Jordan Larson's quest for fairy-tale ending at Paris Olympics

JORDAN LARSON CRUISES through acres of green Nebraska farmland in a bright red Tesla, wearing a beige hoodie that says "Paris." It's a windy day in May, and the closest thing America has to volleyball royalty is driving from Lincoln to her hometown of Hooper, population 857. She has been back maybe twice in the past 10 years.

When she arrives, she swings by her mom's old home, a brick house with an asymmetrical roof, and Jordan recalls how it was always warm and pristine inside. She points to the garage and says that her neighbors used to joke that they always knew when she was home because they could hear her hitting her volleyball against the garage door. Later she drives up an unpaved road lined with bales of hay to get to her dad's 300-acre farm. "We're going to smell like manure all day," Jordan says. Her dad's white ranch house sits across from the farm, the paint fading and the shrubs in need of a trim. She calls his cell. No answer. "This is scaring me," she says. "Where is he?" She calls again. He answers and appears at the front door.

"Nice ride," Kevin Larson says to his daughter.

Jordan goes inside to grab a few pieces of mail, and they make plans to attend church and brunch in Omaha the next day. Jordan gets back in her rental car and drives to Hooper's main street. She points out a pub, a restaurant and a mini-mart that used to have 25-cent cups of ice cream. She remembers middle school days when she finished volleyball practice and grabbed a scoop of chocolate on the way home. Sometimes, her stepdad would drive and they belted Garth Brooks songs on the stereo.

At the intersection, she comes across a farmer riding his green tractor. Jordan lifts her index finger off the steering wheel and waves it at him. With a look of pleasant surprise on his face, the farmer waves his index finger back at her.

"It's the farmer's wave," Jordan says, smiling.

After she turns left onto the highway out of Hooper, the Tesla beeps. It's low on charge. The closest charging station is 60 miles away, in Lincoln. She drives slowly to conserve the battery. Along the way, she talks about how she never fit in in Hooper, how her extraordinary volleyball skill has brought her genuine joy but also agonizing loneliness. Through death and divorce, how volleyball gave her a connection to others and provided an escape from her pain but also kept her from those she loved most.

Now the 37-year-old is preparing for the end. She has played professionally in Puerto Rico, Russia, Turkey, China and Italy. She won a silver medal with Team USA at the London Olympics, bronze in Rio and gold in Tokyo. Paris is next and last.

But first, Jordan Larson has returned to Nebraska to attend a banquet for an old friend who has cancer, to spend time with family, to pick up a meaningful piece of jewelry and to visit her townhouse full of unpacked boxes. She's also back in Nebraska looking for connections to her past, to understand how they've led her to this moment, and to see if she can shape a future that's as blank as the Hooper skyline.

"I still want to remain open to love even though I've loved and lost," Jordan says, both hands on the wheel. "But for me, sometimes rooting feels like it's closing doors. I don't know -- maybe I'm running away from it."

---

ON OCT. 16, 1986, Jordan Larson came out of her mom's womb with long limbs and even longer fingers. For the first two years of her life, she also was bald. People called her Michael Jordan, and she walked around calling herself by the nickname for years.

Her parents separated when she was 3. Her mom, Kae, started dating an old high school classmate named Pat, and they moved into his home in Hooper. Jordan remembers watching her mom dance in the kitchen to country music that was playing on a small white TV. Kae exercised every day after work and kept the house pristine. Kae also loved fashion. She dressed up Jordan, her only child, in fancy overalls.

Jordan was naturally athletic and could beat most boys in every sport. At 10, she watched gymnastics in the Olympics and announced that she'd be an Olympian one day. Her mom smiled, her eyes glinting.

But Jordan struggled to connect with girls her age -- there were 15 kids in her grade-school class -- and often felt lonely. She got bullied and came home crying.

"My athletic ability set me apart -- even without it being my intention," Jordan says. "I just wanted friends."

By eighth grade, Jordan found some of what she was missing in volleyball. When she reached out for a high-five, her teammates always obliged. When she jumped and made contact with the ball, she heard people talk about her in awe. But her ambition -- to be one of the best players in the country, to earn a Division I scholarship, to play in the Olympics -- was also distancing. Kids at school didn't understand her intensity or drive.

"When it came to athletic competitions, they all were her friends wanting to hang around with her," her stepdad, Pat, says. "But when it came to just social circle, they didn't want to have a lot to do with her."

