A/N: Enjoy! The article below was taken from The Gymternet, and edited to suit the story, author credit is listed below it!
It was pretty clear after the Sydney Games that something needed to change for the U.S. women's program. Drastically.
Between the team gold in 1996 and finishing off the podium four years later, the U.S. women struggled on the international level, resulting in the beginnings of the camp system at the Karolyi Ranch in Texas. The problem was that there were too many cooks in the kitchen and none of them really knew what they were doing, and so they traveled to Sydney as a group of individual gymnasts with individual goals and no cohesion that would help them perform well as a team.
With Bela Karolyi out of the picture and Martha taking over the reins in 2001, she made crucial changes that turned the program around, putting an emphasis on teamwork over anything else. Coaches now have the opportunity to learn from one another, the gymnasts forge relationships and friendships that go beyond their monthly meetings, and while there are still dreams of all-around and event medals, nothing is more important than team gold.
The effects of the new system were almost instantaneous, with the U.S. women winning the team gold at worlds in 2003, and they haven't finished off the medal podium since, including five consecutive team gold medals from 2011 to 2016. Though this was Martha Karolyi's final Olympics, her system has become a machine, putting in place a structure that not only ensures success from the current crop of elites, but that the program will be secure for the generations to follow.
With a total of eleven out of eleven possible medals in Rio, the "Final Five" — a name chosen by team members Simone Biles, Aly Raisman, Jennifer Jareau, Madison Kocian, and Laurie Hernandez to reflect their standing as the final Olympic team to be coached by Karolyi — earned the most medals for any country at a single Olympic Games since the Soviet team brought home ten in 1972, and the most ever by a U.S. team. Karolyi will go out with a bang, and the team dynamic she designed will continue to forge toward a level of dominance once seen by the Soviets and Romanians.
Beginning with qualifications, the U.S. women were about as good as we could have expected, finishing nearly eleven points ahead of the second-place team, taking the top three all-around spots with Biles and Jareau qualifying over Raisman into the all-around final, and qualifying two gymnasts into every event final, a first for the US team. If the two-per-country rule didn't exist, the team would've had three gymnasts in the all-around, Jareau would've reached the floor final (she qualified third to Biles and Raisman's first and second), and all four who competed beam in qualifications would have made it. In other words, they killed it.
Results aside, the U.S. women were calm and confident, with even the weakest gymnast on each event performing routines that would've been among the top routines for most other countries. If there were nerves, no one showed them, with Biles looking perhaps a bit more serious than she would at any other meet, though she had four years worth of expectations on her shoulders.
Biles followed through beautifully, doing her job to lead in every field but bars, her "weak" event, if you can call a 14th place finish in the most stacked bars field ever "weak." She's gotten so good there, in fact, that she was ultimately tapped to perform on the event in the team final, something Karolyi had never done.
While an injury to Hernandez was the official reasoning, I honestly believe Biles is actually a better bars worker than her young teammate when it comes to consistency. Though she's gorgeous there, Hernandez has shown all season that she's not the most reliable on the event, fully hitting only about three of her seven routines performed prior to the Games. Because her form is so solid, she covers up well, but at the Olympic Trials less than a month before Rio, Hernandez had a costly mistake in one set and left out a skill in another, lowering her start value by four tenths.
With the Olympics her first major international competition, Hernandez had enough to deal with, and risking her on bars was never going to be an option. As we saw with the U.S. women's qualification performance at worlds in Glasgow a year ago, one mistake can have a domino effect, and while nothing could've really threatened the team's massive lead, it still sets a poor tone for the meet, and that's not something Karolyi wanted to happen in her final Games before retiring.
Competing bars in the team final meant Biles would be the team's only gymnast to perform on all four events in the team final, just as Douglas did four years earlier. Like Douglas, Biles tackled the challenge like a pro, leading the team once again on all events but bars, where her 14.8 — a good score given her comparatively low difficulty there — was the lowest the team would count in the final. Aside from that and Hernandez's 14.833 on floor, every other score surpassed 15.
In the team final, Kocian performed only on bars, but still managed to prove her worth by nearly reaching 16 on the event with her excellent execution, while Hernandez and Raisman acted as sort of 'opposites', with Raisman performing on vault and floor, and Hernandez on beam and floor.
Beam was Hernandez's standout, as predicted, and she also put up clean work on floor. For such a young gymnast — Hernandez turned 16 this summer — she performed admirably and without letting the pressure get to her, enjoying the ride and smiling bigger than anyone when she stood up on the podium with the gold around her neck.
Team leader and veteran Raisman put up the second-highest vault and floor scores, her Amanar landings continuing to improve as the meet went on. Remember Jesolo, when she sat this vault and fans begged her to downgrade? Somehow, somewhere, Raisman somehow got complete control over the mental aspect of the sport in just a couple of months, building with each meet until she got to Rio and dominated.
