Before this weekend's Winter Cup, David Sender's last big competition was the 2009 U.S. Championships, where he finished 10th all-around in spite of tallying the second highest day one total. At the time, he was eager to move on to the next chapter in his life: vet school, the culmination of a lifelong love of animals.
The Olympic dream had crashed down on him the year before, when in spite of being the U.S. champion and petitioning directly onto the team after spraining his ankle before Olympic Trials, the men's selection committee not only not named him to the team, it did not even make him an alternate. (Meanwhile, in spite of his broken hand, Paul Hamm was named to the team and given every opportunity to prove that he was fit for competition before the U.S. men left for Beijing.)
So if there was an element of retribution to Sender's gymnastics in 2009 -- huge skills that nobody else was doing, followed by a direct refusal to participate at Worlds (conveyed to USA Gymnastics via text message, someone told me at the time), it was a little hard to blame him.
Adament as he was about moving on, Sender did say that deep down one reason he'd chosen Illinois for vet school was that there was a fully fitted out gym nearby, and an Olympian-turned-coach (Justin Spring) who could train him if he ever wanted to come back. Three years later, here we are -- Sender finished sixth all-around at Winter Cup, earning a place on the national team and signaling that he's a threat to make the U.S. men's five-member Olympic team.
I dug out the 2009 Nationals story tonight and wanted to re-post it. Sender struck me then as a unique character -- a man committed to all of his dreams -- and even now, it seems that's still being bourne out. Good for him.
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DALLAS -- His final competition officially halfway done, David Sender lowered himself onto the floor of a conference room at the American Airlines Center. Transitioning from a standing to a laying position is not a gymnastics move, but Sender did it so slowly that he made it look harder than any of the skills he'd just finished performing in the first day of men's competition at the U.S. Championships.
Sender led the competition through the first five events, only to be eclipsed by Jonathan Horton during the last rotation, where the 2008 Olympic silver medalist on high bar performed on his best event and the 2008 Olympic might-have-been visited his worst, the pommel horse.
Barechested, Sender lay on his stomach while a trainer massaged his back, where he'd felt a twinge after landing his rings dismount, and took questions from reporters eagerly crouched around him.
Now that he'd performed so well, was he reconsidering his decision to discontinue gymnastics to go to veterinary school at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign?
"Unfortunately, the decision's already been made," Sender said. The U.S. Championships are literally the last thing Sender is doing before he moves to Illinois to start the next chapter of his life. His car is packed, and he's flying back to California Saturday to pick it up. From there, Sender plans to drive to Illinois, which will likely do nothing to make his back feel any better.
So no World Championships? "Right now I'm just kind of tired," he said.
He looked that way after the meet, but not during it. There seemed to be a precision in his gymnastics tonight, an easiness that he hadn't shown before, tossing off tough skills with a certain nonchalance. That came because for Sender, there was nothing to prove anymore -- no national team to make, no World Championship squad to be named to, no Olympic team to contend for. For once, it was his decision, not theirs.
Is there a measure of satisfaction in coming back after not making the Olympic team and performing so well? Sure, he said. Sender skipped the Olympic Trials to rest the ankle he'd sprained in practice right before the meet and petitioned directly to the Olympic team, hoping that his U.S. title-winning performance in 2008 would be enough. It wasn't. Sender was not even named an alternate.
A trainer told Sender he would have been ready to compete in Beijing with his ankle thickly taped. Whether or not it would have had enough training time to work on his landings, to make sure everything was finessed, to prepare himself mentally in the way that only hours of repetition can, will always be unclear.
In a way, perhaps not making the Olympic team was the better thing, because it brought him a freedom he'd never felt in gymnastics. He took three weeks off after the Olympic Trials.
"At that point I wanted to re-evaluate," he said. "It was tough because there was no big goal."
He started training again for the only reason that athletes do when they've reached a point where something has been accomplished or a great opportunity has been lost: because he wanted to.
"In the end I decided I still really enjoyed the sport at its heart," he said. "This year was entirely for me. I had nothing to prove to anyone."
This time around, he trained skills not to meet some code, not to maximize his scores, but because he wanted to perform them.
There was a new vault, the Yurchenko double pike he performed tonight to earn a 17.05 (partly because USA Gymnastics was offering a 0.5 bonus to anyone who threw a certain amount of difficulty). Sender was the only competitor to perform a second vault as well, a handspring front layout with a double twist.
"That was obviously the highlight of my day," Sender said of the Yurchenko pike. "It's a really fun vault to do." He also upgraded his floor routine with an unusual pass, pioneered by China's Lo Yun in the 1980s.
He still feels the effects of the ankle injury, and has lost a little range of motion -- "but it's no worse than any other part of my body," he added, indicating the masseuse.
After Saturday, Sender will spend some time pursuing becoming a veterinarian, a dream he's held as long as the one of going to the Olympics, and a much surer thing. But if the temptation to return to the gym gets to be too much, Sender said he could see training under 2008 Olympic team member Justin Spring, who was named head coach of the University of Illinois earlier this year.
Ideally, if he decides the 2012 Games are something he wants to do, he'll likely move back to California to prepare with Stanford's team, a program the Cardinal alum found worked well for him.
Right now, though, gymnastics is about to be set aside.
"I won't have to do this for awhile, feel this for awhile if I don't want to," Sender said.
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