Jordan, though, always had her mom. Kae, rocking her jean-on-jean outfits, hooted the loudest when Jordan made a big play. Twice a week, Kae and Pat drove Jordan to Omaha and back -- a two-hour journey -- to play on a club team. Jordan did her homework in the backseat and spent the rest of the time slinging questions at them: "How can I do better with making friends?" "How can I connect better with people?" "What am I doing wrong?"

There were no easy answers. As a freshman in 2001, Jordan made the varsity volleyball team, driving deeper resentment. When Logan View coach Angie Hauptman wanted Jordan to play on the JV team for a tournament, to get more game experience, the coach asked the JV players to cast anonymous votes. Do you want Jordan on the team?

Ten players voted no. Two voted yes.

Hauptman remembers watching Jordan, who sat in a corner with a stoic look on her face, as Hauptman read the votes. Later, Jordan walked up to Hauptman and said, "If they don't want me, I don't want to be there."

---

JORDAN PULLS INTO the garage of her Lincoln townhouse. So many storage boxes line the walls that there's barely room to hop out of the Tesla. She thinks of this house as a "pit stop."

"You're going to see my shoe collection. I'm obsessed," she says, pointing to rows and rows of sneakers along the walls of the garage.

Jordan apologizes as she walks through the garage door. Her house is disorganized, she says. It's very unlike her, she adds, but she hasn't really had the time. The living room smells like fresh carpet. Framed jerseys from every year she's played pro and for Team USA are propped against the brown leather sofa and the TV shelf. A photo of Kae and Jordan's grandma hangs on the fridge door.

She takes the stairs to one of the guest bedrooms on the second floor, where her baby shoes and old clothes are neatly packed in plastic bags and arranged in boxes. She picks up an old doll, sets it on her lap and plays with its arms. Dozens of photo albums are scattered across the room, newspaper clippings and photos spilling from some of them. She pulls out the sports section of the Lincoln Journal Star from September 2008. The back page has a single photo: an airborne Jordan Larson, her right arm stretched over her head, her back arched, is staring at a ball a few feet above her. Behind her, a sea of fans, wearing red and white, stare at her, necks craning, some with their mouths open. Jordan points to the corner of the frame, where Pat and her then-boyfriend Luke Burbach are standing next to each other, watching her intently.

You can almost hear the noise of palm making contact with the ball, for the perfect kill.

---

"IT'S A DIFFERENT SOUND -- her hand contact, how fast her arm is," Nebraska coach John Cook says. "She was doing things that nobody had ever really seen before."

During his recruiting trips, Cook watched players on opposing teams cover their heads because they were so worried about getting hit in the face.

"I would equate it to LeBron James," Cook says. "Everybody knew he was going to be great. You just know this is a prodigy coming up."

Cook, who had won a national title in his first season at Nebraska in 2000, extended Jordan an offer during her sophomore year in 2002. After her visit, she told Kae and Pat she wanted to commit. Kae smiled at Jordan, but advised her to take a beat and journal her thoughts. To Jordan, the decision was easy: She wanted her mom to go to as many games as possible, and Nebraska was home.

The morning after her visit, she called Cook and told him she was committing. That summer, she visited Cook's office to deliver more news. "Coach," she said. "I'm going to come to Nebraska, and we're going to win a national championship. And then I'm going to go be an Olympian."

She spent her last day before leaving for Lincoln crying. In her calming voice, Kae reassured her. "Jordan, you're going to be fine."

She led Nebraska to the 2005 national championship game, where they fell to Washington, and was named the conference freshman of the year.

As a sophomore, she met Luke through one of her roommates, and they connected instantly. Luke had a sarcastic sense of humor, and Jordan always matched him. She also loved his large family. Every year for Thanksgiving, close to 100 of his family members showed up to celebrate.

"It allowed me to be a part of something bigger than my little..." Jordan says, trailing off.

That season, Jordan also fulfilled one of the promises she made to Cook four years earlier. In front of a then-record 17,209 fans against Stanford in the 2006 NCAA final, Jordan jumped into the air on match point and slammed the ball. The sound of palm making contact with the ball reverberated across the arena.

A kill, her 19th of the match, won the national championship.

Jordan beamed and ran into the arms of her teammates, jumping up and down. Kae, Pat and Luke hugged each other in the stands.

"All my life, the question has been, 'Am I doing [the] right thing?'" Jordan says. "That team was so special, and the win helped validate what my brain was saying was right."

