Four arduous years came down to one precarious wobble.
Aly Raisman needed a strong balance beam routine to beat Gabby Douglas and qualify for a chance at the Olympic all-around medal she barely missed at London 2012. She had already given what she called the best meet of her life when she teetered on the edge of a fall that might have left her to watch someone else live her dream.
“Usually she doesn’t do that wobble,” said Mihai Brestyan, Raisman’s coach. “She surprised everybody, surprised me, surprised herself.”
Yet Raisman gathered herself on that beam and completed the rest of her routine flawlessly. She dismounted. She raised her arms. And she qualified for the all-around – with a score of 60.607 to Douglas’ 60.131. A fall would have cost her a half-point deduction and perhaps a spot in the final.
“It definitely was my goal,” Raisman said afterward. “The media kept asking me, and I was trying to downplay it, because I didn’t want to add to the pressure, but it’s something I think about a lot.”
Brestyan told Yahoo Sports that the all-around medal was “50 percent” of the reason Raisman came back at all. (He said the other 50 percent is a secret.) She had to go through eight months of purely physical training, and then came the incremental tinkering she would need to not only get to the level of 2012 but also one extra level to beat her teammate on Sunday.
Much has been made of Douglas’ comeback from all-around gold, but Raisman came back from the most crushing of defeats — a tie for bronze with Russia’s Aliya Mustafina in which she lost the tiebreaker.
How close was it in London? With only their three highest apparatus scores used, Raisman lost 45.933 to 45.366 – almost the exact same margin that boosted her past Douglas on Sunday.
“I love both of the girls,” said 2008 Olympian Shawn Johnson, “but Aly is here with a vengeance from 2012 and she deserves that spot.”
Raisman’s importance to the team as a whole can’t be overstated. She is known as “Grandma,” a reference to her age (she’s 22 and she doesn’t do Snapchat), but her leadership among teenagers is very much a part of her job.
Douglas has struggled in several ways over the last few months, Simone Biles is so dominant that it’s intimidating and Laurie Hernandez is still new to this level. There are some who believe Hernandez should have been given the chance to compete for the all-around spot instead of Douglas, and that surely didn’t ease any nerves that were already brewing among athletes who the world is watching so closely. Raisman was captain in 2012 and is captain again at these Summer Games, and that’s for a reason.
But there’s also the personal journey she’s on – one she didn’t have to take.
“I’ve been working so hard,” Raisman said. “It’s been a rough last year and a half. People think it looks easy. It’s taken me three years to complete that vault the way that I did. Training three years to get to that point.”
If the wobble turned into a fall, especially after such impressive performances on the vault and the uneven bars, it’s possible Raisman would have had to live with wondering if she really did get better from 18 to age 22. Now she knows.
“When you make the Olympics, you’ve reached the peak of your sport and the peak of your abilities,” Johnson said. “To go further than that is an incredible mental challenge.”
That is perhaps Raisman’s greatest gift, and it’s very rare. “It’s the determination to succeed,” Brestyan said. “She’s not necessarily the most talented kid on the team, but she’s the hardest worker on the team, that’s for sure.”
Biles is still the runaway favorite in the all-around. Her performance on Sunday, in her first Olympics event, was shake-your-head stellar. Still, Raisman’s evening, when put in the context of what happened in 2012 and since, is just as impressive.
Grandma may not win gold, but she earned her golden chance.
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