head coach interview, he wanted Cecile beside him.

Roberts knew Landi since they had worked at WOGA. “I want to win championships, I want to win conference, and I want to win nationals. Who better to do it than somebody who’s done it on the biggest stage in the world?” he had told about his ask. And apart from Cecile’s husband, Simone was one of the first to stand behind her for the decision to accept the Georgia offer. “Simone was the first one to tell me: ‘I’m so happy for you. You need to go,” Landi had revealed.

So as Roberts put it, Georgia agreed to a somewhat “unorthodox” setup of co-head coaches. However, this might not be a cakewalk for Cecile. College gymnastics is a little different in format than the elite gymnastics. The collegiate version puts more importance on execution than difficulty. So the NCAA might force her to adapt somewhat. But still, it is a familiar sport for Cecile and such roadblocks are nothing new to her. It remains if she shows the same dominance in the collegiate realm to bring Georgia back to its golden era.

Well, while almost the entire WCC roster has extended their best wishes to their coach, the US gymnastics legend, Simone Biles felt that this was the right time for Cecile Landi to move on.