---

BACK IN HER Lincoln townhouse, Jordan walks to another guest bedroom on the second floor and opens a sliding shelf that holds books ranging from Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens" to Nicholas Sparks romance novels. She pulls out a thin, brown notebook -- one of her journals -- and flips through the pages. Most of them are filled with dates and times, for appointments, dinners and events, so precise that sometimes she has recorded how long she thought a dinner would last (8 to 9:45 p.m.).

Then she stops at a page. She begins to read aloud, quickly and without pausing between sentences.

May 12, 2015:

Sitting on the plane en route to the States from Istanbul, Turkey. I just completed my seventh season, cannot believe it's gone by so fast. What an incredible journey -- I've been blessed with such an amazing career so far. I know my mom is looking over me and guiding me through all this. Wishing more than ever that she has been here to enjoy this journey with me. Losing my mom has been a much bigger toll in my life than I would have ever expected. As much as I thought I had prepared myself for losing her, I was never prepared.

She pauses, a melancholic smile on her face. She flips through the pages and lands on another entry. She begins to read, this time more slowly.

August 4, 2016:

Happy birthday, Mom. Missing you a little extra today. Man, could I have you in this moment. My heart is hurting. Nothing can take your place. I've had the hardest time accepting that people love and care for me. I feel so forced to be me. I'm not sure why I feel so alone. Why can't I just be in life? Why can't I just feel like a normal person?

She looks up from the page.

"With grief, how do you know you've actually made it to the other side?" she asks. "How do you measure that? What does that actually look like?"

She shrugs and places the journal back on the shelf.

---

JORDAN SCANNED THE PACKED gym before Nebraska played at Washington in the 2008 regional finals. Where is Mom? Where are Pat and Luke? Did something happen? Is Mom OK?

Between points, Jordan surveyed the crowd and still no Pat, no Luke, no Kae. Nebraska lost the first set 25-14.

Something is very wrong.

Jordan missed serves and was clumsy with her passing, and Nebraska lost the second set 25-23. When the team walked into the locker room, Jordan fumbled for her phone in her bag. She dialed Luke's number, but the call didn't go through. There was no cell service in the locker room. She begged a former teammate to go outside and call her boyfriend or stepdad.

Minutes later, she came back with news. Kae was OK but felt too ill to make it to the game. She was watching the match on TV in her hotel room with Jordan's grandma. Pat and Luke settled Kae in and finally made it to the game.

Jordan exhaled. She had run through so many worst-case scenarios that she could swallow this. She walked back onto the court. She spotted Pat and Luke.

Today cannot be my last match for Nebraska. My mom will see me play in person again.

In the winter of 2007, Kae had developed a cough that she couldn't shake. She was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. Still, she attended as many games in Lincoln as she could, and Jordan led Nebraska to a No. 4 seed in the NCAA tournament. Days before Nebraska's game in Seattle, Kae told Jordan she was going to the game. She hated flying by then, and she had a chemo appointment the day before, but she was determined.

"This is important," she told Jordan.

Nebraska won the third set 25-17. With the fourth set tied 24-24 and Nebraska two points from elimination, Jordan swatted a ball off the Washington block to give Nebraska a chance to pull even. An ace sent the game to a fifth set. But the momentum didn't last, and Nebraska found itself down 9-3.

Today cannot be my last match for Nebraska.

Jordan got a kill. She pumped her fists and said, "Let's go." She got three more to make it 9-9. Her eyes weren't closed, but even if they were, her body would have known exactly what to do.

Match point, Nebraska. And Jordan stood at the line to serve.

Covering his face with his clipboard, Cook motioned for Jordan to take a deep breath. "Float it in," he mouthed.

No way. I'm going for it.

Jordan threw the ball in the air. She skipped and leaped -- her signature jump serve -- and made contact.

Not a single Washington player moved.

Ace.

Jordan dropped to her knees, her forehead and arms drooping to the ground. Tears poured from her eyes as her teammates enveloped her. Nebraska was heading back to Omaha to play in the final four.

Jordan ran to Pat and Luke, who had made their way down to the floor. She dropped her face onto Pat's shoulder, her body shaking with sobs.

My mom will see me play in person again.

She rushed back to the hotel and spent the rest of the night with Kae, holding her hands and slowly walking her around the perimeter of the hotel so she could get some fresh air. They walked laps until well past midnight.

A week later in the national semifinals, with Luke, Pat and Kae in the stands, Nebraska pushed Penn State to five sets, the first sets Penn State had lost all season. Cook called the loss the greatest match he has ever seen. It was Jordan's final game for the Huskers. Still, it's the win over Washington that she'll remember forever.

