Flouncing to Victory
The Rise, Fall, and Unbelievable Reinventions of Sterling St. James
Prologue: A Legacy of Flounce
Sterling St. James didn't just compete in the 1968 Olympics—he redefined what it meant to move. He was a pioneer, a visionary, a man who could make the simplest swoon of despair look like an artistic statement about the fragility of existence.
For one brief, glorious moment, the world recognized Flouncing as an Olympic event. And Sterling, with his gravity-defying pirouettes and perfectly timed collapses, flounced his way into the history books.
Then, the Olympic Committee cruelly revoked Flouncing’s legitimacy in 1972 (citing “what the hell is this?”). But Sterling? Sterling refused to fade.
This is his story of triumph, reinvention, and desperate, near-delusional attempts to remain in the public eye.
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Introduction
By the time Sterling St. James won Olympic gold in Flouncing at the 1968 Mexico City Games, he had perfected the delicate art of moving with grievance. There was a precision to his suffering, a velocity to his exasperation, a commitment to collapsing mid-argument that had never been seen before, nor would be again.
He wasn’t just an athlete; he was a force of narrative propulsion. Sterling St. James could leave a room so dramatically, you’d question whether you had just insulted his ancestors. His signature move—The Mid-Flounce Pirouette™, a two-step whirlwind of injured dignity—was banned in four countries for its destabilizing emotional impact.
And then, as suddenly as he rose, he was gone.
Flouncing was removed from the Olympics in 1972, the International Olympic Committee citing concerns that it was “not an actual sport” and that “we may have been pranked.” With no podium left to faint upon, Sterling began the lifelong project of reinventing himself in increasingly ill-advised ways.
This is the story of a man who refused to walk normally or exit a space without a sense of impending doom. This is Sterling St. James.
The Rise: Flouncing’s First and Greatest Champion
Sterling was born too dramatic. His mother often claimed that as an infant, he exaggerated his crying for attention, once pretending to faint when denied a second bottle.
Born in the wrong era, Sterling was a man who should have been a silent film star, a Russian ballet defector, or a Victorian child succumbing to a mysterious illness. Instead, he found himself growing up in Milwaukee, a place notoriously unsuited for high-drama movement.
Originally a backup dancer for Liberace, Sterling was discovered by a Hungarian aristocrat-slash-Olympic referee who saw something extraordinary in his ability to collapse into a chair or exit a room as though he had just received devastating news.
At the 1968 Olympics, Sterling flounced as no man had flounced before. His Mid-Flounce Pirouette™ was so devastatingly fluid that three judges burst into tears and a Soviet competitor defected on the spot.
His signature move, The Disbelieving Exit, featured a slow shake of the head, a single tear, and a gesture so vague and haunting that it was later interpreted as a political statement.
The rest of his routine was equally electric—a single, devastating hand to the forehead, a collapse so drawn-out it lasted 19.3 seconds (still an Olympic record), and a final victorious pose that conveyed both agony and triumph—though some speculated it was simply a pressing need to empty his bladder.
The French called him “Le Grand Flonçeur.” The Russians called him a national security threat.
He was unstoppable.
Until he wasn’t.
The Fall: Flouncing Gets Erased from History
The Olympic Committee, fearing an international scandal, removed Flouncing from the Games in 1972. In their official statement, they cited reasons such as “widespread confusion,” “excessive fainting,” and “we were under the impression this was a joke.”
Sterling did not take this well.
He sued the Olympics for emotional damages, arguing that his entire personality had been built around competitive suffering. When the suit was thrown out, he sued the IRS for taxing his “artistic movement” as regular income. He was laughed out of court within 14 minutes, which he later described as ‘a grave miscarriage of justice and an assault on the finer things in life.’ When asked if he had legal representation, Sterling replied, ‘Of course not. I find solicitors dreary. I chose, instead, to defend myself with nothing but a poignant gaze and a well-tailored suit.’ The judge, failing to see his genius, fined him for contempt, which Sterling paid in antique coins before storming out, only to realize he had left his dramatic exit cape behind and had to go back and retrieve it.
