Bieger and Better
June 04, 2008Jana Bieger is unquestionably the quiet one. Consistent, calm and almost impossible to rattle, Bieger has 
made her mark internationally alongside Nastia Liukin. Never as popular as her friend and longtime teammate, many may forget that Bieger is almost as successful as the better-known Liukin.
In fact, Bieger was the top American at the 2006 World Championships, finishing second to Italy’s Vanessa Ferrari and also picking up silvers with her team and on floor. (Bieger was also a bars finalist.)
Bieger and Nastia also have a few other things in common, including being coached by parents—Jana’s coach is mother Andrea—who were themselves Olympians. (Andrea represented West Germany at the Games in 1972, ’76 and ’80.)
But Bieger takes it one, even two or three, steps farther. Not only does her mom guide her in the gym, but Andrea also oversaw Bieger’s rehab from last year’s ankle injury—Andrea was trained as a physiotherapist in Germany—and used to serve as teacher for Bieger’s home school curriculum, before Jana graduated from high school last year.
“She didn’t start college yet,” Andrea explains. “It’s too much time out for camps, competitions where we have to travel, so I said to her, ‘Just concentrate on gym, now [that] it’s the Olympic year. You’re so young and you can take a year off.’”
So, with school on hold (Bieger has already given up her NCAA eligibility but fully intends to continue her education), mother and daughter have designed a daily routine they hope will get them to the Games. The pair wake and have breakfast, always together, in order to get to the gym by “8 or 9” AM. There, they work out until around noon, before breaking for lunch, also usually together, and then start again with another three-hour afternoon training session. Before driving home, together, and starting the whole process again the next day.
The family, including father Wolfgang Heiden, a safety inspector for oil tankers, own Bieger International Gymnastics in Deerfield Beach, Fla., which they opened after Jana’s success in ’06. When Bieger isn’t working out, she’s often in the gym, helping her mom run the place, while her dad travels the world for his demanding job.
That’s a lot of togetherness for any mother-daughter duo. Yet, the pair vehemently denies that they ever get sick of each other.
“Not really,” Bieger answers when asked if she and her mom occasionally need a break from each other. “I mean, she’s definitely my friend. We get along really well. I can tell her anything. … There have been harder days, where we were mad at each other, where things just aren’t working for whatever reason, but it’s no one’s fault.”
“We work together in all directions and we have fun with our time,” Andrea agrees. “Of course, from a mother’s point of view, and also from her viewpoint, there will be a lifetime where she will separate; it’s only her life right now where she’s depending on me.
“I’d say, at her age now, we are more friends,” Andrea adds. “Of course, there is a point where we’re mother and daughter, and she also has connections to other [people]. After the gym, she goes out, she lives.”
Andrea cherishes that normalcy for Jana and, to preserve it, the Biegers didn’t start out as coach-mother, gymnast-daughter hyphenates. Jana came up under, and made her national debut with, well-known coaches Tim and Toni Rand at American Twisters, before making the move to work with her mom full-time at about the same time as she entered the senior ranks—a change Jana initiated.
“She asked me to,” the elder Bieger answers simply of why she decided to coach her daughter. “We have the connection. I wouldn’t say I thought I could do it better. I just think it was time, for her and for me. I had never taught at the level where Jana is, and somehow we both grew into that level of gymnastics. That’s how we are a successful team. I saw … how easy it was for her to [understand] my coaching, how quickly she learned new skills, how easy it was for her, how well we communicated. … It wasn’t me. It was her. If it didn’t work, I’d have given her up.
“I just know her,” Andrea continues, explaining why they make such a good team. “I know if she has a bad day and I can rearrange the workouts (snaps her fingers) just like that. And I’m only human. I can have a bad day. She knows this, too. It makes it so special that we can work this way. If you have someone who is not family, there is always this little distance—what you are saying, what you are not saying—we don’t have that.”
Asked to specifically describe one of those “harder days,” Bieger is at a loss—“Umm,” she ponders for a while, before throwing up her hands, “I can’t really think of anything”—and all Andrea can come up with is that Jana thinks it’s a “waste of time warming up” for two-a-day practices. Her daughter prefers one five to six hour workout per day. “She likes to just have it done,” Andrea says with an indulgent smile. Hardly the kind of knockdown, drag-out disagreement most 18-year-olds have had with their mom.
Though they may not need time apart, but both mother and daughter agree that Wolfgang is their go-to guy after a bad day in the gym.
“My dad is the one I can go to,” Bieger explains. “He’s the one who says, after a competition, ‘It’s OK,’ even if it didn’t go well. I think it was two years ago at Classic where I really didn’t do well—I fell on beam—and he was like, ‘Whatever. Things happen. Forget about it.’ … He’s really comforting and he just really supports me in that way.”
“He is the neutral point in our family, because he is not a coach in the gym,” Andrea acknowledges. “When we started, he didn’t have a clue [about gymnastics]. That’s a good point, because you have somebody who talks about something else. In our house, there’s no gymnastics. It’s not forbidden, but usually it stays in the gym.”
It was Andrea who first put Jana in the gym, but she insists she had no intention of turning her daughter, then just six, into an Olympian. “I never pushed her into gymnastics,” Andrea says. “Yes, I put her in the gym, but for basics, because I think gymnastics is a base for every sport. … I saw her talent and pretty soon she was seven or eight and she was already Level five, six. … I saw pretty early that she can be much better than I was. Now, she is laughing if she sees my Olympic videos. The spring floor, spring bars—the technology is moving on and making it possible what they do today. We tumbled on concrete!”