"It was a miracle, you know?" Jordan says. "I can still feel what it felt like today."

---

JORDAN SITS on the patio of her Airbnb in Dana Point, California, a half-hour drive from the Anaheim gym where the national team trains. It's a breezy May afternoon, and she just finished a therapy session and has an hour until the team chaplain arrives.

Desert plants ensconce the patio, creating a cocoon around her furniture and jacuzzi. Since this is a temporary home, Jordan hasn't decorated it. The house is pristine, so clean that the metal in the bathroom shimmers and the tiles on the floor gleam.

"I'm turning into my mom," she says.

Would you say you're like her?

"I try," she says, pausing.

"She was so good at relating to people, seeing them as who they were and without judgment," she says.

"I think I'm trying to be like her."

"I wish you'd had the chance to meet my mom," she says later. "I'd have made a lot more sense to you."

---

A FEW WEEKS after her final match for Nebraska, in January 2009, Jordan boarded a plane to Puerto Rico with Luke, who proposed to her on a chilly Christmas day in 2008. Jordan was off to play her first pro season, and Luke, without hesitating, went with her.

"He was handing waters to us on the sidelines," Jordan says.

Back home in Hooper, cancer ate at Kae's body, but she threw herself into planning Jordan's wedding. She designed their invitations and organized the venue, caterers, desserts and drinks. Jordan loved that her mom had a new purpose, but she was terrified to pick up the phone and call her. She feared it would bring news that would shatter her.

In May, Jordan and Luke married in Nebraska in front of 300 family and friends. Kae wore a black dress and smiled brightly. Kevin and Pat walked Jordan down the aisle, her hands looped into theirs. "That was special," Jordan says.

After the wedding, Jordan and Luke drove to Anaheim. She trained with USA Volleyball and was getting ready to play in Peru when Pat called.

"Mom's in the hospital. It's not looking good."

Dazed, she walked into coach Hugh McCutcheon's office and told him she needed to go home and she didn't know when she'd be back.

When she got to the hospital, Kae looked so put together that if not for the tubes hooked into her body, nobody would know she was ill. "Jordan," Kae said. "You better not be missing a volleyball tournament to be here."

Jordan spent two weeks by her mom's side. The cancer had reached her brain and she was losing motor skills. Her mom had one serious conversation with her in those two weeks. "I know you're going to be okay because you have Luke," she told her. "But I'm worried about Pat."

Jordan nodded and kept her emotions to herself. She didn't want to burden her mom. She didn't want to tell her she was wrong.

In the quiet of the night and during her showers, she allowed tears to fall. I'm not going to be OK, Mom. I'm not.

One day, doctors gave Kae medication for her pain and sent her home. There was nothing else they could do.

That night, Jordan tried to give her mom the medicine, but Kae couldn't swallow it. Jordan had an intense urge to run. She told Pat and her grandma that she was going to stay with Luke at his sister's. She wanted to remember her mom dancing in their kitchen. She didn't want to remember her mom in pain.

At 6:30 the next morning, Sept. 16, 2009, she woke up to a call from Pat.

She's gone.

---

BACK ON HER Dana Point patio, Jordan continues to talk as the sun moves across the sky, creating shapes on her floor. She has been thinking a lot about surrogacy, she says. And about freezing her eggs.

Why surrogacy now?

"My body's been this way for so long that, I don't know, it's scary," she says. "But if I can keep striving to do what I'm best at doing and someone else can carry [my baby] alongside me, why not?"

She recently called a clinic in Lincoln.

"And they're like, 'Oh, Jordan Larson-Burbach. We already have an account for you.' I was like, 'You do?'" she says. "And then I remembered that that's where we went." She informed the clinic that she's no longer Larson-Burbach.

"It took me back," she says.

---

THE DAY AFTER Kae's funeral, Jordan got on a plane to Puerto Rico to join the national team. Then she signed with a team in the Russian league. Volleyball was her solace. It gave her something to do. It gave her somewhere to be. Luke quit his job as an engineer so he could be with her. He went to practices, traveled for away games and stayed with her in her hotel room.

After the season, they returned to the United States, and Jordan moved to Anaheim to train with the national team. In 2012, McCutcheon told Jordan she had made the Olympic team. She looked at her phone and wanted to dial her mom's number. She was going to be an Olympian, but she didn't have the one person who believed her when she announced her dream back when she was 10 years old.

