Memmel’s stick-to-itiveness shows

PHILADELPHIA -- She competed Friday with the resolve of someone who came tantalizingly close to living a dream before it was yanked away and held just beyond her reach.

Chellsie Memmel experienced that four years ago, when she broke her foot a few months before the Athens Olympics and was selected an alternate to the U.S. women’s gymnastics team.

She was forever changed by that experience. Not broken, but more single-minded in believing her time would come even though she couldn’t know when that would be.

“There were hard days, definitely, but none when I really wanted to give up,” said Memmel, who will turn 20 Monday and is the second-oldest participant in the Olympic trials that will help determine the U.S. team for the Beijing Games.

“The ‘want’ to make the Olympic team really kept me going.”

Her assertive performances Friday brought her to the brink of the prize she missed four years ago.

Memmel was third in the all-around standings after the first phase of the women’s competition, trailing Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin -- the only two women all but sure of winning Olympic berths. Memmel, of West Allis, Wis., ranked second on the uneven bars, soaring fearlessly from bar to bar, and third on the balance beam, where she claimed the four-inch-wide slab as her own.

She was fifth on floor exercise despite a 0.10 deduction for going out of bounds, and she tied for eighth on vault, a placement that’s sure to improve when she perfects a more difficult vault she has been practicing.

She has been through enough to know that nothing’s certain, that after ranking third at the U.S. championships and maintaining that place with an even higher score Friday she still must navigate Sunday’s finale -- and a selection camp scheduled to end July 20 at the ranch of Martha Karolyi, the national team coordinator.

That explains why she was satisfied but subdued Friday, almost afraid to tempt fate by celebrating too much.

“I definitely don’t want to get ahead of myself because there’s one more day of competition,” she said.

“I’m thrilled with how things went, but I can’t be all la-di-da because I still have to go to train and be focused. And there’s one more day. I can’t lose focus now.”

She never lost her way even while most of her contemporaries moved on after Athens. She won the 2005 world all-around title, the first U.S. woman to do that since Shannon Miller in 1994, but was injured at the 2006 world competition and lost ground to younger, bouncier rivals.

She also had surgery on her shoulder and her knee.

Her father, Andy, who coaches her, said he never saw a hint that she was ready to give up.

“When she’s in the gym the day after she gets hurt and says, ‘I still want to do this,’ you have to continue that path,” he said.

“For her, there’s still things she can learn. Once there’s things that she’s afraid to learn or can’t learn, then it will be a different story. . . . If she’s going to train to be in a lower group and doesn’t make it, then she’ll be done.”

Though she’ll have to wait another month for the ultimate reward of being selected to the Olympic team, she still got a prize Friday.

As part of a family joke, Memmel gave her father a small, yellow happy-face sticker that he wore on the lapel of his blue polo shirt. He gave her four big, smiley stickers, one for each apparatus.

“She does good, she gets stickers,” he said, smiling.

The next sticker just might have the Olympic rings on it.

--

Helene Elliott can be reached at helene.elliott@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Elliott, go to latimes.com/elliott.