In a last-ditch effort to save his sport, Sterling stormed the International Olympic Committee’s boardroom with a megaphone, demanding Flouncing be reinstated. When his impassioned speech was met with blank stares, he attempted to flounce out with great dignity, but misjudged the exit and had to awkwardly shuffle past a potted plant.
He did not merely leave the Olympic Committee in disgrace, he did so wearing a silk cape and murmuring, ‘You will regret this when civilization crumbles around you.’ He then flounced down the stairs, tripped on the hem of his own importance, and had to be escorted out by security, during which he corrected a janitor’s posture.
Rejected by the establishment, Sterling did what any vainglorious athlete would do: he reinvented himself as a cultural phenomenon.
The Years of Desperation: Flouncing into Oblivion
Sterling tried everything to remain relevant. His life became a series of increasingly misguided career pivots, each more spectacularly delusional than the last.
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Disco Fever
Sterling St. James released a disco album titled Flounce! Flounce! Revolution!, an ambitious yet ill-fated attempt to merge dance music with audible disappointment. The record consisted entirely of Sterling sighing theatrically over a relentless bassline, punctuated by the occasional murmured lament, such as “This isn’t music—it’s an existential crisis with a beat.”
Initially, the album was met with universal bewilderment, dismissed by Billboard as “less a disco record and more an exasperated man trapped in a sound booth.” However, everything changed when Yoko Ono publicly declared it a masterpiece, calling it “the sound of an artist refusing to compromise with melody.”
Emboldened, Sterling leaned into the chaos. He announced that the album was never meant to be played at regular speed, insisting it could only be truly appreciated when simultaneously slowed down, sped up, and played backwards.
Rolling Stone was unconvinced, calling it “the first album in history that actively resents its audience.”
However, one critic—having accidentally played it at the wrong speed—declared it “an avant-garde masterpiece—an audacious critique of rhythm itself.”
Sterling, naturally, claimed this had been his vision all along, calling it “a deliberate assault on the tyranny of time signatures.”
To this day, Flounce! Flounce! Revolution! remains his only gold record, though it is widely believed that Yoko Ono personally bought half the copies.
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Dating Liza
He briefly dated Liza Minnelli. Their relationship lasted three weeks, culminating in an argument so baroque in its melodrama that it allegedly caused a blackout in Manhattan, though people who were there say, “It was more like three blocks surrounding Studio 54.” Reports of the actual length of their courtship differ. In her biography, Liza states the affair lasted precisely twelve days, five of which were spent in silent, theatrical misunderstandings so deliciously absurd that people in the next room applauded without knowing why. Their break-up took place at a gala, involved the phrase ‘You, madam, have no concept of the importance of a well-timed exit!’ and concluded with Liza throwing a cocktail glass at his head, missing, and hitting a Duke.
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Royal Claims: The Rise and Immediate Collapse of Andorra’s Most Uninvited Diplomat
Sterling St. James was never one to let reality get in the way of a perfectly good narrative.
During the more desperate years of his post-Flouncing career, he attempted to pass himself off as foreign royalty, styling himself as the exiled Prince of Andorra—a nation he had never visited but believed had the proper amount of obscurity to make the lie believable.
"It was never about the throne," he would later insist. "It was about my rightful place at seated dinners with a favorable floral arrangement."
Armed with a suspiciously new signet ring, an undeserved sense of entitlement, and a forged letter of introduction “from the Crown,” he successfully infiltrated three charity galas, where he glided through the guest lists with the authority of a man who had recently inherited an imaginary vineyard.
At one particularly exclusive soirée, he was overheard lamenting the burden of royal exile to a confused oil heiress, sighing deeply before murmuring, "I miss my people. I miss my mountains. I miss my tax advantages."