Luke and nearly a dozen family members and friends traveled to London to watch her win silver with Team USA.

When they returned, Luke was ready to start a family. Jordan wanted kids, too. She was determined to pass along Kae's essence, but she didn't think it meant she had to pause her career. At 26, she called a fertility clinic in Lincoln to explore surrogacy. The cost was prohibitive, so they compromised: Jordan would play one more Olympic cycle and then retire.

Soon, their relationship began to curdle. They spent swaths of time joined at the hip and the other half apart. Luke began coaching Jordan, telling her what she needed to do better on the court. Jordan was looking for comfort in her partner. She felt like nothing she did was enough. Luke felt like she wasn't communicating her feelings. Jordan felt like he wasn't hearing her.

"Her dreams became my dreams and I lost my sense of purpose," Luke says.

By 2015, Jordan could no longer see a future. She texted him from Hong Kong, where she was playing with Team USA, and told him they needed to talk in person. Luke pushed her to share her thoughts over the phone.

"I want a divorce," she told him.

Jordan didn't feel like she had anything more to say. When Luke saw her during mediation, she showed no emotion. She didn't acknowledge him. It was as if one day she was his wife, and the next day she was gone.

What he didn't know was this: Jordan had spent days curled into a ball on her bed -- in Turkey, in Hong Kong, crying. On her way to Nebraska, she allowed tears to fall as she wrote in her journal.

As crazy successful as my career has been, it's been incredibly lonely. I always want people around me to be happy. But am I really happy? Looking at my life, I should be happiest ever. What is wrong with me? Why do I feel like this? I feel like I'm missing love and I don't know why.

I feel like it's my mother's love I'm missing.

---

JORDAN AND HER DAD shimmy into a booth for Sunday brunch after attending the 10 a.m. ceremony at Life.Church in Omaha.

Kevin talks about farming -- planting corn first and then soybean -- and Jordan asks why that's the case. "I should know this answer," she says.

As Kevin begins explaining, she grabs her phone. Her former team in Italy is playing in a European league championship match. She pulls up the livestream and places her phone against the water jug at the center of the table. Her eyes dart from the screen to her father.

A woman walks by their table and pauses when she sees Jordan. They exchange hellos. "We played volleyball together back in the day," Jordan says. The woman -- Brittany -- reminds her that it was her sister she played volleyball with. We look very similar, she adds.

Jordan asks her how her mother is doing, where she lives and what she has been up to.

"Congrats on the volleyball," Brittany says. "You're an icon for so many women and young girls."

"No, no, no," Jordan says, shaking her head. "Thank you."

Brittany walks away.

"This happens every time we're out and about in Nebraska," Kevin says.

Jordan nods, her eyes returning to her phone and the volleyball match 6,000 miles away.

---

JORDAN HIT THE weight room ahead of the Rio Olympics. She put on muscle. She returned to Turkey in early 2016 feeling like she was in the best shape of her career. At the end of the season, she joined the national team in Anaheim.

There, she met David Hunt, who had recently joined as an assistant coach. They became fast friends, getting coffee after practices and talking for hours about volleyball. She was enthralled.

Under coach Karch Kiraly, who took over from McCutcheon, the United States won bronze in Rio. "She was one of our stabilizers, one of our rocks," Kiraly says.

Jordan and Hunt began dating months after returning from the Olympics. When Jordan went to play overseas, Hunt sent her photos throughout his day so she could wake up to them. She began responding with photos from her days.

"We were sharing love, even though we were not sharing that moment together," Jordan says.

Jordan considered retiring from the national team. Hunt was vying for a more permanent coaching position on the team, and she knew a player-coach relationship wouldn't work. At 30, she wanted to continue playing pro for a couple more years, but she'd already played in two Olympics and won a silver and a bronze. Did she think about an Olympic gold? Sure. But Hunt, who was 31 and just setting out on his career, came first.

"Because the amount of respect I had for this man -- the way he treated me, I didn't know that that kind of love existed," Jordan says. "When he picked me up from the airport, he always had flowers in hand, a snack and a bottle of water. I felt so incredibly loved."

Hunt wound up taking a coaching position at Pepperdine. Jordan committed to one final Olympic run -- which COVID delayed by a year -- before they'd get married and start a family.

In the gold medal match in Tokyo in 2021, Jordan stood in the front row and scanned her opponents. How can things be so different but feel so similar?

