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Meet the U.S. women's gymnastics team
Meet the U.S. men's gymnastic team BOSTON -- On Sunday night a four-person committee, led by national team coordinator Bela Karolyi, choose the six women who will comprise the U.S. gymnastics team in Sydney. The committee chose the gymnasts who placed one through five at a combination of the U.S. nationals in St. Louis last month and the U.S. trials that ended in Boston Sunday evening. Those five (Elise Ray, Amy Chow, Kristen Maloney, Morgan White, Jamie Dantzscher) joined seventh-place finisher Dominique Dawes on the team. Notable absentees included Vanessa Atler , who finished sixth, and Shannon Miller , who withdrew after one event, having crashed her first vault. Alyssa Beckerman was named as the team's first alternate. Since five of the six gymnasts compete on each apparatus - four of those scores count towards the team total - U.S. coaches Kelli Hill and Mary Lee Tracy will have to decide who among the six will sit out of each event. Here's look at the U.S. gymnasts who will compete in Sydney: Elise Ray, 18: Asked after Sunday's final if the team needed a leader, Karolyi responded, "the leader is Elise Ray." She was a runaway winner in Boston despite a fall in her final routine on the balance beam. She is the one U.S. gymnast certain to compete on all four events in Sydney. Though Ray lacks a certain flair or selling point, she is calm, elegant and not prone to silly mistakes. Her floor routine opens with a triple full-punch front combination. She is a threat to medal on the uneven bars, an apparatus on which a release move is named for her (a toe-on reverse Hecht over the bar). She also performs two infrequently seen hop fulls before a full-twisting double back dismount. Unlike many gymnasts who travel halfway across the country to find a gym, the Maryland native stayed close to her hometown of Columbia, choosing to train an hour away with Kelly Hill's team Hill's Angels in Gaithersville, Md. Ray plans to study veterinary medicine as a freshman at the University of Michigan come January. Amy Chow, 22: Chow was the one gymnast of the returning Magnificent Seven who took the least amount of time off and was in the best shape to make the team, despite taking a full workload at Stanford. On Sunday she returned to the venue where four years ago she made the Olympic team despite a harrowing face-first fall against the balance beam. To shoot for a spot on the Sydney team, Chow first had to coax Mark Young, her coach since the age of three at the West Valley Gymnastics Club in Campbell, Calif., out of retirement. She won a silver medal on the uneven bars in Atlanta, but is fairly even on the four events. Chow solidified her berth on the team by compiling the highest total score on Sunday. Kristen Maloney, 19: Maloney was U.S. all-around champion in 1998 and '99, despite a sore left shoulder and a stress fracture in her right shin. Last October she had a titanium rod placed inside her right tibia. A month later the tendons in the shoulder were tightened and, according to Maloney, they "cleaned out a few things that didn't need to be there." Maloney was back at Karolyi's training camps a few months later. She has three strong tumbling passes on floor if she can stick them: full-twisting double layout, double layout, front through to a triple twist that more often than not makes it about 2 7/8 of the way around. Her shoulder injury seems to have affected her most on bars, a once-strong event that may now be her weakest. Karolyi could still use this Parkettes gymnast from Pen Argyl, Pa. as an all-arounder. Morgan White, 17: At 4'10" and 85 pounds, White has been underestimated just as she is undersized. She won the all-around crown at the Pan Am Games in Winnipeg last summer after coach Mary Lee Tracy had to convince her that she could be among the top three. Shortly before the American Cup meet in Orlando in February, Tracy pulled a nervous White into an arena bathroom and told her protegee to soak her face and think of pressure as a beast that had to be put in its cage. White finally broke into the 9s on her final vault on Sunday, but probably won't be seeing much time on that apparatus in Sydney. She has 10.0 start values on the other three events. She is a smooth swinger on bars with a version of a Stalder handstand named for her in the FIG code of points. Jamie Dantzscher, 18: Karolyi was clearly not convinced that Dantzscher belonged on the team even after her strong showing in St. Louis. In Boston he spent his time talking up nearly every other top gymnast. After three events Sunday, Karolyi strolled out to the podium where Dantzscher was about to go up on her worst event, the balance beam. He patted her shoulder as if to let her know she had won him over and walked back to his seat on the other side of the floor. Dantzscher still had two falls off beam and she'll clearly be the one who won't compete on that event. She seemed burned out on gymnastics last summer when she left her longtime coaches in West Covina, Calif. Beth and Steve Rybacki shortly before the Pan-Am Games. Dantzscher eventually returned to the Rybackis and rededicated herself to making the team. Dominique Dawes, 23: "Awesome Dawesome's" appearance on her third Olympic team was the year's most pleasant surprise. While other gymnasts were slugging it out at Karolyi's monthly camps, Dawes was quietly working on a comeback with her Hill in Maryland. Since winning a gold medal with the Mag 7, Dawes appeared on Broadway in Grease, danced in a video by the Prince and even appeared as a celebrity guest on Emeril Lagasse's cooking show. She'll need to upgrade her start values on both floor and beam if she hopes to compete in those events. Her four vault scores in St. Louis and Boston (8.862, 8.825, 9.187, 9.287) were clearly sub-par, but the team may need her to vault because she is still a notch above Morgan White on the apparatus.
Brian Cazeneuve is a Sports Illustrated writer-reporter who covers the Olympics and is a frequent contributor to CNNSI.com. Click here to send a question to his Sydney 2000 Mailbag.
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