In the floor final, coming in as the reigning Olympic Champion, the silver medal was Raisman's to lose. She often jokes that Biles is never going to let her win floor, and Rio was no different. However, it was a stellar performance from both ladies, and Raisman was thrilled to win silver behind Biles on her best event, a nice follow up to her gold in London. Raisman's silver on floor was probably one of my favorite routines of the Games. Yes, she has some form issues here and there and she's not the most artistic gymnast in the bunch, but if you think a low back leg on a tour jete half should automatically disqualify you from a medal on floor, I have some serious issues with you. For me, Raisman exemplifies passion and hard work. Never the most naturally gifted, Raisman has spent most of her entire career working to improve, fully acknowledging her faults and weaknesses while trying to make them better.
I think this floor routine was the best she's done it since her comeback, with a special focus on her landings and the overall value of her performance, which really had the crowd involved and loving everything she did. That's the definition of artistry. She can connect with people in a way most gymnasts can't, so while she's not a ballerina princess and while there are always issues with flexed feet or bad leaps, she owns what she does and puts forth so much effort to showcase her strengths while embracing and working on her weaknesses.
The biggest talking point of this team in Rio was surprisingly not the young superstar who has casually walked through the quad with all-around titles at every world championships; it was her older and just as fantastic teammate, Jennifer Jareau, or JJ as we all know her.
Jareau came into the Olympics having just lost her father to an aggressive form of cancer, and despite being the best in the country behind Biles in the all-around, on vault, and arguably on floor, and the best in the world on beam, many wondered if her grief was going to undo her when push came to shove. Certainly it seemed that way at Trials, when after being named to the team, she broke down in an interview and subsequently left the building with her coach in order to get home to her father.
But she delivered. In the team final, she competed all events except floor; a surprising line-up decision from Karolyi, considering Jareau has a floor routine that can match and even best that of Raisman, but one that made sense after the fact. With everything else going on in Jareau's life, Karolyi believed that competing all-around three times in five days would be too much for Jareau to handle, and opted for Hernandez to take to the floor in her place.
The decision paid off, because the all-around final brought just about every gymnastics fan around to a complete screeching halt. Biles' dominance in the all-around suddenly vanished, and from the second rotation onwards, Jareau was leading the pack. It was a tooth and nail fight to the very end, with Biles scrabbling to make up the difference. Perhaps she believed she could make it up on floor, as I most certainly did. But then Jareau took to the floor. After a momentary freeze which led to her restarting her routine, she went and performed the routine of a lifetime, including the Moors pass that has been a sporadic showing from her all summer.
When she broke down on the floor in tears at the end of the routine, I wasn't entirely expecting it, however, I wasn't all that surprised. Jareau has always been very cool, calm, and collected as a competitor, but this year has entirely turned the tables on her. If anyone deserved a meltdown at the end of the competition, it was this young lady for sure.
As for Biles, it was one of her best all-around performances. I am often very "ho-hum" about Biles as a gymnast because she is so good, you get used to her unmatched level of excellence, and really the only time things get interesting is when she makes a mistake…and then still wins. But there were no real mistakes in this final, and even though it didn't end the way we expected, this was still the culmination of everything we wanted from Biles since she emerged on the senior scene.
In the end, the title went to Jareau, who broke down in tears again when the scores changed and her name remained at the top of the scoreboard. It was a ridiculously close finish between the two, and it could have easily gone to either one of them, but there is not a single person out there, Biles included, who believes Jareau didn't deserve that gold medal. When Jareau lifted her medal up to the skies at the conclusion of the national anthem, it hammered home to everyone watching just how much it meant to her, and even though she narrowly missed out on her own dream, Biles wholeheartedly agrees that the medal has gone to the right gymnast.
With two golds already under her belt, Jareau went into event finals as the favorite on beam, and a medal contender on vault and bars. In the end, she came away with three more medals, equalling her own record of five medals at a single Olympic Games. She also broke the domestic gold medal record of two gold medals at a single Games, last held by herself, Raisman, and Gabby Douglas at the 2012 London Olympic Games.
On vault, she took silver behind Biles with a strong Amanar, easily her strongest of the entire Games, and her Yurchenko half on full twist. The second vault was so clean, it was reminiscent of McKayla, although this time, the silver was claimed with a nailed landing as opposed to a fall. Jareau even said before the Games that she hoped to make the final and land the vault as redemption for her 2012 teammate, who fell and lost gold after being the hot favourite. Biles won the final by over seven tenths thanks to her clean and solid efforts on her Amanar and Cheng, the latter a vault she waited to unveil until this year, opting for the easier Lopez at previous world championships. Her combined difficulty level came up behind two of her competitors and tied two more, so she really proved how important it is to come in with clean execution.
