Visa Championships: What we learned

2008 Olympians Bridget Sloan and Jonathan Horton won their first all-around titles this weekend at the Visa Championships. Here’s what we learned:

The 'best club in the world'
That’s how silver medalist Ivana Hong described WOGA, and it’s hard to make a case against that statement, considering the club is home of the past two Olympic all-around champions, Carly Patterson and Nastia Liukin. Now, many look to 16-year-old all-around bronze medalist Rebecca Bross to continue the club’s golden tradition. Bross had a front-row seat to Carly Patterson’s Athens preparations, then got four more years of education training with Nastia Liukin. And just like Nastia in 2004, many believed that had Bross been healthy and age-eligible, she could have made the Beijing squad. Bross and Liukin aren’t the only elite gymnasts at WOGA – Hong relocated to the Dallas area after the Beijing Games. Three in a row for WOGA? “I try not to think about it,” Bross said. “But I do dream about it.” (The last time a single club placed two women on the podium at a U.S. Championships was in 1993, when Shannon Miller and Kerri Strug, representing Oklahoma’s Dynamo Gymnastics, finished first and third, respectively.)

Why Bross could be boss
Bross showed her hometown crowd why many consider her, already, a contender for Olympic gold in London. But it wasn’t because of what she did perfectly; it was how she came back from major mistakes on the second day of competition. The first came on bars, when Bross clung to the high bar after one hand slipped off after a high Jaeger. Then, Bross missed the next skill in her routine, a Pak salto (layout flip from the high to the low bar), slamming her ribs into the low bar, a mistake she couldn’t save. And then she made another major mistake on beam, landing her beam dismount – a dismount made famous by Carly Patterson – short and stumbling backwards. Bross, who National Team Coordinator Martha Karolyi has praised for her mental toughness, came back on floor and stuck her double-twisting Yurchenko vault in the final rotation to end her competition on a positive note.

Olympics set the stage
Team silver medalists in Beijing, Bridget Sloan and Samantha Peszek, now clubmates at Sharp’s Gymnastics in Indiana, exuded confidence and a special brand of polish in Dallas that can only come with the experience of competing under Olympic-sized pressure. Peszek managed to smile through her tricky beam routine and beamed throughout her upgraded floor set, while Sloan confidently stepped out of her comfort zone and into the spotlight. Both Sloan and Peszek are major contenders – and could be leaders – of the team for the 2009 World Championships (see below).

New rule a step backward
Revisions to the Code of Points include deductions on women’s floor exercise for any tumbling pass that is not truly stuck – taking the traditional “lunge” step backwards can be up to a three-tenth deduction. The rule hasn’t been well received in the gymnastics community, with the major complaint being that it’s even further removing the artistic side of women’s gymnastics. But rules are rules, and this one in particular works in Bridget Sloan’s favor. Sloan has favored landing several of her tumbling passes with her feet together for several years, explaining, “I like to show the judges that I have that much control.” And in this Code, control is exactly what the judges are looking for. Sloan took the all-around lead after her floor routine in the third rotation largely based on her excellent execution score of 9.250, a direct result of her stuck landings on her double pike dismount and opening combination pass.

Four-ward to London
Nastia Liukin, who competed on beam in Dallas, will have two more months of solid training after a whirlwind ride on the post-Olympic circuit. One more world medal would break the tie between Liukin and Shannon Miller, who each have nine world championship medals. Two selection camps, to be held at the National Team Training Center in September and October, will determine the final, four-woman squad for the 2009 Worlds, which will be held in the O2 Arena, the same venue that will host gymnastics at the 2012 Olympic Games.

On the men’s side ...
Olympic high bar silver medalist Jonathan Horton won his first U.S. title, after falling short in 2007 and 2008. Horton, along with Alexander Artemev, Steven Legendre, Danell Leyva, Tim McNeill and David Sender was named to the U.S. men’s world championship team, Artemev sat out Nationals with a back injury, but expects to be back in time to compete on his signature events, pommel horse and parallel bars. Sender, last year’s champion, has said that he’d decline his Worlds spot as he’s scheduled to begin veterinary school at the University of Illlinois Urbana-Champaign.