Phil Sheridan: These athletes tough-as-nails competitors Posted on June 21st
Paul Hamm is doing handstands on his surgically repaired hand, trying to speed the healing so he can compete in Beijing in August.
Amber Trani was back in the Parkettes’ center in Allentown three weeks after surgery for a ruptured disk in her back. Less than three months later, she will attempt to perform in all four disciplines in tonight’s U.S. Olympic gymnastics trials.
Mount Laurel’s Darling Hill can’t raise her arms above shoulder level without the torn muscles shrieking in pain, and yet she will extend them backward and push herself off a vault tonight and Sunday.
“It’s like, what am I asking my body to do?” Hill said. “I mean, we’re defying gravity here, and you’re asking me to land on my feet? It’s not going to happen. But you have to push through.”
With all due respect to Tiger Woods for winning the U.S. Open with an injured knee, the gymnasts at the Wachovia Center this week are not only arguably the greatest athletes in the world. They are also among the very toughest.
They look like pixies. They are as fearsome as pit bulls.
“I think it’s one of the toughest sports to compete in,” said Morgan Hamm, Paul’s twin brother, who suffered a torn pectoral muscle last year. “You’re going to get injured. It’s not a question of if you’re going to get injured, it’s a question of when. It’s going to happen.”
The “when” can be especially cruel. This is a sport that disappears for 31/2 years, coming around like a comet with each Summer Olympiad. To get hurt in the weeks or months before the Games is to be robbed of an entire career.
Take Trani, who lives near Quakertown.
“There are just so many risks in gymnastics,” she said. “We put our bodies into positions they really weren’t meant to be in. It’s kind of inevitable that you’re going to hurt something. You try not to think about that.”
It happened to her early in the Olympic year she had been working toward forever. She had back surgery on March 11. Any normal person would be out of action for months. Trani competed in three of four events at the national championships earlier this month and hopes to add the painful uneven bars tonight.
“I decided to go for it,” Trani said. “When am I going to get a chance like this again? I’m not sticking around for four more years. I’ll be in college. I figured I might as well go for it and have no regrets.”
Hill raised her right arm to shoulder height, showing where the pain kicks in. She has been working on the unforgiving bars but isn’t ready to compete on them tonight. But she held up her hands, showing patches of missing skin.
“I have rips everywhere,” Hill said. “I can’t compete on bars yet, but I have to prove I can be ready [by the July selection camp].”
The selection process is designed to take all these breaks and tears and pain into account. If the top six performers at these trials advanced to Beijing, then Paul Hamm and national champion David Sender would be out. Hill and Shayla Worley and Bridget Sloan would not have a chance.
“I don’t like being in this position,” said Hamm, who had a plate and nine screws attached to the broken bone in his right hand. “It’s not fair to the other athletes here. But it’s the only way I can be on the team.”
Hamm is the greatest male American gymnast of all time. Leaving him off the Olympic team because he was injured at the trials would be like leaving Michael Jordan off your roster because he missed the exhibition season.
Sloan was a member of the 2007 women’s world championship team and was on track to go to Beijing before having surgery to remove torn cartilage and a cyst from her knee. Within months, she was competing at the national championships on one leg, fighting to keep her Olympic dream alive.
“It’s hard to understand our sport unless you’ve lived it,” Sloan said. “I don’t want to diss Tiger Woods, but he’s swinging a club. I know there’s some torque and all, but we run full speed into a horse with maximum power. We’re doing triple turns on the floor.”
It must be noted that Sloan was joking around in a good-natured way about the gap between golf-tough and gymnastics-tough.
But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t right.
Contact columnist Phil Sheridan
at 215-854-2844 or psheridan@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/philsheridan.