Commanding Performances for Johnson, Liukin & Memmel
June 20, 2008
Nastia Liukin is a solid No. 2 and easily the best on bars. Double check.
2005 World Champ Chellsie Memmel is back and not only secure in her spot, but threatening the top two. Check, check and check.
Yes, all went on as expected tonight at the Wachovia Center in Philadelphia and National Team Coordinator Martha Karolyi, and her eagle-eyed Selection Committee compatriots, should be pleased. Still gearing up for the “real” trials next month in Texas, all the women showed steady progress since Championships in Boston, with their best still to come.
For Johnson and Liukin, this weekend will likely be their expected coronation. If they finish out the competition as the top two, they will secure guaranteed Olympic berths. A fact that still stuns Johnson.
“I don’t think I even realize it’s the Olympic Trials yet,” Johnson said, with her ever-present smile and good cheer. “It’s crazy to think that if things go good on Sunday I could be [an Olympian].”
But the theme, even for the two top dogs, remains improvement. “This is the first time I got all of my bonus and I had a really great time doing it,” Johnson said of her floor routine, which she cited as the night’s highlight for her, “but I still have lots of little things I can clean up.”
“We’ve got three more weeks to improve,” Liukin echoed. “And, hopefully, I’ll be near-perfect by the end of summer.
Liukin will work on “just tidying things up,” she said.
“There’s one more tenth I can get on beam and floor [if I hit perfectly],” she explained. “My bars dismount can be a lot better. Just lots of stuff.”
Memmel, a strong third, still has perhaps the most room to grow. She hopes to be doing her Yurchenko double-full again by the Selection Camp. “I’ve been working on it in the gym and it’s getting stronger,” she said, “but it’s not worth the risk right now.”
She insists that her increasingly secure Olympic position only inspires her to even greater effort. “The only 
thing that changes is that I want to work even harder,” Memmel maintains. “All of us on Team USA want that gold medal and I’m doing what I can to make sure we get it.”
On bars, Memmel lost two tenths off the “A” score because of an incomplete jam—“just not quite getting it to handstand,” she self-critiqued—and she hopes to add a Stalder-full for another two tenths on top of that.
Fourth-place Samantha Peszek was also all about maintaining: keeping her spot in the standings, but dropping her 1-1/2 through to double pike floor dismount, despite her pre-meet insistence that it would stay in her routine. “That was the plan, I swear” she said apologetically. “Really, it was. But after I [practiced] again on floor it just wasn’t there. It wasn’t consistent. Martha Karolyi and my coach discussed it and [took it out]. I was really upset at first, because I can do it, but they explained that I only get two-tenths for [the skill] and the deduction I would get was a lot worse than that.
“Trials is stressful enough and I was nervous, so it was probably better,” Peszek said. “I was able to perform [my floor routine] tonight with ease. I even had too much power on my Arabian [double front]. My coach was like, ‘You should have just done a punch front out of it.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, sorry that I didn’t think of that during my floor routine.’”
The outgoing Peszek also admitted that she’s finally starting to feel good about her Olympic chances. “I’m happy going into the second day,” she said. “I think that if I keep going this way, keep being consistent, I’m on a really good path.”
Bridget Sloan added one more step to her comeback trail at Trials, returning to floor, an experience she relished, even if it didn’t quite go as planned. “I think the excitement got the best of me,” Sloan said with a laugh. “I landed after my first pass and was, like, ‘Success! I’m back on floor,’ and then I looked down and it was like, ‘Shoot, I’m out of bounds.’ Well, that’s why there’s Sunday.”
Sloan had hoped to do vault here, but Karolyi put the kibosh on her Yurchenko double-full. “Martha’s seen what I can do,” Sloan said, shrugging. “Right now they just don’t want me to do anything that could, might, possibly cause an injury. We just want to play it safe.”
Safe. Controlled. Consistent. The watchwords of tonight’s competition. Just one more step toward the meet that really matters, next month at the Ranch, before the big show in Beijing.
