Word: memmel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Sacramone's second fall of the meet, and it may ultimately have cost the U.S. women the team gold on Wednesday in front of a capacity 19,000 crowd, which mainly rooted against the Americans, at the National Indoor Stadium. Sacramone and her teammates - Shawn Johnson, Nastia Liukin, Chellsie Memmel, Samantha Peszek and Bridget Sloan - ended up with a perfectly respectable silver, 2.375 points behind home-town favorite China. But it wasn't so much that the squad had earned the silver as they had squandered the gold after a string of unusual errors. "A gold medal would have been...
...team coordinator. "It wasn't a fall or anything. But it gave us a tiny disturbance at the last minute - we had to reorganize things, and readdress." It was the women squad's second injury in as many weeks - the first came just days before the Games, when Chellsie Memmel, a contender for the all-around title and a critical part of the U.S. women's bid against the Chinese for the team gold, also aggravated a fickle ankle on a tumbling combination. The second mishap's timing clearly rattled the team, which looked jittery on the first few events...
...Peszek was still able to compete on the bars, the only event of the four in which the U.S. used all five of its allotted athletes. The shock of Peszek's injury, along with Memmel's, clearly weighed on the remaining team-mates - Johnson, nine-time world medalist Nastia Liukin, Alicia Sacramone and Bridget Sloan, as they took to the first rotation on floor exercise - an event at which the U.S. generally excels. Sacramone, a former world champion on floor, unexpectedly stepped out of bounds, costing her a deduction and lowering her score by enough of a margin to keep...
...When they got to bars, the U.S. finally had the five gymnasts it needed to compete - including a not fully fit Memmel, whose five release moves make her a high scorer on this apparatus. But she lost her grip in one of those flights, and took a hit in her score. "It just happened," she says. "There wasn't anything wrong, I fell. It was a mistake." While she normally scores above 16, she had to be content with a 15.05. Then came Liukin, who has one of the most difficult routines in the world and might have been shaken...
...injury means Memmel will only be able to compete on uneven bars, and although that event is one of her strongest, Memmel could barely hold back tears as she talked about her scaled-back program. "It was very difficult," she said. "It's the Olympics, so it's the hardest thing to say I can only do bars. But bars is better than nothing. Bars is better than going home...