Olympic Glory

As a little girl, I had the pleasure every four years of watching the elegant women in fancy sequined leotards float across a frozen sea of ice followed a few months later by a different set of beautiful women in fancy sequined leotards twirling and flying through the air without the benefit of the ice.  I would day dream about being one of those fancy women; they made it all seem so easy.  But I’m basically lazy so I just watched, played with my Barbies, and pinned an old blanket around my shoulders and pretended I was a princess.

My Barbies are long gone.  I still wander around sometimes with a blanket slung over my shoulders, but that is to keep warm.  However I still love watching gymnastics and pretending that I am out there doing flips and flying around the uneven bars.  Now that I have actually spent some serious time training for competitive sports, I watch with a whole different eye.  I don’t claim to know anything about gymnastics, but I’ve learned something about heart in the last few years.

This morning, I went to Chaifetz Arena to watch the VISA Championship and cheer on future Olympians.  This is a gymnastics competition that brings together the best gymnasts in the USA to vie for spots on the National Team and the opportunity to try out for the US Olympic Team.  Since I didn’t have any skin in the game (didn’t know any of the competitors), I went to the earlier session which was day two of the Junior Women Championship.  These are younger women who are up and coming in the sport, but I don’t think that they are eligible to try out for this year’s Olympic Team.

To be there in the crowd was fascinating.  You could easily tell who the crowd favorites were; the crowd viscerally shared in the experience of the girls’ trials and triumphs.  Shortly after I sat down, one of the girls fell off the balance beam and the entire audience moaned in distress.  When the young women were doing the floor exercises, every time they hit a complicated move, the audience clapped in delight. 

My favorite competitor to watch was a young lady named Simone Biles.  She first caught my eye on the vault.  Her focus and attention were wholly on that vault.  I thought she did a good job but then my criterion is that she didn’t land on her face.  Apparently the judges thought she did a good job too since she won gold for that apparatus.  However the reason I kept watching her was that she just seemed like a genuinely nice person.  She was focused on her game, but she also smiled and seemed like she was having a good time.  At the end, she was the only one who hugged her fellow medalists- real hugs, not a half arm around the shoulder, I’ll beat you next time too hugs.

At the end of the competition, I still don’t know any more about gymnastics than I did going into it, but I have more respect than ever for the athletes who put their heart and soul into doing what the love.  And in a few years when Simone Biles’s day comes to vault in the Olympics, I’ll be able to say that I was there when…

A few links for your viewing pleasure.  If they are dead, my apologies, but things move on in the sports world.

Photos on STL Today:  http://stltoday.mycapture.com/mycapture/folder.asp?event=1484575&CategoryID=38576&ListSubAlbums=0

Results:  https://usagym.org/pages/post.html?PostID=10264&prog=h