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Olympics Blog

A winner either way

By Helene Elliott
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PHILADELPHIA -- Raj Bhavsar is also on the bubble for selection to the U.S. men’s gymnastics team and is prepared for whatever comes.

Bhavsar, 27, competed in the 2000 trials and didn’t make the team. He was an alternate for the Athens Games and didn’t compete in 2005. He came back in 2006 and has competed at an elite level ever since, a victory in itself.

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Asked what he’d like people to think of him, he didn’t hesitate.

‘I truly just want people to be extemnely happy that I found myself again and got back on my feet and on my own and made it back to the Olympic trials,’ he said. ‘I believe I have a message to tell people right there, in the sense of uplifting the human spirit.

‘It’s been an incredible journey to compete in three Olympic trials. It’s no easy task. Whether I make the team or not there’s a gold medal that I’m kind of already putting around myself in the sense of inner accomplishment and intrinsic reward.’

-- Helene Elliott

Olympics Blog
Helene Elliott

Helene Elliott was with the Los Angeles Times’ Sports department from 1989 to 2024, first as a staff writer and then, starting in 2006, as a columnist. She became the first female journalist to be honored with a plaque in the Hall of Fame of a major professional sport as the 2005 winner of the Hockey Hall of Fame’s Elmer Ferguson Award, awarded to writers “who have brought honor to journalism and to hockey.” A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., and graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, she has covered 18 Olympics.

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