In the words of her mentor and coach, Nuri Shaar, Ms. Lutz-Weber has no equal at the elite Olympics level.
And when someone like Ms. Lutz-Weber arrives to practice, as she does frequently at Rio, she is not only in a great position to compete at the highest level, she is also expected to perform and inspire. And so it is for that reason—and for so many others at the highest levels of athletics and pole-dance, at the world championships and World Cups, who do the hard work of winning the Olympics and winning World Championships—if Ms. Lutz-Weber does not perform to her peak on the track and dance floor, she has to go elsewhere. Because she is too good and strong-willed to go nowhere.
When she is not dancing, she is coaching, running and growing her career.
She is the first African-American woman to compete in the Olympics. Her mother, a former ballet dancer, was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and she grew up in the slums of Nairobi. She started pole dancing as a means of staying alive. Her parents and her coach took her from place to place, teaching her that the only true way to survive was to prove something to yourself. She grew up in a time when the country was split between warring ethnic groups, with black Africans living in Kenya, and white Africans living in Kenya, and the world of modernity there was very narrow.
So it was that she found herself in a new village, in a country, Kenya, where people could not understand her because she wasn’t white. In a neighborhood that was not the place to be in those days. The streets were rough. And so for the first time in her life, she lost her home, her friends, her family. And she had to start from scratch.
“I wasn’t in shock,” she recalls. “I knew, in my heart of hearts, that everything would be fine here. But just being out there, experiencing everything, it was like coming back to Nairobi. And you would have to fight to be accepted again, to feel at home again.”
Ms. Lutz-Weber didn’t have much. Her mother was never able to give her money or clothes during these years. So she took on tasks. She started teaching. She became a coach. She earned her GED. She studied a degree in human
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