EVERETT — For Aly Raisman, the 2012 Olympic Games were an experience that would be hard to top.
Still, four years later she is willing to try.
The 21-year-old Raisman, in Everett for this weekend’s Pacific Rim Championships, was the captain of the United States women’s gymnastics team at the London Olympics. She not only helped the Americans win the team gold medal, she also won the gold medal in the floor exercise and added a bronze medal on the balance beam, making her the most decorated U.S. gymnast at the Games.
Given her success in London, and likewise given that a woman in her 20s is often on the downside of her gymnastics career, Raisman could easily have opted for a post-Olympics retirement, just as 2012 teammates Jordyn Wieber, Kyla Ross and McKayla Maroney did — all of them younger than Raisman.
But the love of her sport and the lure of another Olympic dream pulled Raisman back, as she explained on Thursday.
“I always felt like I wasn’t done yet,” she said before a team workout at Xfinity Arena. “I still love gymnastics and I think you should always follow your heart, so I figured why not?”
Raisman, who lives in Needham, Massachusetts, took a year off after the Olympics, “and it was the mental break I needed,” she said. “But after that year I still felt like I wanted to come back. I didn’t want to look back (in later years) and wonder, what if? So I decided to give it another go.”
Being an Olympian in 2012 and coming home with three medals “was the most amazing experience ever. We all worked so hard and we all were able to come together as a team. And to win the team gold medal with my teammates … words really can’t describe it.”
So she is back and her chances of being a 2016 Olympian are good, though hardly certain. Other top candidates for the five-member Rio de Janeiro team include 2012 Olympic all-around champion Gabby Douglas (she is not in Everett, having been in other recent competitions), three-time defending world all-around champion Simone Biles, and other up-and-coming youngsters.
As Martha Karolyi, coordinator for the U.S. women’s national team, explained on Thursday, “Nobody at this moment is on the team. It’s a very open field. We have a selection process going on (leading up to the U.S. Trials), and then from the Trials the decision will be taken to who will be making the team, five girls and three replacement alternates.”
Raisman and Douglas are both bidding to be the first women named to consecutive U.S. Olympic teams since Amy Chow and Dominique Dawes in 1996 and 2000.
It is, Karolyi said, “not an easy road and very few people are able to repeat two Olympics successfully in a row. But it looks like Aly is an extremely ambitious person. She really loves gymnastics, so she understands very much what it takes to get to the level to make the Olympic team. … She is definitely focused on her training, and I think she has a great chance to be not only on the Olympic team, but to be successful and to repeat some of the results that she had (in London).”
Her personal coach, Mihai Brestyan from Brestyan’s American Gymnastics Club in Burlington, Massachusetts, said the challenge for Raisman is that “she already has a name and everybody wants a piece (of her).” Due to the many distractions “it’s hard for me. … I’ve tried in the three years she’s come back to minimize all that. Before London I protected her. Kind of build a fence (around her) and limit her time. When it’s really necessary you let her go, but other than that you protect her.”
Going forward, he went on, “we have Simone Biles coming up and she’s the best right now, even though we’re trying to catch up with her. But the first goal (for Raisman) is to get back on the team and to support the team the best we can. If it happens that she gets to the finals, then we try to do the best we can and if she can win, that’s great. But the most important thing is to have that team medal. That’s our goal right now.”
And if sheer willpower is worth anything, Raisman is a good bet to be in Rio de Janeiro. Steve Penny, the president/CEO of USA Gymnastics, calls her “one of most determined people I’ve ever met in my entire life. She knows what it takes. And she’s tenacious. I don’t think people really know how tenacious a competitor she is.
“It’s hard for an athlete to do what Aly is doing,” Penny said. “It’s very difficult to hold onto world-class form four years after you did so well at the Olympic Games. But Aly knows exactly what it’s going to take and I’m just so proud of her. She’s been able to get her body back in shape and her head back in shape. She’s entirely committed.”
She is, he added, “just such a special person.”
Raisman, playfully nicknamed “Grandma” by her good friend Biles, has no idea what the coming months will bring. But having experienced one dream in London four years ago, she is willing to imagine a similar dream unfolding this summer.
The chance to do something special in Rio de Janeiro “would obviously be amazing,” she said. “And that’s why I came back to gymnastics. I want to make another Olympic team because there’s really nothing like it. There’s nothing like representing your country.”
Being on the U.S. team again “would mean a lot to me, and that’s obviously why I’m working so hard every day. That’s why we’re all working out so hard. We’re all hoping we can be on that team.”
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