Flips And Flops The U.S. trials produced a women's Olympic team of maturity and depth, and a men's team that merely plumbed the depths by E.M. Swift For dramatic purposes, it's difficult to fall in love with an Olympic trials without surprises: unknowns who rocket to the fore, favorites who tumble into oblivion, coaches who curse at the decisions of officials. And unless you count the face plant that Amy Chow administered to the balance beam in the next-to-last routine on Sunday night - a horrendous whack that failed to deter Chow from finishing a performance of breathtaking complexity and making the Olympic team - none of those things was evident last weekend at Boston's unstoried Fleet Center, where the U.S. men's and women's gymnastics teams were selected pretty much according to form. The young, and not so young, guns who were expected to make it to Atlanta made it. The hopefuls who needed a fall from the leaders or a breakthrough meet of their own to see their Olympic dreams fulfilled will have to carry their hopes forward until the year 2000 or give them up. Dawes, 19, the trials' top scorer, was one of three '92 veterans to qualify for the women's squad. photograph by Manny Millan But for the purposes of selecting a team with the potential to harvest medals, the gymnastics trials could hardly have gone better. The tough got going, the dogged hung in, and the injured, well, if they were good enough, they made the team without lifting so much as a pinkie. By the time Sunday night rolled around and the seven members of the women's team were introduced, the top coaches and officials could hardly contain their glee. "This is our strongest team ever," Bela Karolyi announced, exhausted from all the bear hugs he had doled out, one or two of which may actually have been out of the range of the television cameras. Two of Karolyi's charges had been named to the team, 14-year-old Dominique Moceanu, the recuperating wunderkind and author, and 18-year-old Kerri Strug, one of three returning members of the 1992 team that won a bronze medal in Barcelona. Said Karolyi, "These girls are contenders for medals, and plenty of them." Steve Nunno, coach of the astonishing Shannon Miller, 19, whose five Olympic and nine world-championship medals make her the most decorated gymnast in American history, went so far as to name the color of the booty he expected. "We finally have a team that has the opportunity to win the gold medal," Nunno gushed. "If we hit all our routines, like the '92 team did in Barcelona, with the home court advantage there's nobody that can beat us." The Romanian, Russian and Chinese women might have something to say about that, but Nunno's point was well taken. The women's team that emerged from the trials is both experienced and deep in talent. The team is led by three former or current national all-around champions - Miller (1993 and '96), Moceanu ('95) and Dominique Dawes ('94) - and all seven members have won at least one world-championship team medal. Most surprising, given the fleeting nature of the sport, their average age is 18. That's nearly two years older than the '92 team's average age, and a welcome sign of the changing times in gymnastics. "Before, you peaked at 15 or 16 and went downhill from there," says Dawes, 19, who was the top individual scorer at the trials. "It reflects on the coaching. The mats and pits we're using now have cut down on injuries, and we're able to stay in it longer. Hopefully our success will give the younger girls the motivation to keep going. It's good for the sport." U.S. women's gymnastics is so rich in talent that of the 14 competitors who took the floor at the trials, nine had world-championship experience. That doesn't count Miller and Moceanu, who didn't have to compete in Boston to qualify. Both were nursing injuries. Miller, who in early June won the nationals in Knoxville, has tendinitis in her left wrist. Moceanu, who last year, at 13, became the youngest national champion ever, and this year, at 14, became the youngest to write an autobiography, has a stress fracture in her right tibia. Neither injury is expected to hamper the two gymnasts' performances in Atlanta, and if Moceanu and Miller had been required to perform last weekend to make the Olympic team, they would have. But USA Gymnastics' selection procedure for women allows injured competitors to bypass the Olympic trials and petition to have their scores from the nationals counted instead. With the opening ceremonies of the Atlanta Games less than three weeks away, and with their injuries needing time to heal, Moceanu and Miller opted to petition their way onto the team. After a nasty beam beaning, Chow regained her poise and grabbed an Olympic berth. photograph by Manny Millan While it was technically possible that one or both of their scores from the nationals would not hold up, the reality was that as soon as their petitions were accepted, Moceanu and Miller were a lock to make the team. Despite grim pronouncements from officials about how, typically, scores have tended to rise at the Olympic trials, it was apparent early on that the judges in Boston were lowballing their marks. Of the 56 routines during Friday night's compulsories, only seven were scored higher than Moceanu's four-routine average at the nationals, in which she had finished a disappointing third, behind both Miller and Jaycie Phelps. By the end of the first three rotations (out of eight), Miller had already been mathematically guaranteed a spot on the team. Moceanu, watching from the stands with her father, Dimitry, clinched her position one rotation later. The other competitors accepted this arrangement with remarkable equanimity, especially considering that Mary Beth Arnold, who finished seventh at the trials, was competing with a stress fracture similar to Moceanu's. The feeling was that Miller and Moceanu merited special treatment because of past performances. "I knew