In her 12 years of formal gymnastics training, Alicia Sacramone '10 has learned to balance on more than just the beam.
One moment she is flitting across the floor in a competition in Europe wearing a shimmering royal blue outfit that she designed herself, the next she is on a plane back to Providence, returning to Brown on the eve of her first college midterm. Juggling fashion sketches, gymnastics practices and a rigorous Ivy League curriculum is all in a day's work for the eldest member of the U.S. national gymnastics team.
In the summer of 2005, Sacramone propelled Team USA to a major upset at the World Championships in Melbourne, Australia. The squad took the gold medal in the team competition and nabbed nine of the 13 total medals in the individual events. Sacramone took the bronze medal in the vault and the gold in the floor exercise for the Americans.
Sacramone again led the national team in its title defense at this year's world championships in Aarhus, Denmark, on Oct. 16. This time around, Sacramone won an individual silver medal in the vault and earned another silver thanks to the team's second-place finish behind the Chinese.
Though she was pleased with Team USA's performance, Sacramone said she believes biases among the judges prevented her and her teammates from retaining their gold medal. Sacramone said a slew of unconventional technical penalties awarded by the judges gave an unfair advantage to China going into the final round.
"They stripped us of our title," she said.
Sacramone was also disappointed that she was not able to defend her 2005 world title in the floor exercise. After performing what the judges told her was "one of the cleanest routines in the competition" during the practice rounds earlier in the week, they deducted a half-point from her score for what she described as "breaking an ongoing dance sequence" in the preliminary round. The deduction was just enough to keep her out of the finals in the event that she considers her strongest.
The penalty perplexed Sacramone because she had been performing the same routine all year and the judges had never caught the alleged flaw. She then performed a slightly modified floor routine in the team competition, and the judges still saw no problem with it.
Despite the frustrating loss, Sacramone reminded her teammates that they should be proud of their efforts.
"We didn't lose the gold, we won the silver," Sacramone said. "But we have to move on from our mistakes and learn from them to assure that they don't happen again."
Sacramone was able to draw from her own experiences with rejection and loss to encourage her teammates to look to the future.
After dedicating virtually eight years of her life to competing on the elite gymnastics circuit, Sacramone's career suffered a huge blow when she failed to make the U.S. Olympic squad in 2004. To make matters worse, a back injury she sustained at the Olympic Trials forced her to watch the 2004 Summer Olympics from a couch in her hometown of Ashland, Mass., in a full back brace.
With her back hurting and her spirits shattered, Sacramone refused to set foot in a gym for months. The energetic performer and powerful athlete who once lit up the floor said she contemplated walking away from the sport for good.
But watching the girls she had competed with for years twist and tumble across the Olympic stage in Athens rekindled Sacramone's competitive fire. Watching her peers' routines from half a world away made Sacramone realize that she had taken her abilities for granted.
"Sometimes it takes watching someone else do the things that you have been trained to do to fully appreciate them," she said.
With a newfound passion for her sport, Sacramone excelled at the 2005 national championships in August of that year, winning the gold medal in the vault and floor exercises and finishing in fourth place overall.
But with her senior year of high school rapidly approaching, Sacramone faced some tough decisions. Most female gymnasts peak in their early teens and retire after high school to focus on their education and careers. Competing at an elite level as a college student is a rarity. Ultimately, Sacramone decided to continue to pursue her dream of competing in the Olympics because she felt that she had "unfinished business in the elite world."
In order to achieve her goal of qualifying for the 2008 Summer Games, Sacramone decided she needed to continue training with world-renowned Romanian gymnastics coaches Mihai and Sylvia Brestyan. Sacramone has been working with the Brestyans for the past decade, and she feels they know her almost better than she knows herself.
"They have been there through it all - the good, the bad and the ugly," she said. "To train with anyone else just wouldn't be right."
Sacramone had committed to a full scholarship at the University of California, Los Angeles in December of her junior year of high school. But Brown Head Coach Sara Carver-Milne and Jennifer Sobuta '09, a current team member and longtime friend of Sacramone's, had long been recruiting her. Impressed by Brown's campus during a visit with Sobuta, Sacramone finally took up Carver-Milne's offer to come to Providence in the winter of her senior year and quickly changed her plans. She enrolled at Brown instead of UCLA because she said the combination of academics, the gymnastics program and the ability to be close to home was too good to pass up.
Sacramone will spend the next two years competing for both the Bears and for the national team. She added that she wants to lead the Bears to an Ivy League championship while preparing for a career in fashion design. Along with the normal first-year adjustments, Sacramone will also have to manage commuting from Providence to Boston for training sessions twice a day for two hours at a time in addition to conditioning with the Brown gymnastics team, designing her next outfit for national team competition and handling a full course load.
Though her days are hectic, Sacramone said she can't think of anything better than studying and competing at Brown.
"It is the perfect situation for what I want to do," she said.
