Athlete profile: Michele Rohrbach

Posted: Tue February 3, 1998 at 5:00 PM ET

Athlete notes

Like all of us who have dreamt big things when watching something on television, Rohrbach actually turned this dream into reality...a serious gymnast in her youth, she once saw a video clip of aerials on a television in a store display...Rohrbach was used to flips from gymnastics and she liked to ski, so at age 17 Rohrbach ventured into aerials...and while Rohrbach won the world junior title in '94 and finished as the fourth-ranked aerialist in the world last year, that does not mean her first time on the ramps resulted in success..."The first time I landed a jump, I could not stop on the hill," she reminisced. "I kept going and ended up in the river"...Rohrbach was not hurt and was laughing as she exited the water..."I guess it prepared me for all the water training I would do later," she said jokingly...in fact, water training is one of the keys to her success in the upcoming year...Rohrbach has been working to improve the difficulty in her jumps and with aerials that usually begins with flips into the pool..."I want to do more than just double flips and spins," she noted. "If you train in the water and on the trampoline during the off-season, it is amazing what you can do by the next year. Moves you would have never even imagined the previous spring"...for Rohrbach that training might put her over the edge in '98...at the Lillehammer Olympics she was too young and inexperienced to compete and had not even completed a double flip yet in competition...but her '97 World Cup season included four podiums, along with two consecutive seconds, and a second place at the World Championships in Nagano...she seems poised for an, ahem, watershed season...to prepare for the Olympics, Rohrbach has taken off from her three-day-a-week job at Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) to focus full time on her training...her dad works at a department store and her mom is a homemaker...Michele also has one brother, an avid cyclist... she often goes cycling with him when she has free time outside of her work and training schedule... Rohrbach speaks some English.