Last week, Misty Copeland was named principal dancer at American Ballet Theater. This lovely young dancer is only the second African American to be a principal since the beginning of ABT. And let me tell you, she’s got the craziest calves I’ve ever seen. She’s actually chiseled. Before we get on with the beautiful ballet stuff, take a look at what Under Armour did with her:

Her back story is right out of a fairy tale. She came from very, very humble beginnings, and was discovered at 13 dancing in the Boys and Girls Club of San Pedro.

In 2007, she became ABT’s first soloist of African American descent. She was so conscious of how precious her steady rise in the company was that she danced the lead in Stravinsky’s “The Firebird Suite” with six, count ’em, six (secret) stress fractures in her shin bone. She felt that as a trailblazer, she couldn’t show weakness or risk losing ground, so she told no one about her injuries. One wrong move could have ended her dancing career permanently, but happily, it ended well.

So as promised, here comes the ballet! It was a lot harder than you’d expect to find video of her dancing, so here are the two best-quality recordings I could find.

And here she is in 1997 at the age of 15. Keep in mind she had been dancing for less than 2 years at this point!