Gymnast misses cut for second Olympic training session
Hold off on that Vanity Fair cover and wait on the pre-Olympic hype. Unlike 1996, when Dominique Moceanu was the poster girl for U.S. gymnastics, her road to the Sydney Games is going to be a lot tougher.
MOCEANU WAS NOT among the 15 gymnasts invited to Bela Karolyi’s second pre-Olympic training camp. Eleven others failed to make the cut after the first camp, held last week at Karolyi’s ranch outside Houston.
“No, she’d only been in the gym for two weeks,” Mary Lee Tracy, Moceanu’s coach, said Saturday from her gym in Cincinnati when asked if she was surprised Moceanu was left off the list.
“The only reason we brought her there is both of us felt it’s a good thing to see what the competition is, even knowing this might happen.”
The gymnasts invited to the second camp were: 1996 gold medalist Amy Chow; two-time defending national champion Kristen Maloney; 1997 national champion Vanessa Atler; Jeanette Antolin; Alyssa Beckerman; Jamie Dantzscher; Annabeth Eberle; Katie Hardman; Robin Phelps; Dana Pierce; Elise Ray; Sierra Sapunar; Tasha Schwikert; Jennie Thompson, and Morgan White.
But don’t count Moceanu out of the Olympics just yet. Karolyi, who came out of retirement to be the national team coordinator, has established escalating criteria for conditioning and skills, and Moceanu could be invited to later camps if she meets those.
Moceanu is taking this as a challenge, not a defeat, Tracy said.
“She’s disappointed, but at the same time, Dominique is a realist,” said Tracy, the ’96 U.S. assistant coach. “She knows what it’s going to take. Did she come back more fired up? Absolutely. There was no, ‘Poor me, why’d they do this to me?’ ”
It was difficult to make the cut with the erratic training schedule Moceanu has had in the past 18 months, Tracy said. After becoming the first non-Russian to win the all-around at the 1998 Goodwill Games, her life took a turn even a soap opera writer couldn’t have created.
She ran away from home in October 1998, when she was 17, and asked to be declared a legal adult, saying her parents had squandered her money. She was back in court the following month, asking for a protective order against her father after he allegedly inquired about having two of her friends killed. Dumitru Moceanu denied the allegations.
Consumed by her family troubles, she didn’t train for three months, then bounced around a handful of coaches and gyms. She sat out another four months after knee surgery last summer, finally arriving at Tracy’s gym at the beginning of January.
“Dominique is an athlete who has proven in the past to have very spectacular, very nice, very efficient performances,” Karolyi said earlier this month. “The only question in my mind, will she come back to her physical shape and will she be able to perform to this other criteria?”
Still, this was Moceanu, the face of the U.S. team as it prepared for Atlanta. She graced the cover of Vanity Fair, did a national commercial and published her autobiography - all before the Magnificent Seven won gold.
“Moceanu was clearly not ready (at the camp), but I did believe they would protect her,” said Kelli Hill, Phelps and Ray’s coach. “If she’s very motivated, it might give her cause to challenge them and work harder. I’m hoping that’s what happens. I think if she was in shape and ready to go, she could be a great asset to our team.”
But it’s good Karolyi, Moceanu’s coach in 1996, isn’t making exceptions, Tracy said. The U.S. program has faltered since Atlanta - the U.S. women finished last at the world championships last fall - and it’s going to take a lot of work to fix that in time for Sydney.
“I don’t think it can be about who you are or what you’re done in the past,” Tracy said. “We’re only seven months away and we’ve got a lot of work to do. They’re going to see a big difference in Dominique in the next weeks.”
© MSNBC
