U.S. WOMEN GYMNASTS GOOD AS GOLD
Stacked team carries potential to win every event in Rio Games
The U.S. women’s gymnasts are going to need an extra piece of luggage to get all of their loot home from the Rio Olympics. A steamer trunk, perhaps. The Americans are sending to the Rio Olympics their strongest gymnastics team yet, one that is all but assured of winning the team and all-around titles and might very well sweep all four individual events.
“It’s definitely possible for Team USA to come home with gold on every event,” Madison Kocian said Monday.
That’s not arrogance or overconfidence. That’s just plain fact.
Consider the lineup. Threetime world champion Simone Biles hasn’t lost an all-around competition in more than three years and is considered by many to be the greatest gymnast of all time. Gabby Douglas is the reigning Olympic champion and was second to Biles in last year’s world championships.
Fellow Fierce Fiver Aly Raisman won gold in floor exercise in London in 2012. Kocian was a cochamp on uneven bars in last year’s world championships. And first-year senior team member Laurie Hernandez is a star in the making, finishing second to Biles in the Olympic trials.
No other country can match that wealth of talent even when it’s in prime form, which perennial powerhouses Russia and Romania are not. Russia has been hobbled by injuries, losing London all-around silver medalist Viktoria Komova this spring. Romania didn’t even qualify a full team for Rio, a stunning setback for the team that’s won a medal in every Games since 1976.
That leaves China.
Sure, the Chinese won the silver medal in the last two world championships, but they were so far back they could barely see the Americans. The USA won by more than five points each time, colossal routs in a sport in which medals are usually decided by tenths and hundredths.
In the all-around, Biles is so heavily favored that if she doesn’t win it will be the biggest upset in gymnastics history.
Her routines are packed with so much difficulty that she starts the competition a point or two ahead, and rarely does she give anyone the chance to close the gap. Take Sunday. She fell off the balance beam, her second day with a significant error, yet won by more than two points.
“The way she competes, she’s like, ‘All right, I got this.’ Every single time,” Douglas said. “Her gymnastics definitely pushes me to even do more and expect more from myself. I think she pushes everyone to be the best and expect more of themselves.”
Biles also will be favored to win gold on floor exercise and balance beam, events she won at worlds last year, and vault. That alone will put the U.S. women in position for a gold medal sweep.
No team has won all six golds since the all-around and individual event competitions were added to the Olympics. But consider that the USA won gold on everything but vault in last year’s world championships. And Biles, the vault bronze medalist, has upgraded since then. Her new, second vault puts the gold well within her reach.
“This team, it’s crazy,” Raisman said.
There’s no guarantee the USA can pull off the sweep. There are some very good individual gymnasts throughout the world, and crazy things tend to happen in big competitions. Just look back to London, where McKayla Maroney was considered a shoo-in for vault gold until she fell.
But doing something unprecedented would be an appropriate send-off for Martha Karolyi, who is retiring as national team coordinator after Rio.
“She doesn’t really talk about results,” USA Gymnastics President Steve Penny said. “But Martha is the ultimate competitor. She wants the highest level of results that every athlete can achieve.”
If the Americans happen to make some history in the process, all the better.