Salon.com > Jordyn Wieber

Kvelling for Aly Raisman

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 03:38:00 +0000

By the time American gymnast Aly Raisman started tumbling for a medal in the individual floor exercise event yesterday, she was being propelled along by quite an Olympic narrative. Raisman’s story isn’t Oscar Pistorius or Michael Phelps-level operatic, but over the previous nine days she’d put together a pretty compelling arc. The 18-year-old captain of the American team first upset Jordyn Wieber last Sunday night, unexpectedly securing a spot in the individual all-around and introducing audiences to her panicked, anxious mom and dad, still positioned to take the gold in the games’ very competitive “Most Intense Parenting” event. Raisman then anchored the American team as they won the group all-around, finishing her routine with tears in her eyes, only to lose out on a bronze in the individual all-around on a tie-breaking technicality.

Do Olympians get OCD?

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 17:20:00 +0000

Watching all these synchronized divers, as well as the U.S. women’s gymnastics team victory this week, got us thinking. What sort of mental acrobatics does it take for a gymnast to stay on that 4-inch beam, to dive perfectly in unison with another person, or, for a sprinter to burst from the blocks at just the right moment? With the precision required of them, are elite athletes more prone to obsessive compulsive disorder than the rest of us?

Not quite, according to two sports psychologists who spoke with Salon. But the perfectionism and obsessiveness that tend to course through Olympians’ blood does leave them vulnerable.

“That obsessive compulsive person is awesome up to a point,” said Dr. Judy L. Van Raalte, a Springfield University sports psychologist who works with college and professional athletes. “You’re willing to train, to commit, and it feels comfortable to you; it doesn’t tire you out.”

Yet, just like anyone else, athletes do have weaknesses that can be triggered by stress – a theory called the diathesis-stress model of mental illness. Elite athletes confront distinct, sport-specific challenges, which can wreak mental havoc when presented in moments of extreme pressure, like Olympic competition.

Tears, guts, gold!

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 11:50:00 +0000

A few seconds before it was really over, Aly Raisman raised her arms and started to tear up. Having finished her last tumbling pass on the floor exercise without an error, Raisman knew that the U.S. women’s gymnastics team would win the gold in the team all around, the few remaining arm flourishes in her routine beside the point. Over on the sideline, Raisman’s teammate Jordyn Wieber broke into a huge, uncontained smile, one Raisman would echo in a few minutes. But before then, still on the floor, Raisman’s tears didn’t yet look like the ones of joy and happiness they soon would — they looked like tears of immense relief.

The proximity of elation and sadness, relief and disappointment is what makes the Olympics so rousing to watch. Over and over, the games come to down to teeny-tiny numbers, not just the split-seconds or tenths of a point that separate winners and losers, but the brief moment in time that separates athletes who have nailed their routine, entered the water cleanly, left all the hurdles standing, and those who have not. As the Russian gymnastics team demonstrated so completely on their floor routines, a tumbling pass can fall apart in an instant. When Raisman raised her arms, she knew she had survived the ghosts of all those possible errors.

Michael Phelps, Jordyn Wieber: Redemption!

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 11:45:00 +0000

Gone were Jordyn Wieber’s tears, and the running mascara, magically replaced by an impish smile and a playful bite on an Olympic gold medal.

Gone, too, was Michael Phelps' silver medal snarl, replaced by a post-relay war whoop.

It was Redemption Tuesday at the Summer Olympics.

Two days ago, when Wieber missed her chance at the all-around gold in women’s gymnastics, it was cause for outrage. A travesty, some suggested.

Actually more like a tragedy. As in Act I.

In NBC’s prime-time Olympics, story is king. And queen. And Wieber’s travails merely served up a handy narrative.

“She may be going from the abyss to the mountaintop,” said Al Trautwig, who had been milking Wieber’s woes all evening long, as the U.S. stood on the verge of capturing the team gold. And when Wieber finally cashed it in with a solid floor exercise, the story had come full circle.

And cash in she will. Asked about Wieber’s prospects just after the preliminaries, gymnast-turned-commentator Dominique Dawes told USA Today, “It could cost her a couple of million dollars throughout her career, probably.”

Jordyn Wieber stunner: “Quite honestly, it’s horrific”

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 15:25:00 +0000

Jordyn Wieber is a controlled crier. At all of 17, wearing a long-sleeved purple leotard and a little too much rouge, her lifelong dream smashed -- not because she'd done anything horribly wrong, but because she hadn’t done it perfectly right -- the gymnast-that-couldn’t put her hands over her eyes and cried, before accepting a shoulder in which to more discreetly sob. Just a few minutes later she hefted on her backpack — suddenly an extremely poignant, age-appropriate shield — and stared off into the middle distance, listening as the teammate who beat her spoke to a TV crew about the surprising turn of events. Then she went on television herself and, without her voice breaking, describing the outcome as “disappointing.” The NBC commentator was not nearly so dignified, dramatically declaring, “Quite honestly, it’s horrific.”

Jordyn Wieber shocker: Gymnastics is not a meritocracy

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 11:46:00 +0000

There was mascara and there were tears.

It was a perfectly sad — but perfect — prime-time moment, as Jordyn Wieber, the defending world champion, got the news that she had missed the finals and wouldn’t compete for the all-around gold medal.

But really, why all the fuss? Is the rule restricting each country to two competitors just sort of silly? Sure. But the Olympics are full of rules that sacrifice competition in favor of inclusion.  Maybe the real problem is that USA Gymnastics is something less than a pure meritocracy. Ask Elizabeth Price. The upstart gymnast finished fourth in the Olympic Trials. But she didn’t make the five-member team, because McKayla Maroney, who finished seventh, got the Olympic berth because of her strength in the vault. Price had to settle for being an alternate.

But there’s another reason for the melodrama. Wieber was tonight’s Queen of the Prime Time Olympics, and she’d share her pain, and her running mascara, with all of America.

But there is another, less obvious Olympics.

Olympics secret: They’re not about sports

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 20:20:00 +0000

Every two years, television reteaches us how to watch the Olympics. As thousands of sprinters, swimmers, archers, gymnasts, boxers, hurdlers, pentathletes and trampolinists descend on London for two weeks of gamesmanship that includes everything from basketball to badminton, fencing to field hockey, table tennis to taekwondo, NBC — the sole televisual purveyor of the Olympics in America — gets down to the business of instructing us, the viewing audience, on how to care about largely unknown athletes competing in not always well understood sports. It does this not only by explaining the rules of the decathlon and the steeplechase, the physical difficulties of the clean and jerk and the pole vault, but by telling us story upon story — the more dramatic, inspiring and tear-jerking the better — about the athletes involved.