The effect was immediate. A murmur of curiosity and admiration swept through the room. Vogue briefly considered running a profile titled "The Forgotten Monarch of the Pyrenees." Meanwhile, Page Six merely described him as "A Duke, a Count, or Possibly Just a Man in a Velvet Cape."
Unfortunately, his reign was as fleeting as it was ridiculous.
During a black-tie fundraiser for a museum wing dedicated entirely to paintings of horses, his fabricated lineage was challenged by the only actual Andorran in attendance, a bewildered banker named Luis Font-Ribera, who, despite being born and raised in the tiny European principality, seemed only 60% sure himself.
Luis: "There is no royal family in Andorra."
Sterling: "Not officially, no."
Luis: "Not unofficially either."
Sterling: (sighs deeply, swirls his wine, and dramatically surveys the crowd as though debating whether to flee the country in exile a second time.)
The string quartet, sensing tension, began playing at a dramatically faster tempo. A countess from Madrid raised an eyebrow. A minor duchess audibly gasped.
With nowhere left to turn, Sterling did the only thing a man of his station could do—he executed a flawless Flounce Exit™.
Of course, it would have been a perfect act of aristocratic vanishing had he not immediately reappeared five minutes later after realizing he had left his gloves in the coatroom.
In a post-scandal interview with Vanity Fair, he defended himself without a trace of shame.
"Titles are so limiting, darling," he explained, leaning against a grand piano in a borrowed tuxedo. "One day you are royalty, the next you are but a humble man of the people. It’s all just a matter of branding."
He was never invited to another Andorran-themed event again.
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Flouncing Gloves™
Then came the infomercials. Sterling St. James introduced Flouncing Gloves™ to the world, claiming they enhanced one’s ability to exit conversations with appropriate levels of condescension. The gloves came in seasonal colors and included a testimonial from a woman who claimed they saved her marriage. Of course, the Flouncing Gloves, of course, were a phenomenal failure, not because the idea was bad but because Sterling insisted on narrating the commercial himself in a slow, tragic monologue. It opened with him in a velvet armchair whispering, ‘Have you ever found yourself exiting a dinner party and felt, deep within your soul, that you had failed to devastate the room?’ He then sighed theatrically for a full 11 seconds, causing one test audience member to stand up and leave, inexplicably overcome with regret about their own life choices.
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Celebrity Survivor
Sterling St. James was cast on Celebrity Survivor in what producers later described as “a clerical error of devastating proportions.” From the moment he arrived, he objected to every aspect of the environment—the humidity (“Like being waterboarded in an unairconditioned Ritz-Carlton”), the sand (“**Coarse. Uncouth. Common.”), and the disturbing lack of heavy velvet drapery.
He spent the first twelve hours rehearsing different ways to collapse into the jungle foliage, arguing that if the island refused to meet his aesthetic standards, he would impose them himself.
By dawn of the second day, he had seen enough.
Sterling gathered the remaining contestants on the beach—shirt unbuttoned to the navel, bathed in the eerie light of an unnecessary torch he had fashioned from a palm frond and a stolen flint. He raised a conch shell to his lips as though it were a microphone and delivered an impassioned farewell speech that, due to high winds, was almost entirely inaudible.
The fragments the others did hear included:
“This island lacks narrative structure.”
“I have tried, against all odds, to bring dignity to a world of burlap and mediocrity.”
“I was not meant to subsist on anything that has to be ‘foraged.’”
“I leave not because I am weak, but because I am unwilling to be associated with the visual monotony of this landscape.”
“Let my departure be remembered as a lesson in knowing when a space does not deserve you.”
With that, he flounced toward the horizon, an exit so grand and theatrical that three producers instinctively reached for their wallets to tip him.
There was, however, one tragic flaw in his departure.
The boat that was supposed to collect eliminated contestants wouldn’t arrive for another 14 hours.