Team USA was playing Brazil, the same team it lost to in London in 2012. Then, Jordan was 26 and considering retirement. Now, she was 34, muscles more pronounced, still playing the sport. USA was now at gold medal point.

After a Brazil serve, the ball was set for Jordan. She jumped in the air, and arching her back, she lifted her right arm in the sky. Her fist made contact with the ball. The sound reverberated across a quiet, fan-less gym. Nobody on the Brazil team moved.

A kill, her 12th of the match.

She screamed as she dropped to her knees. Her teammates pulled her into hugs on the floor. She leaned on them, her body shaking in sobs. Team USA had won its first gold medal in volleyball. Jordan completed the rare trifecta of winning gold, silver and bronze. She was named the Best Outside Hitter and the Most Valuable Player of the Olympics.

A part of her cried because she'd done it all -- she'd won every medal possible and capped it with gold. Another part of her cried because she knew it was the last Olympic match she would ever play.

She married Hunt in Malibu two weeks later in front of a small gathering that included her dad and stepdad. Jordan and Hunt bought a house in Malibu and started to make it their own, but another opportunity came knocking. Jordan was offered a two-month contract to play with Vero Volley Monza in Italy. The money was great and Jordan had always wanted to play in Italy. Who wouldn't want to play in Italy once before they retire? Hunt, who called himself and Jordan "the team," encouraged her to do it. They decided it would be her final contract before retirement.

"What a way to cap off a career, you know?" Jordan says.

Hunt accepted an offer to be the associate head coach at Texas, and after leading Vero Volley to a second-place finish, Jordan joined him in Austin. She accepted a job as a Texas assistant for the 2022 season.

Asjia O'Neal remembers everyone buzzing before Jordan's first practice.

"That's like someone saying, 'LeBron's going to be our coach now,'" O'Neal says. "People worship the ground she walks on."

Jordan settled into her new home with Hunt. They coached together, they went on long walks together, they tried a radical diet together, they adopted an English bulldog and named him Spud.

---

THE MANAGER OF Sartor Hamann, a downtown jewelry store in Lincoln, places a black velvet box in Jordan's outstretched palms. Jordan unlatches the box, her eyes wide.

Inside is a diamond-studded pendant of the Olympic rings.

Jordan pries the necklace from the box and asks for help putting it on. She walks over to a mirror, tracing the diamonds on the necklace with her fingers.

"It's such a meaningful thing for me, to carry with me to the Olympics," Jordan tells the manager. "Thank you."

The manager smiles and passes a small purple drawstring bag to Jordan. Inside sits her wedding band, the center diamond still in place. Jordan slips the pouch into her purse.

The necklace's designer walks out of a side room and introduces himself to Jordan. She tells him she'll wear the necklace for every Olympic game she has left to play. With a melancholic smile on her face, she walks out of the store, caressing her necklace.

"It's bittersweet," she says. "It's grieving the life I thought I was going to have, you know?"

A few months ago, Jordan handed over her ring and asked them to use the smaller diamonds to make a necklace of the Olympic rings.

"But also, now this is a new life. This is something that I can continue to wear."

---

JORDAN QUIETLY RESIGNED from her coaching position before Texas' season even began. She says she can't share details of her divorce from Hunt for legal reasons, and Hunt declined to be interviewed for this story.

"I feel like I did everything in my power to make it right this time," Jordan says. "The circumstances brought me to the point I didn't really have... I really didn't want to leave."

For a week, she wondered if she could find a way to stay and finish the season at Texas. She felt like she owed the team and the coaching staff.

"It was just going to be too hard for me to continue on," Jordan says. "And it was better for me to go home."

She called her dad, who said, "Let's get you right."

She packed five suitcases and threw them in her car. She said goodbye to Spud. She began driving north. Back to Nebraska. Her father drove his truck south. They met seven hours into her drive, and he followed her the rest of her journey home.

Jordan moved into her high school coach Angie Hauptman's basement in Lincoln. Her father's farm was too secluded. Hauptman joked with Jordan that she would start a blog titled, "The Olympic Champion In My Basement."

For days, Jordan laid in bed staring at the ceiling as her brain pummeled her with questions. Did I make a mistake? Who do I trust? Did this really happen?

She opened her photo album on her phone and poured over images from the past year. And now I'm starting over.

"I thought I was going to be happy, and I was going to have this great marriage, and I was going to have children," she said to Angie. "What's wrong with me?"

John Cook reached out to her. "Why don't you come and just be around our program, come to our gym, hang out. You know, this will be really good for you," he said.

