America’s Olympic pixie-in-waiting looks ready for the cameras, for the Russians and for the Chinese. Jordyn Wieber, 16, is the reigning all-around women’s world champion and isn’t resting on any past podia. Instead she is adding difficulty to her routines, looking to overwhelm judges and audiences in London this summer.
This is the way with gymnasts, who must keep advancing always like a shark. At the Garden on Saturday in the American Cup, Wieber will unveil more combinations on the balance beam, more twists on her floor exercise. She woke up one day in January, she says, and realized this was an Olympic year, her year, and that she’d better do something about it.
“I try not to think about the outside pressure, about being a favorite,” she said Friday, before a practice session. “I have to prove myself all over again.”
Wieber is a junior at DeWitt (Mich.) High School, where she misses all the football games and dances in order to train. She also takes some online courses and travels at least once a month to Houston, for five days at a time, to practice with other gymnasts and Marta Karolyi, the national women’s team coordinator for USA Gymnastics.
Competition for the team’s five Olympic spots will climax this June at the trials in San Jose. Meanwhile, there are tune-ups for tune-ups, and the American Cup on Saturday is really the first of them. The U.S. women won the team title at the 2011 World Championships in Tokyo — which was Wieber’s first worlds — nipping second-place Russia.
Jordyn Wieber - Picture: Koji Sasahara/AP
The intramural battle among the Americans is tough and very real. Some of the 2008 Beijing stars, such as Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson, have launched comebacks and are hoping to make the team as well, though they may find it difficult to excel in more than one or two specialties.
“We’re all in it together,” Wieber insisted. “We don’t feel competitive outside the gym.”
Wieber said that Liukin became her role model when she watched the Beijing Olympics on television back in 2008. At the time, Wieber was already an elite gymnast heading for the national team.
Barring injury, Wieber is considered the surest bet to make the U.S. team. By increasing the difficulty of her beam routine, already Wieber’s greatest strength, she is adding as much as five-tenths to her start value on that apparatus and may open ground on the opposition.
“You’ve never arrived,” Karolyi warned. “You always have to fight and try harder to win. The fact that she’s adding difficulty shows (Wieber) realizes that.”
She is also a groundbreaker on her other favorite event, the vault, in which she performs a 21/2 twisting Yurchenko — in which she does a cartwheel onto the springboard into a back handspring, then launches herself from the horse into those 21/2 twists. “Fun,” she calls it. Most others would call it impossible.
Wieber turned professional shortly after proving herself at the world championships. She will not be accepting any of the college scholarships available to her, a decision she realizes will further distance herself from classmates and their social lives.
“It doesn’t bother me that much,” Wieber said. “I get to travel all over the country and the world and that’s better.”
The Americans will have their top two young women gymnasts, Wieber and Aly Raisman from Needham, Mass., competing Saturday at the Garden. The Russians and Chinese, still smarting from defeat at the world championships and perhaps fearful of hometown judging, declined invitations to participate in the American Cup.
The Romanians are here, however, making this event feel a lot like the semi-boycotted 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.
Source: http://www.nydailynews.com
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