Sterling was forced to wait on the shore, seething, wrapped in a makeshift silk sarong (which no one had given him), hissing viciously at a passing pelican, and screaming into the waves that this, too, was an act of sabotage.
He was never invited back to reality television.
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The Autobiography: The Art of the Dramatic Swoon
Sterling St. James’s autobiography, The Art of the Dramatic Swoon, was not so much a memoir as it was a manifesto for the terminally exasperated. It was 400 pages of unapologetic theatricalism, filled with deeply personal insights on the life-or-death necessity of a well-timed collapse.
The central thesis? Fainting, when executed properly, is not a sign of weakness, but an advanced survival tactic.
"One must never faint arbitrarily," Sterling cautioned in Chapter 7: Fainting With Intent. "A faint must have meaning, structure, tempo, cadence, and above all, audience impact. When deployed effectively, it can extract you from any situation—dull dinner parties, heated legal disputes, financial debts, family obligations, jury duty and on one occasion, a regrettable second date with a man who wore boat shoes without socks."
His most persuasive argument came in Chapter 14: The Financially Advantageous Collapse, in which he recounted how, during a particularly tense luncheon with a collections agency, he dramatically clutched his pearls, gasped “No, I simply cannot!” and slid, in slow motion, under the table. The sheer spectacle of it so unnerved his creditors that they offered him an extended grace period on his outstanding debts.
Critics were divided.
People Magazine hailed the book as “a masterclass in theatrical self-preservation,” while E! Entertainment News breathlessly described it as “the literary equivalent of a standing ovation—flamboyant, over-the-top, and impossible to ignore.”
The New York Review of Books took a decidedly different stance, calling it “a manifesto for grown adults who believe swooning is a viable alternative to paying rent.”
One particularly brutal review in The Times noted: "If Flouncing had a prophet, we now have his sacred text. One only hopes his followers will stop collapsing in front of oncoming traffic."
Undeterred, Sterling insisted on a book tour, during which he staged multiple highly choreographed swoons at live readings. At the Strand Bookstore in New York, he collapsed so gracefully mid-sentence that an audience member mistook it for a medical emergency and dialed 911.
The book remained on the bestseller list for an astonishing eleven weeks, due in part to Sterling bulk-purchasing his own copies, claiming he needed “spares for impromptu readings at fashionable salons.”
When asked if he had plans for a sequel, Sterling sighed deeply, glanced out a window with great melancholy, and whispered, “If the world deserves it.”
A second volume never materialized.
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The Tonight Show Incident
Sterling St. James was no stranger to grand gestures. He had built a career, and arguably an entire philosophy of movement, around the art of the dramatic exit. But on one fateful night, in what should have been his defining moment of televised indignation, Sterling found himself upstaged by a door.
It was 1983, and The Tonight Show had been billed as his triumphant return to relevance—or, at the very least, his latest attempt at it.
The interview started smoothly enough. Sterling, draped in an unnecessarily high-collared velvet cape, perched on the couch like a scorned aristocrat humoring commoners. He regaled the audience with tales of his tragically misunderstood disco album and his deeply spiritual connection to the Andorran people (which, at this point, had been legally disproven).
Then came the moment.
Pressed about his exile from the Olympics, Sterling took great offense at a mildly amused question from the host regarding whether Flouncing could ever be considered a real sport. The audience chuckled. The host grinned. Sterling’s eyes darkened.
"I refuse," he announced, voice quivering with fury, "to be interrogated by a man who considers bowling a legitimate form of competition."
And with that, he rose, flicked his cape, and turned toward the exit, prepared to execute the single most devastating walkout in late-night history.
There was just one problem.
The studio doors jammed.
What should have been a swift, majestic departure became a slow, awkward ordeal, as Sterling—realizing the door was not budging—was forced to shuffle sideways through an embarrassingly small gap.
It took fourteen excruciating seconds.
The audience held its breath.
His cape—the very symbol of his defiant glamour—became tragically ensnared on the door handle, forcing him to jerk his body backward like a man caught in a net of his own pretension.
For a moment, it seemed he might abandon the cape entirely, leaving it behind as a final martyr to the indignities of show business.
But no.
With the precision of a man who has lost everything except his commitment to accessories, he wrestled it free—not gracefully, not with the dignity of a seasoned performer, but with the wild flailing of a man who has just stepped into wet cement.
The audience erupted in laughter.
It was the first time Sterling St. James had ever been laughed at involuntarily.
He never recovered.
In subsequent interviews, he refused to acknowledge the incident, dismissing it as “an unfortunate failure of architecture.”
He was never invited back.
The Final Flounce: A Disappearance for the Ages
By the 2010s, Sterling had become a relic, a cautionary tale, a man people claimed to have seen “working at a Jamba Juice.”
Then, the comeback.
At age 97, Sterling announced one final performance.
The venue? The Sydney Opera House.
The audience? Thousands of confused tourists and three critics who showed up out of morbid curiosity.
The stakes? He would Flounce off the largest stage in history and disappear forever.
As the lights dimmed, a single spotlight hit Sterling. He raised his arms, took one final, impossible leap, and then—
POOF.
He vanished.
Some say he fell through a trap door. Others claim he ascended directly into the heavens. A few insist he simply flounced at such speed that he broke through the fabric of time.
He was never seen again.
Flouncing II: The Reckoning
History has not been kind to the Sydney Opera House performance. Today, it is looked upon as a moment of such profound absurdity that it is studied today by con artists and priests alike. Some say the event was an elaborate insurance scam, others claim Sterling actually disappeared into the ether, while a third, lesser-known theory suggests he merely got lost in the building’s basement and was too proud to ask for directions.
Still, his legend refused to die.
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The Documentary
Documentaries were pitched. Only one was made. You’ve heard of it—it won the Oscar that year. Inexplicably, it’s narrated by Werner Herzog, a 90-minute deadpan existential monologue on the futility of Flouncing in a world that refuses to appreciate delicate, calculated suffering.
Werner Herzog, in his own words, describing his Oscar-winning documentary, Le Grand Flonçeur: The Agony of Movement
"When I first heard of Sterling St. James, I did not believe he was real. He seemed like an apparition, a ghost of a man who existed solely in the margins of forgotten Olympic history. But then I saw the footage—the grainy, flickering black-and-white images of a man who did not simply move, but suffered his way across space. Here was an athlete who had weaponized exasperation, who had turned grievance into performance. He was not merely leaving rooms; he was abandoning entire realities, collapsing under the weight of his own impossible standards."
"I knew then that I had to make a film—not to celebrate, but to mourn."
The Film Itself
The film begins with a single, unbroken shot of the abandoned training grounds in Switzerland where Sterling allegedly perfected the art of Flouncing in exile. The camera lingers on a tattered silk scarf caught in the wind, its movements haunting yet directionless, like a man lost in the cruel machinery of fate.
We hear Herzog’s voice:
"What is movement but the futile thrashing of organisms pretending to have purpose? In the end, we all Flounce toward nothingness."
The second act of the film painstakingly reconstructs Sterling’s tragic downfall. The removal of Flouncing from the Olympics is narrated with the somber weight of a war crime tribunal, intercut with archival footage of Sterling sighing into microphones, shaking his head at reporters who could never understand his art.
"We see the moment the light dies in his eyes," Herzog intones, "when he realizes he is no longer a competitor, but a relic—a living ghost, condemned to reenact his finest exits before audiences that will never truly appreciate them."
The Interviews
The film’s interviews feature an eclectic cast of former colleagues, cultural critics, and one man who simply walked past Sterling in an airport once and felt changed forever.
A former Olympic judge, now in his 90s, recalls with visible distress: “I don’t know what we did. I don’t know why we took it from him. It was… beautiful, wasn’t it?”