Jordan took Cook up on his offer, but she wasn't herself.

"She was just very quiet," Cook said. "Just reserved."

"Do I play? Do I coach?" she asked him. "What do I do now, Coach?"

One night in the fall of 2022, Jordan's agent called to say Monza wanted her back. She hadn't worked out in months, but she was tired of pitying herself. She signed up for personal training and began lifting weights.

"F--- this, this s--- sucks," she said to herself. "I'm going to take control of what I know."

Tears streamed from her eyes as she packed her bags. For the first time she felt like she had nothing to anchor her to America.

"She certainly didn't heal," Hauptman says. "But she discovered some things about herself enough to move on."

In Italy, she realized she wanted to continue playing volleyball.

She announced her new goal: Paris 2024.

---

JORDAN SIPS HER COFFEE at Mimi's, a cafe a couple miles away from Team USA's training center in Anaheim. It's 7 a.m. on a May day, and Jordan and her teammates are seated at a table for a breakfast hosted by the team chaplain. She's wearing a navy blue long-sleeve gym shirt and has her hair in a low ponytail, ready to play in the friendly match against Japan in two hours.

Jordan orders her usual, oatmeal with fruit on top, and the chaplain poses two questions to the group. What was your relationship to faith growing up? And what has God done recently that made you realize that the journey you're on is benefitting you?

Danielle Cuttino talks about getting baptized last year, and refinding God. She breaks into tears. Jordan nods and reaches her hand toward her. Chiaka Ogbogu explains growing up in a Nigerian Catholic family, and how she reached out to God during an isolating season in Poland.

Jordan goes last. She talks about growing up in a household where her family focused on showing up for their neighbors and being good human beings. She pauses, pursing her lips.

"I felt a ton of judgment," she says. "I didn't know how to understand [how] you could be Christian but then also house judgment."

She says she wants to be part of the community, but she doesn't want to alienate people who might not think of Jesus as their God. Her sentences are pockmarked with pauses.

"I have constantly had this, like, tug and pull of, like, what does [Christianity] look like for me?" she says, pausing.

"Does that make sense?" she asks.

People nod.

Tears fall out of her eyes. She wipes them away and takes a sip of water. Ogbogu reaches over and touches her knee.

Later, Jordan says she didn't share details about what she has been through, and she didn't speak cohesively, because the Bible says divorce is a sin.

"So I feel like I'm not worthy of being in that space," she says.

---

HER HEART RACED and her palms sweat when she walked into the Team USA gym in Anaheim in the spring of 2023. Deep down, Jordan knew she was ready. She had gotten "more sophisticated" with her training and preparation. She continued to increase her protein intake and cut back on sugar.

She showed up earlier than her teammates and warmed up before the warmup. She adapted her game to suit an aging body. She doesn't jump as high or hit the ball as hard as she used to, but her angles have gotten sharper, and her line shots are more accurate.

"She's the Tom Brady of volleyball," Cook says.

As the months wore on, she began to feel more at ease. She had so much left to give -- to the sport and to the next generation. Fifteen years ago, when she turned up in Anaheim for the first time to train for Team USA, she remembered looking at older players and thinking, "What are you guys doing here? Don't you have a life?" Today she shakes her head and laughs at the irony. She makes jokes about her aging body, ("I'm going to blow my back out.") and tells her younger teammates like Justine Wong-Orantes to "stop growing up."

In June, she accepted a job as an assistant coach at Nebraska. Her dad bought her a townhouse in Lincoln and she moved her things out of storage and flew home. She helped coach Nebraska to the national championship game, where they lost to Hunt and Texas.

It has been almost two years since they divorced, and it is also the longest stretch she has been single. There's a lot of growth yet to happen, but she feels more at peace, she says. Now it's all about giving back -- to volleyball, to young girls in rural America, to Nebraska.

"When I first met her, it was, 'I know they can rely on me -- let's go win a gold medal,'" says legendary UCLA softball coach Sue Enquist, who serves as a cultural consultant for the U.S. volleyball team. "And her goal right now is to help her team win a gold medal."

Coaches wax lyrical about her ability to talk to her teammates, or in the case of Nebraska, her ability to look at each player and assess what they add to the team. Cook, who thinks she's one of the greatest passers in the history of the sport, watches her give feedback in ways he never has been able to in his decades-old career.