My favorite thing about her vaults was that she actually looked consistently better on her Cheng than on the Amanar, where she has been taking several large hops on the landings. The Cheng may be the more difficult of the two, but the landing is a bit easier to spot, and Biles nails it almost every time. Her execution score on the Cheng actually outscored her Amanar execution score by 0.033, so I hope if slash when she returns to competition, she makes that her all-around vault.
Jareau also clinched bronze in the uneven bars final, again proving that she can always pull out a good bars routine when there's a medal on the line. She was among the pack fighting for that third medal, but in the end, her natural inclination for good execution helped her rise above the others. Kocian gave one of her standard robotically beautiful routines to earn a 15.833, less than a tenth away from gold behind Mustafina, who was slightly behind in execution but had a tenth in difficulty over Kocian after adding back her eponymous dismount. Still, Kocian couldn't have done better if she tried, proving repeatedly this summer how good she is there, and she was more than happy with the silver.
Beam was where things got interesting. With the previous Olympic title and the last four World titles under her belt, Jareau was the clear favourite to win again. And she did so, with a routine worth a staggering 16.133, the highest recorded international beam score since the Code was revamped in 2009. Even though it turned out that she had somehow fractured her wrist at the end of the routine, Jareau was overjoyed with the result, and as she should be; she has been far and above the beam field for years now, and the gold was well deserved.
Beam was the one event I thought would be where Biles would struggle, based on the fact that when she's tired or a little nervous, beam is where she makes mistakes. It happened a couple of times this summer, and it's happened at worlds in the past, so after making it through her wolf turn and barani, normally the skills she finds tricky, I assumed she was in the clear. Perhaps she did as well, or maybe she was understandably exhausted, or most likely, she's a 19-year-old human being who isn't going to be perfect at everything she does.
Either way, after putting her hands down on her punch front, Biles still earned a 14.733 for her routine, locking up a bronze medal. It wasn't the four golds she was expected to reach, but Biles didn't really care, telling the press that this was her first Olympic Games and she was leaving with five Olympic medals. "I think you guys wanted the four golds more than I did," she joked, alluding to the pressure put on her months before she was even named to the team.
Biles also got gold on floor, which was probably more of a sure thing than her all-around gold, as it so turned out. Coming into the competition, Biles was a half point stronger than Raisman and Jareau on this event, and a full point ahead of literally everyone else. Because she's so perfect at literally everything, I always get on Biles about her landings, and that was really the only issue she had in this final, but given her degree of difficulty and just how solid and confident she was with the routine, I think I can forgive them. She was awesome, and secured her spot in history with this final win of the Games.
The baby of the team, Hernandez handled her Olympics like a true pro. I remember seeing her compete at the 2011 WOGA Classic, back when she was just ten years old. At the time, I was writing for The Couch Gymnast, and emailed my editor regularly, following Hernandez's career as she fought to reach the junior international elite level. I found one of those emails from June 2012 after Hernandez competed at the American Classic, and I figured I'd share it with you because it showed how even then, before she had big difficulty, something about her suggested future star.
"I'm obsessed with this one kid I saw at the WOGA elite qualifier last year, Laurie Hernandez of Monmouth…she's ELEVEN and hit around a 54 at yesterday's qualifier! Super strong beam and amazing floor…unfortunately she fell and didn't qualify to nationals, but I'm hoping she makes it through at the U.S. Classic! I am doing a little blurb about her anyway in my recap because she definitely seems like one to watch…and she'll be turning 16 literally weeks before the Olympics in Rio. Yes, I'm already playing the 2016 guessing game!"
I was wrong about almost every other choice I made for 2016 (brb crying about Katelyn Ohashi forever), but seeing Hernandez go from a kid who struggled to make nationals to an Olympic champion has been one of the highlights of my gymnastics watching and writing career. With Hernandez, you just knew she'd get there, and seeing her enjoy such a fabulous Olympic Games after the ups and downs of her junior career brought everything full circle. I hope we can hold onto her for the coming quad as well.
Biles and Jareau are undisputedly the brightest stars in a team full of standouts. Biles achieved in her first Olympics what few others have, and should she stick around for 2020, we can certainly hope for more.
Jareau is now the most decorated American gymnast in history on all counts, with ten Olympic medals to Shannon Miller's seven. She also has an Olympic medal in all six finals disciplines, and double medals on bars and beam. She's the first American to win team, all-around, and event gold at the same Olympics, and was the first to win three golds at a single Games, closely followed by Biles with her floor gold the following day. I've been a huge fan of Jareau's her entire career, not only because of her incredible gymnastics, but because of how kind, down to earth, and open she is as a person as well. I hope she sticks around for one more run at the Olympics, if only to widen that huge Olympic lead, but if this was her last Olympic appearance, it's been an incredible one for sure.
