UCLA Stage Big Enough

Jamie Dantzscher, Kristen Maloney and Jeanette Antolin figure to lead UCLA’s women’s gymnastics team to its fifth national championship and win individual apparatus titles in bundles when the NCAA tournament begins Thursday at Pauley Pavilion.

Dantzscher and Maloney were stalwart members of the 2000 U.S. Olympic team. Antolin was one of the final cuts and had been a regular participant on U.S. national teams before 2000.

None is older than 23, which should be prime time for an athlete. But these three gymnasts have no desire to try out for the 2004 squad, which probably will be a contender for a team gold medal. They have been content on the smaller stage of college gymnastics and will say goodbye to the sport when college ends.

Maybe they will try coaching or commentating, and they will be fervent flag wavers, hoping that the 15- and 16-year-olds who will represent the U.S. can improve on the fourth-place finish of the 2000 team.

But that’s it. They have had broken bones, twisted and torn ligaments, psyches bruised by criticism in 2000 from fans who had longed for a repeat of the 1996 team gold.

They have felt athletically rewarded by the less-demanding, more fun-filled college competition. They have dated, eaten pizza, gained a couple of pounds, slept a little less and studied a little more than they did as tiny, single-minded dynamos.

“I spent 15 years of total focus on gymnastics before I came to UCLA,” said Antolin, the Huntington Beach senior who is favored to win the NCAA all-around title. “When 2000 was finally over, it was time to sample life.”

They see a parade of teenage pixies whose bodies haven’t reached physical maturity and are still flexible enough to complete tougher tumbling passes and do more demanding flips and double-triple-quadruple landings.

There is an exception. Kate Richardson, another Bruin senior, has spent this season arriving early at the practice gym and staying late. She has trained for her college season and also the more difficult elite-level tricks because she plans to make a second Olympic appearance. When the competition ends Saturday night, she will head back home to Canada, where her presence on the national team has been requested.

“If I were going to have to compete for the U.S., I probably wouldn’t be doing this,” Richardson said. “I still love gymnastics and I’m really excited about going to my second Olympics. But if I were American, I probably wouldn’t have the chance. There’s too many good young ones.”

There are almost always too many good young ones.

Svetlana Khorkina, 25, the long-legged Russian who has excelled on the uneven bars, is expected to appear in her third Olympic Games. Oksana Chusovitina, a 27-year-old mother from Uzbekistan, has qualified for her fourth Olympic Games and won a vault gold medal at the World Cup in Rio de Janeiro this month.

But mostly it will be a new cast of ponytailed children starring in Athens.

Dantzscher, who was the 2002 NCAA all-around champion, felt an Olympic tug last summer. She tried to have her mangled left ankle fixed by surgery. For nearly four years, Dantzscher had accepted the chronic pain caused by torn cartilage and built-up scar tissue. But surgery made the ankle worse. She missed part of this season and is able to compete in only two of four events, the uneven bars and floor exercise.

“If gymnastics was going to be my career and my income, maybe I would have had another surgery and tried to keep on training for the national team,” Dantzscher said. “But in our sport, that’s not the case.”

Unlike figure skating, Olympic gymnasts don’t have a lucrative show career available. Two-time Olympic medalist Michelle Kwan, for instance, can earn a six-figure income during the spring and summer by touring in ice skating shows.

“If we had that,” Maloney said, “maybe there would be more of us considering staying in the sport longer.”

Maloney probably wouldn’t be one, though. She had missed two entire UCLA seasons recovering from various leg injuries suffered during her elite career. After just missing out on her Olympic dream in 2000, Antolin went straight to surgery.

“We start so young and we take such a pounding that it’s really hard to keep on after your Olympic time has come,” she said.

Still, Antolin was tempted as she was scoring nine perfect 10s in the vault this season, and recognizing that vault is not a U.S. national team strength.

“I considered trying to go for it one more time,” she said. “I considered it but then realized my back hurts every day and so does my ankle. My body was telling me something different from my heart.”

The 2000 Olympic team, considered a disappointment after earning no team or individual medals, had featured two veteran gymnasts, Dominique Dawes and Amy Chow. Dawes and Chow had been members of the “Magnificent 7,” the charismatic group of tumblers who won the first U.S. team Olympic gold medal in 1996 at Atlanta.

Some gymnastics insiders considered it a bad sign that the U.S. had to rely on two veterans, and neither Dawes nor Chow had a distinguished performance in 2000.

“It’s really hard,” said Mohini Bhardwaj, at 25, a former UCLA standout but still aspiring to an Olympic berth, even though she’s a decade older than many of her rivals. “It seems like there’s such a small window of opportunity and I’d like to change that perception.”

In 1996, Bhardwaj went to the Olympic trials and finished 10th. In 2000, she was so disenchanted with the sport she didn’t bother going to the trials.

“I’ve been in and out of this sport, up and down,” she said. “Now I realize I have an empty spot. I’ve been on national teams but I never made the Olympics. I still have it in me.... I think I have some maturity that would make me a great person to help the younger girls.”

Antolin wishes she could put her 2004 mind into her 2000 body. “That would make a great competitor,” she said. “That’s the thing about this sport, though. By the time you have it figured out, it’s too late.”

UCLA Coach Valorie Kondos Field said it was not a terrible thing, though, having your ultimate athletic experience as a teenager.

“It’s a bit of a double-edged sword,” Kondos Field said. “Yes, if the girls could use what they learned in college and had a 15-year-old body, it would be great, or if they had something besides Cirque de Soleil to look forward to.

“But they are forced to turn the page and start a new chapter after the Olympics. They’ve learned you can’t put all your eggs in one basket. The average NFL career is, what, three years? What do you do after that? Gymnasts are forced to answer that question right away.”

So Dantzscher, Maloney and Antolin will root for the 2004 U.S. Olympic team and for Richardson and the Canadians. They will feel nostalgic. For a minute.

“Then I’ll feel my aches and pains,” Maloney said, “and know I’ve done the right thing. Staying home.”