Jamie Dantzscher

Why a page for a girl I don´t know and never saw before on screen ?

Good Question !

When I was surfing thru the net I thought it would be very interesting to see if there are any fan pages for such great gymnasts like Lilia Podkopayeva or Kim Zmeskal and maybe one for my personal favourite - Oksana Chusovitina. So I searched Yahoo for Sports-Recreation-Gymnastics and to my surprise there were a lot of sites referring to this subject. Mostly, of course, about the U.S. American Team, and some for Lilia as well.

I soon became very interested in the fact, that in the U.S. almost every school has it´s own sport-teams, the boys do Basket-,and Baseball, the girls try their best as Cheerleaders, some become good swimmers and there are also many gymnasts.

In Austria, where I live, not many schools support the wishes and skills of young people, the boys play one or two soccer games a year against other schools, the girls most of the time do nothing at all, because they don´t even have any offers. Well, some do horse-back riding - privately.

Some girls become ballerinas at very young age, what a chance for gymnastics-career, but 90 % quit after elementary school, the rest some years later. Our country has one or two good gymnast-women, the men do far better, they already have a team, but Austria decided to send neither men nor girls to the Olympics in Atlanta. And as it looks, Sydney 2000 will be no exception.

What is a gymnastics-fan supposed to do, if there´s no one of his own country taking part in International Events ?

Of course he´s searching for foreign athlethes to cheer for. And there are lots. Only few years ago there where only Russians, Bulgarians, Japenese, Chinese and East-Germans. And they were, and still are pretty good at their skills. With Kim Zmeskal and Shannon Miller things have changed rapidly. In Indianapolis Kim won the AA-competition very impressive.

The Olympic Games 1996 In Atlanta brought triumph to the U.S. gymnastics-fans : "The Magnificent 7" stroke (well, in my personal opinion with a little help of the advantage of playing at home).

Two years have passed now, two years to go to the next Olympics. Austria´s broadcasting company does not pay attention to "side issues", except during the Games. The only chance to stay informed is to read all the sports-homepages (thank heaven my university pays the bill).

Why Jamie ?

Almost every homepage is equipped with a picture-gallery and many links. If you have some time left you only have to click on those many thumbnails and - surprise - you find a very lovely face on some of the pictures. "Who is this ?" you ask and read the footnotes. "Jamie Dantzscher, aha !" Now you search for information and get a link to her homepage. Click ! Everything´s there : Bio, Results, Piccies and an enourmous guestbook. It takes a whole day to read it thru, so I stopped after about 20 mins. and signed it too. I also joined Jamie´s mailing list - let´s see what happens.

Jamie is looking forward to Sydney 2000, she´s improving very well and awarded many medals. The upcoming Olympics seem to be Jamie´s only chance to take part in such an event. For the 1996 Games she was too young (you have at least to become 15 ys. old the same year the event takes place) and with 22 she will be probably too old (that´s always the problem with women-gymnastics).

Curious ?

Click here for some facts about Jamie and my favourite pictures of her !

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