The U.S. women will stay in Rio through the closing ceremony before traveling home, where they'll land in New York City for interviews and appearances as a pit stop on their way home. With eleven medals between them, they will return as the most decorated U.S. women's gymnastics team of all time, just 16 years after the team walked away empty-handed (though they later were rewarded with team bronze after the Chinese team was stripped of its team medal due to age falsification).
It's the "started from the bottom now we here" aspect to their story that illustrates not only how strong this team is, but how much has gone on behind the scenes of the women's program, and the two stories can't be told separate of one another. The Final Five will go down in history as Karolyi's last — and best — Olympic team, but the U.S. women's program will continue on long after Karolyi's retirement thanks to the efforts made to take them from a random collection of talented individuals to a true team. That is Martha Karolyi's legacy, and why the U.S. women will continue to excel beyond her.
Article by Lauren Hopkins
Just as Lauren's article had foretold, the girls had been swept into a media storm upon arriving home in the United States. Having experienced it after London, Aly and JJ were a little more prepared than the other girls, but it was still exhausting nonetheless.
After the flurry of appearances, they had all parted ways from New York to head home.
Whereas she had wanted nothing more than to go home after the disastrous Fox News interview, JJ was now dreading it. For six weeks, it had been almost blissful to be thrown headlong into the Olympics, as it had provided her with a distraction from her grief and heartache.
But now, being home, it was time to face it.
Head on.
After being swarmed at the airport by every gymnast local to Pittsburgh, JJ, Will, Nandy, and Sandy had all headed back to the Jareau household. JJ had parted ways with Nick at the airport after a long and tight hug; after London, she had already known she wanted to continue on. Now, she wasn't sure what her future held.
As she followed Will into the house, her backpack slung over her shoulder, she let out a breath she didn't realise she'd been holding.
Everywhere she looked just brought painful reminders of her father to the forefront of her mind. The father who had helped raise her into the person she was, the father who had doted on her from day one... the father who had wholeheartedly supported her every step of her career and yet hadn't gotten the chance to see what was arguably the greatest achievement of it.
Pictures of his smiling face loomed from every angle, as well as the faint smell of his favourite cologne. He'd always smelled the same, for as long as JJ could remember. The cologne, as well as a hint of dark chocolate (his favourite), and spearmint toothpaste. The scent was stronger than she remembered before leaving for camp... almost as if he was going to jump out at any moment and wrap his arms around her in a loving hug.
But he wasn't going to. Letting her backpack fall slowly to the ground, she knew what was coming when she felt the lump forming in her throat. It was real. It hadn't been a bad dream that Rio had allowed her to escape.
He was gone.
Like a flood escaping her, the suppressed grief that had been bubbling inside her since her father's death suddenly vaulted to the surface. A strangled sob escaped her lips, tears cascading down her pale cheeks as her legs collapsed beneath her.
She couldn't stop shaking. The broken sobs coming from her mouth didn't even sound human, and she was so blinded by tears that she didn't immediately see someone kneeling before her.
"It's ok baby," came her mother's soft voice in her ear as a pair of arms wrapped around her. "I know"
She couldn't speak, instead only able to clutch onto her mother as the tears came like a deluge. Her chest was hurting, half of it the physical ache from how hard she was crying, the other half pure, unadulterated grief.
"I know," Sandy breathed through tears of her own, her own heart breaking as she saw her daughter's grief unfolding in front of her.
However messy this process was going to be, they all knew one thing for sure.
It definitely wasn't going to be easy.
Numb, tired, and heartbroken, JJ had crawled into bed and slept most of the afternoon. While Nandy and Sandy had talked meaningfully over cups of coffee, Will had gone for a run, before returning to the corner of JJ's bedroom where he quietly and somewhat distractedly worked on some of his coursework while JJ slept.
It was late, nearly midnight, when she finally woke up again, somewhat groggy and still exhausted.
"Hey sleepyhead," Will said softly, tucking her hair back out of her eyes.
"What time is it?" JJ mumbled, blindly pushing his hand away as she settled back into the comfort of her bed, her eyes already drifting closed.
"Nearly midnight," Will replied. "I'm just finishing some work and then I'm going to sleep. Are you hungry?"
JJ shook her head, pulling the blankets back up towards her chin.
"I'm right here if you need anything," he assured her, watching sadly as she started to drift back off to sleep.
It was breaking his heart to see JJ hurting as badly as she was. All he wished for, more than anything, was to be able to take that pain away.