It was Bieger’s World silver medal all-around performance that confirmed for Andrea that her daughter had far surpassed her in the sport they both love. “For me, of course, that was the best moment,” Andrea recalls with a smile. “Something I had never achieved and I helped her to have this success. I’m standing there as a mother and seeing her on the podium—that was one of the biggest moments. I’m very proud of her for that, and that she is still a normal girl. Even when she has this success—spending so much time working out, being on TV—she is still so normal. We always make sure, even if it is only a little bit, [that] she has a life outside. She needs that. She has to get that distance from gymnastics.”
But sometimes Jana has been farther away than either she or Andrea had hoped.
Injured in early 2007, Bieger was forced by a bum ankle to sit home and watch while her teammates took gold in her mother’s homeland; something she admits wasn’t easy, but hopes to put behind her with a trip to Beijing this summer.
“Of course there are times when you think, ‘Why did it have to happen to me?’ Bieger sighs, adding with a laugh. “Of course things were easier when you were 11, 12, 13 years old. When you were little and pain free and didn’t have any injuries. Now that you’re older, and you’re 18, it does get a little harder, but that’s what drives me to push even harder. To go back in the gym and focus on what I have to do. My ultimate goal is the Olympics, which are … right around the corner. Now I know that I just have to keep up my routines, keep up my consistency and prove that I can earn a spot on the team.
“I’m just glad it happened last year and not this year,” Bieger adds, seeking a bright side. “I mean, it was definitely disappointing not to be at my third Worlds, but I just needed a couple more weeks before Championships [in 2007], and I didn’t have that time.”
That positive attitude is one of Bieger’s biggest assets, according to Andrea, who says Jana even had to cheer her up during some dark days last year. “This injury took so long [to heal,]” Andrea bemoans. “It was this never ending case, where you didn’t see the light at the other side of the tunnel. It was up and down, a step forward and two steps back. It was so frustrating and, yes, going to Worlds in Germany was something I would have liked, FOR her—to do WITH her. But that was when she said, ‘It’s OK. I got my start the year before in Aarhus, and maybe that was for a reason.’”
Andrea feels strongly that Bieger’s brush with adversity has made her daughter stronger. “These gymnasts who are injured, they have to fight themselves, AND all the other ones,” Andrea says of the intense competition to make the U.S. team. “They are not just coming back—they have to [re-earn] their spot. It makes them stronger. They have much more confidence. They are fighters. [For Jana,] that kind of came, again, from herself: ‘I want to do it and I will show you I can do it.’ Once in a while, even I was a little bit down, but [Jana] (shrugs) … That’s her personality. She is always on the same level. This is her strength for gymnastics, too. She is consistent though her gymnastics. She can be very confident. … She couldn’t do this if she was nervous and frustrated.”
It isn’t that Jana doesn’t feel those things; she just doesn’t show them. “That’s just how I compete, how I am,” Bieger says of her super-cool persona. “Of course, inside, you’re nervous—everyone gets nervous. … I just think about my routines and not what’s going on around me. I just keep to myself.
“I definitely had to work hard to get back to where I was before last year. But it’s been a great year so far for me,” Bieger adds positively about her chances for making it to the Games. “I came out and I went to Italy and I did pretty good and I came back and went to Pacific Rim, which was also a really good competition for me. I’m just glad to be back and competing again. … I am progressing and everything is going as planned. For Championships, I’m right where I want to be.”
For Bieger the plan is Beijing, where she sees herself as a utility player for Team USA. Though she was second in the world only two years ago, she’s realistic about her place on the 2008 squad. “There are all types of different gymnasts,” she starts. “There is, like, Nastia, who is really flexible and graceful and pretty, but yet she still has all the skills. As for me, I’m not as flexible or graceful as Nastia (laughs) but, therefore, we just balance each other out.
“Everyone on this team balances each other out,” Bieger adds. “Someone here has more power and someone else has more grace. I just think I can contribute [with] my floor routine, and hopefully bars and beam as well. … I’m still the same person, the same gymnast I was [before the injury], although I believe that my lines and my form have gotten a little better. … Basically, first and foremost, for everybody, you have to stay healthy. And, second of all, you have to prove you’re a strong competitor. [Show that] you have the skills and you’re able to perform [them] at any time and any point. That’s a strong factor: being consistent.”
And does Bieger, who never missed a National Team training camp, even when she could do little more than watch her teammates workout, see herself as an Olympic lock? That consistent contender they can’t do without?
“You never know exactly until the point they choose the team,” she shrugs noncommittally. “You just have to prove yourself, over and over. Prove you are able to hit a routine. Prove you are able to accomplish what they expect from you.
“I know what to do, how to do it,” Bieger concludes. “I know what I have to do to be where I want to be.”
And there’s no doubt that where she wants to be is Beijing. “Four years ago, at the other Olympics, in 2004, you’re thinking, ‘OK, four years from now,’ and that’s a long time,” she says of being this-close to her Olympic dreams coming true. “But, all of a sudden, it’s here. You’re like, ‘Oh my God, what happened to the time?’ It does fly by really fast.”
Very fast indeed. Six weeks from now, there will be no more what-ifs. Jana and Andrea will be packing for China or heading home to Florida. “It comes to the end, who’s healthy and who can compete and who can do 180 percent gymnastics at the end,” Andrea says of the process. “It’s a competition, every day, for eight to ten weeks. A lot can happen in [that time]. Maybe who makes it is not necessarily the one who did well at Championships, because they couldn’t keep up the work for the long time. Therefore, we decide at the last minute.”
And no matter what news they hear on July 20, when the U.S. women's team will be finalized, one thing is certain for the Biegers: Beijing or bust, they’re in this together.