A French intellectual, smoking furiously, nods: “He was an artist. A tragedy. A poet, but in movement.”
Meanwhile, a former lover refuses to speak—she simply stares out a window, as if watching the past itself disappear into the horizon.
The Climax
The film reaches its devastating conclusion with Sterling’s final, mysterious disappearance at the Sydney Opera House. The footage is grainy and surreal, slowed down to a dreamlike pace as we watch the flawless arc of his final flounce.
"And then—he is gone," Herzog whispers. "Vanished. Like a wisp of silk caught in the wind. Some say he fell. Some say he fled. I say he was consumed by the indifference of a world that no longer had space for beauty."
The screen fades to black.
A single line of text appears:
"Sterling St. James, 1926 – ????"
The Legacy
The documentary went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, though Herzog, in his acceptance speech, refused to acknowledge the existence of the Oscars, instead murmuring:
"In the grand scope of eternity, all awards are meaningless. Sterling did not seek recognition. He sought oblivion, and in that, he has triumphed."
Sterling himself was not present to see the film’s success.
Or perhaps, Herzog suggests, "he was there all along… watching, waiting, preparing his final, most exquisite exit."
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Conspiracy Theories
Conspiracy theories abound. In 2023, an unverified TikTok surfaced, allegedly showing a man in a billowing silk cape sprinting across the Australian outback.
Others claim Sterling St. James is alive and well, haunting five-star hotels across Europe, flouncing dramatically into and out of conversations with unsuspecting tourists. Sightings include:
A masked figure in Monte Carlo executing a flawless Exit of Regret from a blackjack table.
A man in Venice whose mere departure from a gondola caused an entire boat to sigh in unison.
An unidentified presence in a Tokyo tea house who allegedly vanished after finishing his drink with such devastating finality that a woman burst into tears.
Recently, rumors spread across Hollywood of a feature film in which Daniel Day-Lewis would come out of retirement to portray Sterling—if only so he might endure the indignity of practicing a proper flounce for six months.
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New Discoveries
Just last week, Penelope St. James, the reputed granddaughter of Sterling’s real-life love child, made headlines. Now pursuing her Master’s at The New School in New York City, she unearthed several long-lost highlights of Sterling’s career that had been all but erased by time:
1974: Appears as a guest judge on The Price is Right, demanding a dramatic entrance complete with fog machines and a wind-blown cape.
1981: Attempts a Vegas residency titled The Art of the Grand Exit, featuring flouncing-based choreography set to Frank Sinatra ballads. (Canceled after two nights.)
1984: Auditions for Dynasty, lands the iconic role of “Man in Turtleneck #3” for one episode.
1987: Releases an aerobics VHS, Flouncing Your Way to a New You—which fails after audiences realize that flouncing is exhausting and accomplishes nothing.
1996: Rebrands as a "Flouncing Guru," appearing on Oprah to teach women how to "Flounce into Their Power." No one understands what he means.
1999: Pitches a reality show, Flounce or Die!, in which contestants must win arguments using only exaggerated movement. Rejected by every network.
2016: Launches a TED Talk, The Power of the Theatrical Exit, only to Flounce off the stage mid-sentence.
2018: Starts a GoFundMe to bring Flouncing back to the Olympics. It raises $312.
2020: Attempts a comeback dance battle on TikTok, only to be immediately outperformed by a 12-year-old.
2022: Declares himself a "Flouncing Life Coach", launching an exclusive coaching program called "Exit With Style." Fee: $8,500 per session.
2024: Announces a biopic, claiming Timothée Chalamet will star as Young Sterling. (No one has confirmed this.)
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The Flounce Denouement
Could Sterling St. James still be out there, waiting for his grand return?
Even now, perhaps, he is perfecting the ultimate flounce, biding his time.
Because if anyone could flounce back into history… it’s him.