only five places were open," said Theresa Kulikowski, who finished sixth, missing the team by one spot (though as first alternate she will replace any Olympian sidelined by injury). "If those two were in the meet, they'd have finished on top anyway." The 16-year-old Kulikowski can take some consolation in the knowledge that the two gymnasts, one female and one male, who finished just out of the running at the trials in '92 became Olympians last weekend. Nineteen-year-old Amanda Borden, who this fall will be a freshman at Georgia and whose high-voltage smile and Dorothy Hamill hairstyle are guaranteed to make her a favorite in Atlanta, almost gave up the sport after being bumped from the Barcelona team after the trials. But the Cincinnati native stuck it out for four more years, and Sunday night she hung on to the fifth and final qualifying spot. Borden coolly nailed all four of her routines to keep Kulikowski at bay and was particularly impressive on the beam, where one slip would have cost her the Olympic berth. Prancing and preening as if taking a stroll on a sidewalk, Borden scored a 9.862, the highest balance-beam mark given at the trials. "I can't really explain what making the team means to me after just missing in '92," Borden said tearfully in one of the few genuinely emotional moments of the weekend. Then, with eloquent simplicity, she corrected herself. "Dreams come true," she said. "That's what it means." Chainey Umphrey's dreams came true, too. Umphrey was the last man out of the '92 trials, missing the team by .08 of a point. The margin was especially galling because a badly broken and dislocated right foot had forced him to sit out most of the year before those trials. Umphrey, who graduated from UCLA in '94 and will turn 26 during the Atlanta Games, postponed medical school so he could try to qualify for the Olympics this year. If he had known how bumpy the ride would be, he might be two years closer to his intended specialty, orthopedic surgery. Last year Umphrey began suffering migraine headaches, which led to a bout of vertigo so severe that he couldn't walk down a hallway without running his hand along the wall to keep his balance. That's a tough way to do a floor routine. He finally cured his migraines and vertigo by changing his diet, eliminating dairy products. But Umphrey still faced one more trial. Warming up for the parallel bars, the third of his six events on Saturday afternoon, he dislocated the middle finger of his left hand. He looked down at the horribly disfigured digit and thought, Oh, no, not again. But he had come too far and gone through too much to let a little pain stop him. Unlike the committee that establishes the criteria for selection of the women's Olympic team, the committee that makes the men's rules does not permit athletes to petition their way onto the team. They have to finish every event in the trials. So Umphrey, a crowd favorite in Boston, as he generally is everywhere he competes, calmly yanked on his finger to pop it back in place and went about his business, hitting all six of his routines with steely precision. He moved all the way from sixth up to fourth. "No way I was going to let anything stop me this time," Umphrey said. They're a likable group, these men. Unfortunately, no one is predicting that they will win any medals. Nothing new about that. The U.S. men's gymnastics program has been experiencing hard times ever since the '84 team hauled in seven medals (three of them gold) at the Los Angeles Olympics - a competition notably weakened by the Soviet-bloc boycott - and the American men have finished ninth at the last two world championships. "I call 1985-95 the Dark Decade," says U.S. men's coach Peter Kormann, whose bronze medal in floor exercise at the 1976 Games was the first gymnastics medal by an American man in 44 years. "Anything we did right was almost by accident. We didn't tell our kids what we wanted. Our judges overscored them. A 9.6 routine in the U.S. was a 9.1 in international competition. For the first time in 10 years, we're looking at the whole picture in men's gymnastics, and not just one piece of the pie. Our goal is to win a team medal, and it's not as far off as you might think." Kormann and men's program director Ron Galimore have named the project Operation Flip-Flop, which also would have been a good label for the men's trials. Throughout the meet, competitors were flipping onto their backs in this event, flopping onto their bellies in that one. During the compulsories on Thursday, the pommel horse seemed to be bucking, as 10 of the 14 gymnasts, including recently crowned national champ Blaine Wilson, either fell off or mangled their routines so badly that they scored 9.025 or less. "There were a lot of nervous errors out there tonight," acknowledged Kormann. The most interested spectators were Moceanu (left) and Miller, whose nationals scores held up. photograph by Damian Strohmeyer The men's nerves continued to show during the optionals on Saturday, with a total of 15 falls, including two tooth-rattlers by eventual sixth-place finisher Jair Lynch, who managed to both flop on his belly and flip onto his back in the same high bar routine. The good news - and we're reaching a little here - is that the men have increased the degree of difficulty in their routines. If they ever perform the routines cleanly, they might surprise a lot of folks. The bad news is that other than Wilson and 26-year-old John Roethlisberger, who was the high scorer at the trials and is a four-time national all-around champion, the American men are notoriously inconsistent. Even dangerous. "No one thinks we'll do anything in Atlanta, and I could care less," Kormann said testily. "We have a long way to go, but we're climbing up that mountain. We could be great in 2000." As Borden and Umphrey can attest, the Sydney Olympics are not too far off to dream about. But it's not Atlanta, where they're bound.