![]() "That was the biggest weight lifted off my shoulders when I landed that dismount."Īfter Phelps nailed her set, the team cruised. "It was probably the best routine of my life," Phelps says with obvious pride, even 20 years after the fact. More than that, she nailed every move, including a tricky new dismount. In competition, though, Phelps hit her routine. "If you see the footage," she says, "I'm just back and forth, back and forth, back and forth." The whole time Phelps was on the apparatus, Borden was pacing frantically on the sidelines. Though Phelps may have been reassured by the pep talk, the captain was not. "The amount of pressure that I felt for that particular routine that night, knowing that I was the tone setter, was a really, really overwhelming spot to be in." Borden's words of encouragement were enough to help her younger teammate focus. "She calmed me down and just, 'You've got this,'" Phelps recalls. Just before the team marched into arena, Dominique Dawes had burst into tears, overwhelmed by what they were about to face, and Borden was there to reassure her too. It was the second such talk she had given that evening. What's happening?" she remembers wondering.Īfter that final, failed warm-up attempt, Borden, who had been voted captain by her teammates, took Phelps aside and gave her a pep talk. She's the most consistent, hardworking person I've ever seen. Her longtime teammate and training partner, Amanda Borden, then 19, was getting nervous. Phelps had one more opportunity to hit a set during the final warm-up in front of the audience before she saluted the judges for her competitive routine. After missing every single try, she lined up behind her teammates to march into the sold-out Georgia Dome to face 33,000 cheering spectators waving American flags. "I'm used to hitting two or three routines in my warm-up to make me feel like, 'All right, I'm ready to go,' and I did not hit one turn back in the warm-up gym," Phelps recalls. ![]() She had missed every routine she attempted in the back gym where the athletes warmed up before heading into the arena. But behind the scenes, she was struggling. The 16-year-old from Indiana was up first-it was her job to get the ball rolling and set the tone. Yet when they speak about that history-making night, they don't start with how it ended but with how it began-with Jaycie Phelps' flawless uneven bars routine. The former is a pediatrician the latter has mostly worked for the government after graduating from Stanford. ![]() The only two women on the seven-person team who moved away from the sport completely in their post-gym lives are Amy Chow and Olympic hero Kerri Strug. Twenty years after their historic win in Atlanta, many former team members are still involved in the gymnastics world: Dominique Moceanu, who was the baby of the team in 1996, parlayed her fame as a gymnast into a turn as a New York Times best-selling author with a memoir published in 2012 Dominique Dawes, the first African American female gymnast to win an individual gymnastics Olympic medal, spent time as the president of the Women's Sports Foundation Shannon Miller, the seven-time Olympic medalist and back-to-back world champion, has a health and lifestyle brand connected to her gymnastics career that promotes women's health, a mission that took on even greater importance after she successfully overcame ovarian cancer. Strug sets off on her second attempt on the vault.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |