Ron Brant: U.S. men's gold 'is going to happen'

Ron Brant was the U.S. men's National Team Coordinator from 2000 to 2009. Photo courtesy USA Gymnastics.

In December 2000, a group of about 20 gymnasts, coaches and officials gathered at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo., to discuss the progress of the U.S. men's gymnastics team. It was not a happy occasion. 

"Everyone just let it out on the table," said Ron Brant, who was appointed National Team Coordinator shortly afterward.

The high point in U.S. men in gymnastics had come at the 1984 Olympics, where the underdog American squad beat the Chinese in the men's gymnastics version of the Miracle on Ice. Though there had been a few Individual triumphs -- like Trent Dimas's gold medal on high bar at the 1992 Olympics and Jair Lynch's silver on parallel bars in 1996 -- the American men's team had not been a serious medal contender since.

"It had signs of almost making it, but it just couldn't get over the hump," Brant said.

After the U.S. men placed fifth at the 1997 World Championships in Switzerland -- albeit less than a point out of bronze medal position -- World team member John Roethlisberger looked into a television camera and yelled, "We're not doormats anymore!" But the U.S. placed sixth at the 1999 World Championships and fifth again at the 2000 Olympics.

Roethlisberger's declaration had been premature. At the end of 2000, the U.S. men were still doormats, and everybody was tired of it.

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Brant, who grew up on the east coast, did not start gymnastics until he was 15. As a child he was involved in an intense athletic program that included wrestling, football and baseball, but he never saw gymnastics until his family moved to Naperville, Ill. That was 1970.

Brant's first impression of gymnastics was that it was difficult. But something compelled him to keep going to practices. "I decided, 'I can do this,'" he said.

After high school, Brant went into the army, where he coached the sports he'd done as a kid. He returned to gymnastics three years later after leaving the army and enrolling at the University of Illinois. He later became U of I's volunteer assistant coach, but said didn't get hooked on coaching gymnastics until he had graduated with a degree in resort management, moved to Colorado Springs and took a job with a local gymnastics club.

In 1989, Brant, by then a fixture at National Team training camps, sent a letter to USA Gymnastics Executive Director Mike Jacki outlining how Colorado Springs's U.S. Olympic Training Center might be better utilized for gymnastics. Jacki liked Brant's ideas, and on Jan. 3, 1990, Brant moved to the USOTC to set up a program. He started with three gymnasts: Marshall Nelson, JT Malone and Brian Ottenhoff, all from the Greeley Gymnastics Center in Greeley, Colo.

In 1994, a Los Angeles native named John Macready came to the USOTC to train with Brant and Vitaly Marinitch, a former Soviet World Champion whom Brant had recruited to help build the USOTC program.

Macready, a natural born performer, made the U.S. World Championship team a year later and the Olympic team the year after that. It was the start of big things for the Brant/Marinitch program; between 1995 and 2009, there has been only one year when a USOTC gymnast has not made the U.S. World or Olympic team, Brant said.

Vitaly Marinitch, 1989 American Cup, High Bar:

Despite the domestic success of USOTC men, the U.S. men as a whole were still not as distinguished as the Chinese, the re-emerging Japanese or the Russians. By 2000, Brant, like Bela and Martha Karolyi, had came to the conclusion that semi-centralized training that emphasized teamwork was needed for success.

"Over the years the sport had had different levels of leadership," Brant said. "Coaches ran the sport, judges ran the sport. The decision was the staff, the coaches, athletes and judges would all have an opportunity to speak, have an opportunity to put input into it, and a plan would be designed."
Brant believed then, as he does today, that the U.S. men had the potential to be in the top three in the world as a team and as individuals.

"But first we had to build consistency," he said. "We really wanted to establish consistency and show year after year that we could be there. Then -- and that's where we are right now -- it would be about challenging for the top 1-2."

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After the Sydney Olympics, the U.S. strived to develop its own system, tailored to its own athletes.
"We looked at what really makes us tick," Brant said. "We didn't want to follow anymore. We wanted to find a way to lead."

Part of the new plan focused on fitness levels. Brant also applied himself to working out details that would give the U.S. men an edge, including leaving later for large competitions to ensure gymnasts would not be overtrained.

The new system's first test was the 2001 World Championships in Ghent, Belgium. It was arguably the U.S. men's biggest team success since 1984 -- they won the silver medal behind Belarus, and Sean Townsend took the parallel bars title, becoming the first American man to win a World Championship since Kurt Thomas in 1979. It was a breakthrough moment for the team, which after Sept. 11, 2001 had not even known whether it would go to Belgium at all until the last minute.

"The guys were high energy, motivated and they broke through," Brant said. The success continued with Paul Hamm's bronze on floor at the individual World Championships in 2002. The next year, in front of a largely pro-American crowd in Anaheim, Calif., the team repeated as silver medalists and Hamm became the first American man ever to win the men's all-around. He added a second gold on floor, tying with Bulgaria's Jordan Jovtchev.

The U.S. men came dramatically close to winning gold at the 2004 Olympic Games. Their silver medal was solidifed only after three clutch performances by the Japanese men during the sixth rotation of the team final.

The media was cognizant of the accomplishment. "For the U.S. men's gymnastics team, it's been a long four years. For the entire men's program, it's been a long two decades," Washington Post reporter Amy Shipley wrote. "On Monday night, a frustrating era came to a close as six unshakable men seized the silver medal with the same authority they grabbed the high bar in the nerve-wracking finale of the Olympic team final.

"A team chronically overshadowed and generally outperformed by its female counterparts finally found a way to spin the cameras in its direction, winning its first Olympic men's team medal since the Summer Games in 1984 in a breathtaking competition that wasn't decided until the last Japanese gymnast landed in the last event...

"We came into Greece, and we wanted to show the rest of the world we were ready," Wilson said. "We've been climbing steadily up the ladder the last four years."

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If the 2001 World Championships were one of the high points of Brant's tenure as National Team Coordinator, the 2006 Worlds in Aarhus, Denmark were the low. Not only did the highly touted U.S. men not win a medal, they didn't even make team finals. The 2004 Olympics suddenly seemed a very long time ago.

To be fair, the American men did not compete in ideal conditions. No team member had ever competed at a World Championship. They were up at 4 a.m. to compete in the first subdivision in qualifications, Brant said. To make things worse, rings specialist Kevin Tan had food poisoning.

At the 2006 U.S. Championships, Tan had averaged 16.325 on rings. He scored 13.175 in team prelims in Denmark. Arguably, if Tan had been capable of delivering a score like those he normally received on rings, that alone would have been enough to put the U.S. in the team final.

Brant chose to focus on the future. "I think you're going to see the biggest comeback ever in the sport," he said at the time.

"This was really the story of the men's team," he reflected from his office in Colorado last month. "Everybody could have fallen apart, pointed fingers. Everybody pulled together, which made it an even stronger program. It made it an even stronger team to this day. We never changed our message. Their confidence didn't waver."

The 2006 disaster lowered expectations for the 2007 World team. But the performance was more impressive than many had expected -- the U.S. men placed fourth, losing the bronze to host country Germany by just over a point. The team was officially on the rebound, and had some of the scores to prove it. But some still wondered which World Championship was the fluke.

The U.S. men stopped the naysayers by winning the team bronze in Beijing. Not only was it the first time the team had won back-to-back Olympic medals, not one of the six who competed in Beijing had been on an Olympic team before. Nor had any of them been in China during the four years prior to the Games.

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Brant officially left his position of U.S. national team coordinator after the 2009 World Championships in October. There was no team competition, and the U.S. men left empty-handed, although four of the six team members qualified to an event final. A fifth, Nevada's Jake Dalton, would have had a better chance of being in the top eight on vaut if he hadn't been hampered with strep throat the entire time he was in Britain.

"His throat was swollen up like a grapefruit," Brant said. "He wasn't able to train every day, and with those vaults you really have to be doing them every day."

Since the World Championships, Brant has been working in Colorado Springs as the High Performance Director for the U.S. Olympic Committee's Sports Performance Division, helping guide performance initiatives for 10 Olympic and Paralympic sports, including gymnastics.

A number of factors contributed to Brant's decision to step aside as U.S. men's coordinator. "Part of it was the opportunity to grow in a profession that's hard to do," he said. "I'm in a position that I can still communicate with gymnastics in a different level...but not be involved in the day-to-day scheduling. The part I'll miss is the competition."

Although no replacement has been named, Brant said he expects an announcement to be made by the end of the year.

"Nothing's finalized," he said. "Obviously it's a small group of people." Potential successors include 2004 and 2008 Olympic head coach Kevin Mazeika, or perhaps Men's Program Committee Chairman Yoichi Tomita, whose son Yewki spent the better part of the last decade on the senior National Team.

Brant said he'll never close the door on an opportunity to help the U.S. men's program thrive. He still coaches, in a less attention-getting role, at the USOTC's community program. If there's a part he won't miss, it's the Olympic selection process, a time when the five-member selection committee sits down and decides who makes the Olympic team and who gets left behind.

Brant insisted that deliberations, when there are deliberations, generally come down to the final spot only. The vast majority of the process is based on the results of the U.S. Championships and Olympic Trials, as well as assistance from a computer analysis program that examines different competition scenarios. Making the final call is never easy.

"It's very emotionally draining," Brant said. "You know they've worked so hard and to say you're really good but you're not going to be an Olympian [is very hard]."

The depth of the U.S. team continues to grow, as does motivation. Since the 2008 Games, the U.S. senior men's team has gathered every six weeks for a training camp. Impressive juniors are also invited to attend. Brant said the extra work comes at the behest of the athletes, not the coaches. Team gold is now the goal.

"The guys wanted to make the next step to challenge for first place and push each other more," Brant said. "There's a lot of younger athletes that are showing a lot of potential. It's going to be a great mix of guys. I believe the U.S. can win [team gold] this quad or next. It's going to happen."

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