TOKYO -- There will be less of a long, drawn-out process for selecting the U.S. women's Olympic team this time around, National Team Coordinator Martha Karolyi announced as the World Championships concluded Sunday.
Instead of after a selection camp at the Karolyi Ranch, the Olympic team will be named at the end of the 2012 Olympic Trials, Karolyi said, the same evening as competition at the Trials concludes. Trials will take place in San Jose, Calif. June 28-July 1, 2012.
"I'm a little nervous about that, to be very honest, but that was the decision, and I hope we will be able to handle it," Karolyi said. "I always like to select the team two days before we leave the country, and this will be different. So definitely we will want probably to have a tiny bit longer training camp or something. We will have to figure out how to deal with this extra time."
The 2004 and 2008 U.S. Olympic teams have been chosen after closed-door selection camps at the Karolyi Ranch in Texas. Though both were favored to win gold, they took silver at the Games, and some gymnastics pundits believed the selection camps led to overtraining, causing U.S. gymnasts to get injured or peak too early before the Olympics.
The reason for naming the team at Olympic Trials has more to do with getting the Olympic roster in under the International Olympic Committee's deadline for having set rosters, said Steve Penny, President of USA Gymnastics.
"The team has to be named within a certain period of time, and the Olympic Trials is within a window -- it's actually 21 or 22 days before the Olympic Games begin -- so we've actually been granted an extension to be able to do that. We're one of the rare teams that has that opportunity," said Steve Penny, President of USA Gymnastics. "The Dream Team [U.S. men's basketball team] has to name their team sooner than we have to name ours. In the previous years, that wasn't the case."
Karolyi was bubbly and smiling with reporters in the mixed zone after Jordyn Wieber earned a bronze on beam, her second individual medal here at Worlds. Alexandra Raisman finished third on floor as well, but what made Karolyi most jubilant was that the entire U.S. team did not record a fall on any apparatus throughout the five days of women's competition.
"I'm very proud of our girls," she said. "In five days of competition they didn't miss one single routine. They showed the most consistency possible. You always want to get as close to possible to perfection, so our duty will be to go back home and work even stronger to get close to that perfection level."
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