January 22, 2000
Moceanu Not Invited to Camp
Gymnast misses cut for second Olympic training session
Hold off on that
Vanity Fair cover and wait on the pre-Olympic hype. Unlike 1996, when Dominique
Moceanu was
the poster girl
for U.S. gymnastics, her road to the Sydney Games is going to be a lot
tougher.
MOCEANU WAS NOT among
the 15 gymnasts invited to Bela Karolyi’s second pre-Olympic training camp.
Eleven
others failed to
make the cut after the first camp, held last week at Karolyi’s ranch outside
Houston.
“No, she’d only been
in the gym for two weeks,” Mary Lee Tracy, Moceanu’s coach, said Saturday
from her gym in
Cincinnati when
asked if she was surprised Moceanu was left off the list.
“The only reason
we brought her there is both of us felt it’s a good thing to see what the
competition is, even
knowing this might
happen.”
The gymnasts invited
to the second camp were: 1996 gold medalist Amy Chow; two-time defending
national
champion Kristen
Maloney; 1997 national champion Vanessa Atler; Jeanette Antolin; Alyssa
Beckerman; Jamie
Dantzscher; Annabeth
Eberle; Katie Hardman; Robin Phelps; Dana Pierce; Elise Ray; Sierra Sapunar;
Tasha
Schwikert; Jennie
Thompson, and Morgan White.
But don’t count Moceanu
out of the Olympics just yet. Karolyi, who came out of retirement to be
the national
team coordinator,
has established escalating criteria for conditioning and skills, and Moceanu
could be invited to
later camps if she
meets those.
Moceanu is taking this as a challenge, not a defeat, Tracy said.
“She’s disappointed,
but at the same time, Dominique is a realist,” said Tracy, the ’96 U.S.
assistant coach. “She
knows what it’s
going to take. Did she come back more fired up? Absolutely. There was no,
‘Poor me, why’d they
do this to me?’
”
It was difficult
to make the cut with the erratic training schedule Moceanu has had in the
past 18 months, Tracy
said. After becoming
the first non-Russian to win the all-around at the 1998 Goodwill Games,
her life took a turn
even a soap opera
writer couldn’t have created.
She ran away from
home in October 1998, when she was 17, and asked to be declared a legal
adult, saying her
parents had squandered
her money. She was back in court the following month, asking for a protective
order
against her father
after he allegedly inquired about having two of her friends killed. Dumitru
Moceanu denied the
allegations.
Consumed by her family
troubles, she didn’t train for three months, then bounced around a handful
of coaches and
gyms. She sat out
another four months after knee surgery last summer, finally arriving at
Tracy’s gym at the
beginning of January.
“Dominique is an
athlete who has proven in the past to have very spectacular, very nice,
very efficient
performances,” Karolyi
said earlier this month. “The only question in my mind, will she come back
to her physical
shape and will she
be able to perform to this other criteria?”
Still, this was Moceanu,
the face of the U.S. team as it prepared for Atlanta. She graced the cover
of Vanity Fair,
did a national commercial
and published her autobiography - all before the Magnificent Seven won
gold.
“Moceanu was clearly
not ready (at the camp), but I did believe they would protect her,” said
Kelli Hill, Phelps and
Ray’s coach. “If
she’s very motivated, it might give her cause to challenge them and work
harder. I’m hoping that’s
what happens. I
think if she was in shape and ready to go, she could be a great asset to
our team.”
But it’s good Karolyi,
Moceanu’s coach in 1996, isn’t making exceptions, Tracy said. The U.S.
program has faltered
since Atlanta -
the U.S. women finished last at the world championships last fall - and
it’s going to take a lot of
work to fix that
in time for Sydney.
“I don’t think it
can be about who you are or what you’re done in the past,” Tracy said.
“We’re only seven months
away and we’ve got
a lot of work to do. They’re going to see a big difference in Dominique
in the next weeks.”