Laurie Hernandez is competing in gymnastics this Saturday for the first time in four and a half years. So much has changed since winning Olympic gold and silver in 2016 as the youngest woman in the entire US delegation of 555 athletes in Rio.
“I would like to see how [une compétition] feels like an almost 21-year-old rather than competing at 16, ”she told NBC Sports last week. “It’s going to be different, I’m well aware of that.”
Hernandez’s comeback is the main story of the athlete at the Indianapolis Winter Cup, the first elite gymnastics competition in the United States in nearly a year.
NBCSN will air the men’s competition on Friday at 7:30 p.m. ET, featuring former national champion and world medalist Yul Moldauer and many other Olympic hopefuls from Tokyo. Earlier Friday, the Nastia Liukin Cup for Level 10 Female Gymnasts airs at 2:30 p.m. on NBCSN.
NBC has the main women’s session on Saturday at 12:30 p.m. with Hernandez, as well as world tag team champions Suni Lee, Jade Carey and Riley McCusker. The shows are also streamed on NBCSports.com/live and the NBC Sports app.
“It’s important, but it doesn’t really dictate who will be in the Super Bowl,” he said. “What you use for it, and Laurie does a good job using it appropriately, [est de] bring out the cobwebs of what it’s like to be in a competition again.
“I encourage them to use it as an opportunity to see the routine structure that you have right now. Are the skills and connections working? And if they don’t work, that’s when you want to know. If you’re going to make mistakes, now is the time to do it so you can really fix those bugs. “
An Olympic bid isn’t the only reason Hernandez has returned to training for good in 2019, but it’s one of the main ones.
“We don’t do it halfway. We send it completely at this point, ”she said,“ super excited ”about the competition, albeit without spectators. “He’s results-driven. I try to be part of the team. “
Hernandez said last Friday that it had not been decided whether she would compete in the four apparatus of the Winter Cup. Either way, she plans to add more difficult skills to the nationals in June, where gymnasts will qualify for trials three weeks later.
“My first priority [à la Winter Cup] is to go in and follow clean routines and show that I can be consistent, ”Hernandez said. “But my next one is to have fun.”
In 2016, Hernandez had the good fortune (or misfortune) of becoming eligible in age for the senior competitions of an Olympic year. There was little time, at 15, to face players like Simone Biles, Aly Raisman and Gabby Douglas.
The previous nine women’s Olympic teams from the United States included an athlete who was 16 or under during the Olympic year. Hernandez, as the reigning US junior all-around champion, was expected to be the one to extend that streak before her first senior routine.
“When I thought of competitions, like anyone else, my stomach would roll over, and I just felt sick and nervous and under a lot of pressure,” she said last week.
Last spring, Hernandez said publicly that former coach Maggie Haney verbally and emotionally assaulted her ahead of the Rio Games, where Hernandez won team gold and silver on beam.
Hernandez said she developed eating disorders and depression as a result of the abuse. Haney is now suspended in 2025 after several gymnasts testified against her.
“I thought I hated gymnastics, and it wasn’t until mid-2018 that I realized it was the people who made the experience bad, not the sport itself,” was posted on Hernandez’s Instagram last May. “I moved across the country (NJ-CA) at 18 to try a new start. … Making the 2020 team would be a dream come true of course, but my first priority from the start was my happiness.
She began training with coaches Jenny Zhang and Howie Liang at Gym-Max in Costa Mesa, where 2012 Olympians McKayla Maroney and Kyla Ross previously trained.
“They always meet me where my body and my brain can give to them,” Hernandez said of Zhang and Liang. “If I come home and I’m exhausted, the training plans change. And if I come home and have a lot of energy, then the training plans change. If they give me a mission and I can’t do it, they adapt it to something I can do. “
In November 2019, Hernandez attended an American gymnastics training camp for the first time since Rio. She was due to resume competition in the spring of 2020 before the pandemic struck.
Hernandez reiterated that the one-year Olympic postponement was to his advantage, giving him more time to prepare for his return to competition. She was still affected, spending several months last year with her family in New Jersey, working 2,000 miles from her coaches.
Hernandez, who took extension classes at UCLA in theater and screenwriting last year, said she’s been feeling stronger than ever because of the muscle changes in the past four years.
“The body is hanging in there. I’m actually quite surprised, ”she said. “It’s interesting to train with the body of a post-puberty adult rather than a 16-year-old pre-pubertal. It took a long time to get used to.
The gymnast who winked at the judges in Rio still springs from the competition on the floor, having choreographed her own routine. Uneven bars are love / hate. The balance beam, where she whispered “I got it” before going up to Rio, is calming, a contrast to five years ago.
No American has made consecutive Olympic gymnastics teams since 2000 before Douglas and Raisman reached Rio, and both returned to competition more than a year before the Games.
Forster saw Hernandez train in person last fall. Then again on Zoom at a virtual camp in January, when she played on all four devices and showed “a lot of improvement,” he said.
There are different challenges for any gymnast trying to be part of this Olympic team. The roster for the team event is smaller – from five in 2016 to four, although the United States has fifth and sixth places in the individual events only. Carey has already landed one of them.
“We now have a deeper field of athletes than we did five years ago,” said Forster. “In Rio, Laurie, Aly and Simone had really established themselves as the top three athletes in America, pretty sure, and we probably now have six or seven athletes who have. It’s a deeper competition, different criteria to make the team [plus axée sur les polyvalents que sur les spécialistes qu’en 2016]. So it’s a challenge. It will be a very big challenge for Laurie. ”
“There are a lot of people who expect me not to do well this year, just because I got home late or whatever,” said Hernandez, who plans to compete on Saturday in a leotard on the superhero theme, specific identity a secret for now. “Honestly, I’m not doing this for anyone else. I do it for myself because I love it. I really love it. And, especially to come back to competition, I want to love to compete again.
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