It’s now or never
US team competition started with a cover of ‘It’s My Life’ and will end with ‘a lot of tears’
TOKYO — The U.S. rhythmic gymnastics team sat in a Deerfield gym last fall, listening to song snippet after song snippet as members tried to select music for their Olympic competition.
After years of performing to classical and world pieces, their Russian-born coach Margarita Mamzina agreed to let the women use American pop for one of their two routines in Tokyo. The team had wanted this for so long, but it struggled to find anything that would work.
Then someone played Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life.” Instantly, they knew they had found their song.
It’s my life, it’s now or never.
I ain’t gonna live forever
I just want to live while I’m alive. “We all started singing along,” gymnast Izzy Connor said. “It spoke to all of us.”
The Tokyo Olympics mark the first time since rhythmic gymnastics’ debut in 1984 that the United States has qualified a full team — two individuals and a group — for the Summer Games. It’s also only the second time the country has qualified for the group event.
The team did not expect to medal here, and the gymnasts do not pretend otherwise. They arrived in Japan with the candid goal of having “two clean routines” and embracing the Olympic experience.
They came pretty close to that Saturday, finishing 11th in the group competition. It was an improvement from 2016, when the United States finished last among the 14 teams.
Tossing and catching five balls in time to a remix of “It’s My Life” during the first rotation, the group’s performance quickly caught the crowd’s attention. The small audience — mostly Japanese volunteers and representatives from each country’s gymnastics delegation — cheered loudly as the song’s chorus blasted through the sound system at the Ariake Gymnastics Center.
On the carpet, the U.S. athletes smiled at the refrain too.
When they finished their second rotation — this one featuring three hoops and two clubs — several members held back tears as they took their final bows as a team. They engaged in an extended group hug while waiting for their score, stealing a moment for themselves and not letting the judges’ marks define their Olympic experience.
“We were just reflecting on everything we’ve through during the past year and all the sacrifices we made,” Connor said. “Everything we’ve been through was so worth it. We made it through together.”
The Bon Jovi song, without question, became a rallying cry for the team after the International Olympic Committee postponed the Games for a year because of the pandemic. The delay created a difficult decision for squad members: disband and begin their lives or accept the hardships that came with sticking it out for another year.
Many members already had put off college to train for the 2020 Games. They didn’t know whether they could extend their deferments for another year or, in some cases, if they even wanted to do so.
The squad, which formed in 2017, had a heart-to-heart conversation over Zoom a few hours after the IOC announced the postponement. Their coach asked who would be willing to stay another 16 months.
Most said they wanted stick with the team. No one, however, could commit until personal issues were sorted out.
The lease on Elizaveta Pletneva’s Deerfield apartment, for example, was running out, and she hadn’t re-signed because she planned to move back to New Jersey. Camilla Feeley was about to begin classes at the University of North Carolina in the fall.
Connor — whose parents have lived halfway across the country from each other for years in order to support her dream — also needed to check on a college deferment from the University of California-Santa Cruz.
The team, which pays for its own training, also needed to commit to another year of financial burdens the athletes in less-prominent Olympic sports often endure. USA Gymnastics does not fully fund the team, so athletes and their families must pay for some international travel, training camps, matching warmups and those pricey, heavily bedazzled leotards.
In the end, three members — including Feeley — chose to move on to their next chapters. Feeley, however, came back in December after UNC went to remote learning and she discovered she missed the sport.
“I had left a piece of me behind,” she said. “I wanted to see it through till the end with my teammates.”
For all its uncertainties and obstacles, the pandemic offered the gymnasts a chance to experience a more typical lifestyle. With their gym closed for nearly three months, they spent time with their families, went to the beach and read books.
When their training center — a private room in a park district building in suburban Deerfield — reopened, they could practice only once a day because COVID-19 protocols limited how many people could be in the facility at one time. Already tight-knit teammates, they used to the free time to become better friends. They hung out at the pool together, went on hikes at nearby forest preserves and took a girls’ getaway to Wisconsin.
“We got to experience a little more of life as a human being outside the gym,” Connor said. “It helped us grow and mature as people and as a team.”
The real world also convinced them they made the right decision to stick together through the Olympics, even if it meant another year of training six days a week.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said Nicole Sladkov said. “Normal life can wait.” Normal life, alas, won’t wait forever. The journey will end, quite literally, in Tokyo. They’ll go their separate ways at the airport, with some returning to Chicago and others flying back to their original hometowns.
“There are going to a lot of tears,” said Pletneva, who will head to her parents’ home in New Jersey.
With the end coming, the gymnasts have filled their social media feeds with group shots of themselves enjoying the athletes village: posing in front of the Olympic rings, modeling their Team USA swag and hanging out with the men’s artistic gymnastics team.
“It’s now or never,” team member Lili Mizuno wrote in one photo of the team.