Her ambitions don't end there. She is working to launch an app to help girls in rural America access volleyball content -- drills, talks -- in ways they might not be able to in their hometowns. Starting in January, she plans to play for a new professional team in Omaha. But first she'll try to win her fourth Olympic medal starting this week in Paris.

"Through the highs and lows, through the challenges and turmoil of my personal life, volleyball has been steady and consistent," she says. "When you actually get to live out your dream, you don't understand the weight and magnitude of what it actually means. Volleyball has taught me so much about the world and myself ... I wouldn't change that for anything."

Volleyball showed her the world. Now she dreams of taking her children to the Hagia Sophia in Turkey and St. Basil's Cathedral in Russia. But she worries about putting down roots while also traveling across the globe.

Does settling down mean she has considered taking over the head-coaching position at Nebraska when Cook retires?

She gets that question often.

She's not ready now. She needs more experience.

"But, in a few years..." she trails off.

---

JORDAN PUTS HER TESLA on autodrive on her way to the banquet in Weeping Water -- a tiny town east of Lincoln -- to surprise Chuck.

It's early evening on a windy May day and she points to the cornfields. Growing up, she sometimes helped her dad detassel the corn. "Do you know what that is?" she asks. "When the corn is almost fully grown, you have to go through the rows and you have to take off the top."

She takes a left onto a gravel road that leads to the town's fairgrounds and parks her car on a bed of grass next to weathered pickup trucks.

"They're going to make fun of me for coming in a Tesla," she says.

Tabitha, Chuck's daughter, walks toward her, beaming. She hugs Jordan and leads her to the hall. John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" is playing over the speakers. Tabitha's eyes travel up and down Jordan, who is wearing a white long-sleeve shirt. Her hair is mostly hidden under a black hat, and she's wearing sunglasses.

"You're disguised anyway, so people won't even know it's you," Tabitha says.

When Jordan enters the hall, heads whip toward her and the crowd bursts into applause. "Jordan Larson is in the house," announces the auctioneer, wearing a cowboy hat. Jordan waves, a polite smile on her face. She walks over and hugs Chuck.

More than 500 people have congregated for an auction to raise money for Chuck's medical bills. Hunting guns sit on tables alongside bottles of wine and pieces of art. Jordan has donated two items -- an autographed Team USA jersey and a dinner date.

Jordan smiles and poses for photos. She grabs a black Sharpie from her purse and signs T-shirts, napkins and papers. Parents press invitations to their children's graduation into her palms.

When people ask how she's doing and how her training is going, she brushes past it, and almost always says, "I wish I could come back more often. I just, I just travel a lot, you know?"

After several minutes, she walks over to grab some food -- pulled pork, potato salad, mac and cheese -- and sits down next to Chuck at the table at the front of the room.

Jordan's first husband, Luke, is standing in the far corner with his parents. They haven't been in the same space since the divorce eight years earlier, and she doesn't quite know how to approach him.

The auction begins, and she bids on a bottle of red wine. She wins it for $1,000. "It's the most expensive bottle of wine I've ever bought," she says as the auctioneer brings it to her. "It's something I can fit in my suitcase." At the bottom it says, "Funding cancer research. Finding a cure." She points to it and says, "That's really special."

She peers at her phone. Kiraly has sent the team an email, recapping the week's training highlights and attaching a spreadsheet for players to sign up for massages for the upcoming week. "There's always a mad dash to sign up," Jordan says as she reserves her time.

When it's time to auction off her dinner, Jordan walks to the front of the room and pulls her hat down over her face. The bid goes to a family for $5,250. Jordan beams.

After a few more guns, hogs and beef are auctioned off, she is called back up. She holds her signed jersey.

The auction begins at $2,000. Five people bid vigorously.

"$8,750 -- going once, going twice...sold," calls the auctioneer. The highest bid of the night -- hunting guns, hogs and beef be damned. Jordan throws her head back, laughs and runs over to the woman who bought the jersey. The woman bursts into tears.

At half past ten, after spending close to six hours at the banquet, she makes her way through the crowd, hugging goodbye. It takes her half an hour. Finally, she walks over to Luke. As he shifts his weight from one leg to the other, they talk about the weather and Luke's upcoming trip to Alaska. She says goodbye. "Safe travels," he says.

She turns to the door, walks outside, past the pickup trucks.

"I wish I could come back more often," she says. "It eats at me. How do you expand your world and also come back to your home?"

She gets into her bright red Tesla and pulls out of the lot. She's due back in Anaheim tomorrow. Paris is three months away.