U.S. gymnast Hezly Rivera is closing in on the biggest meet she has never been to.
She is not there yet. USA Gymnastics names its team for October’s World Championships on 1 October, after a selection camp at FlipFest in Crossville, Tennessee but the Olympic team gold medallist is the heavy favorite to make the cut. The global event in Rotterdam would be her Worlds debut a year after injury took her first chance away.
She is the two-time reigning U.S. all-around champion, and something she was not in Paris: the veteran in the room.
Her win earlier this month at the U.S. Championships in Phoenix showed her more about herself now, two years after her Olympic appearance, than the medal did. Rivera, 18, rallied from a day-one fall to win it, and resetting through frustration.
“It showed that you can come back after a little mess up or a little mistake here and there,” she told media afterward.
Rivera did it all while not being at full strength.
“She is, believe it or not, not at her 100 per cent right now,” said her coach, Anna Liukin, of WOGA Gymnastics in Plano, Texas. “I would give her probably 85, somewhere there, 90.”
A pulled hamstring had forced Rivera out of the Pan American Championships weeks earlier, a planned tune-up in Brazil that never happened. Liukin said Rivera’s team had wanted the trip to work as a dry run for the long, multi-day meet schedule she’ll see in Rotterdam.
Phoenix became that test instead.
“I think this is a really good reset,” Liukin said.
read more: https://www.olympics.com/en/news/hezly-rivera-ready-to-lead-first-world-gymnastics-championships
