Tiny Texas teen's beam score key for crippled U.S. team

By Chris Jenkins
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

August 21, 2003

ANAHEIM – Hollie Vise was being "iced."

Not to suggest she was nursing an injury or a fever, although as a member of a U.S. women's gymnastics squad that's been beset by a freaky series of physical maladies at the World Championships, it was amazing that she didn't break her nose with the face plant she'd landed off the uneven bars a few minutes earlier.

Rather, the tiny 15-year-old from Texas was being put on ice in the sense used more often in another American sport, the one in which teams call repeated timeouts to make a place-kicker think extra long and hard about that game-tying or game-winning field goal.

Delayed several minutes by a technical glitch after chalking up for the balance beam and signaling her readiness, Vise looked like a doe caught in the headlights and even stepped down off the mat for some excruciating moments. She returned to the most difficult apparatus in her sport, however, and proceeded to provide Team USA with its first world championship.

In a way, the Americans' accomplishment at the Arrowhead Pond was even more improbable than the gold-medal feats of Mary Lou Retton in the last Olympics held in Southern California, almost to the point of preposterous. Overcoming the loss of two world champions and the favorite in a third event – all within hours of the start of the competition – the United States denied Romania its sixth straight world team title.

Romania, the only nation besides the former Soviet Union to have won the title since 1966, last night finished with 110.833 points to the United States' 112.573, the biggest margin coming on the strength of the Americans' balance-beam performances.

"Only after the beam, I say, 'Yeah, we have a chance,' " said women's coach Martha Karolyi, wife of Bela Karolyi, the national team director who coached Retton and Nadia Comaneci to legendary status in different countries. "That was so difficult."

Mostly for Vise, the tiniest member of the patchwork American squad. She was visibly bothered by her splat from the uneven bars, a release she'd missed throughout an afternoon practice session.

"I was really disappointed, but I had to put it behind me," said Vise. "After everything we'd already gone through, the team needed a big score on the beam."

The beam is the alligator alley of gymnastics, only 4 inches wide, the margin by which most major competitions are decided. Vise was the first of the American trio to go, but she could not get a green light from head judge Nellie Kim, a Siberian who won Olympic medals for the U.S.S.R.

"I was ready to go, but they said something with the scoring wasn't working," said Vise. "You have to expect those kinds of things to happen in our sport. Anything can happen."

Obviously. It would not have been a major upset if the United States at full strength had prevailed with its first team title, because the Karolyis had developed by far the deepest program in American gymnastics history. But those weren't exactly scrubs whose names were being scratched from the lineup on an almost daily basis.

The two gymnasts who came down with stomach flu, Courtney Kupets and Ashley Postel, were defending champions in their best apparatus. The only U.S. gymnast qualified for all four events, Kupets recovered from the bug in time to compete, but she blew out an Achilles' tendon in practice Tuesday. Two days previously, ace vaulter Annia Hatch had destroyed her knee in training.

The last American gymnast on the floor, Carly Patterson, was tumbling with an arm she'd broken only months ago. After Vise pushed the Americans ahead with her 9.512 and Chellsie Memmell recorded a 9.575, Patterson essentially put the lead out of touch with a 9.312 that nonetheless drew boos from the pro-U.S. crowd.

"So many blows, so many blows," said Bela Karolyi. "We've been beaten up so hard. That's why I believe a Hollie Vise can go up and down and up and down – what torture for a young gymnast – and do so beautifully. I believe we don't let anything affect us anymore.

"And now you watch. This is just the start."

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