Shannon Miller, age 16, is the 1993 world all-around gymnastics champion, only the second American to ever win that title. She's also the current world champ at uneven bars and floor exercise.
Last summer, she missed the all-around gold medal in the Barcelona Olympics by .0012 of a point, taking the silver medal just five months after undergoing surgery for a dislocated elbow. It was the highest-ever finish by an American woman in a non-boycotted Olympics. She won five medals (two silver, three bronze), most of any competitor at Barcelona. She was all-around champion in her last four meets, all of them top national or international spectacles.She has never, however, won the U.S. national championship.
Her coach has been quoted as saying, "We are working backwards here."
"From worlds to nationals," muses Miller, a junior-to-be in high school from Edmond, Okla., and a member of Steve Nunno's Dynamo Gymnastics club, which has become perhaps the country's top producer of female gymnastics talent since Bela Karolyi (coach of Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton) retired.
One reason Miller doesn't have a national title yet was that elbow dislocation/surgery last year. She competed in compulsories only at the 1992 Nationals in Ohio in May because of it. By time for the Olympic Trials in Baltimore in June, she had recovered enough to stun Karolyi and his protege, world champion Kim Zmeskal. Zmeskal, winner of the national championships, won the Olympic Trials optional round, but Miller's point total from winning compulsories placed her higher, and she had the better meet in Barcelona, too.
Zmeskal is now gone from the scene, as is Olympic champion Tatiana Gutsu of Ukraine, and Miller is No. 1 in the world.
Winning a national championship this week in Salt Lake City isn't an obsession for Miller, but she's well aware that it would fill out her resume nicely and has it on her mind. "Well, kind of," she says during a telephone interview from Oklahoma. "I would like to do well in the competition," she says. "Mostly, I'm just thinking about hitting my routines and peaking for the competition."
The 1993 Coca-Cola National Championships for men and women will be held Wednesday through Saturday at the Delta Center. Compulsories are all day Wednesday and in the afternoon Thursday. Optionals begin Thursday evening and run through Friday night. Individual-event finals are Saturday night.
The event is being hosted by the Salt Lake City Olympic Bid Committee for the 2002 Winter Games.
One-hundred-thirty gymnastswill vie for positions on the U.S. National Team for the next year of competitions. From the National Team, gymnasts are selected to represent the country by USA Gymnastics (a.k.a. U.S. Gymnastics Federation) at domestic and international meets. Twenty women and 14 men will qualify for the Senior National Team this week in Salt Lake City. Another four men make the development squad, and 12 girls and seven boys make the Junior National Team.
Miller has been fighting a sore back for the past 71/2 months, but she won the world titles anyway and - with simplified routines as a concession to the back pain - she took golds in all-around, vault, balance beam and floor exercise at the U.S. Olympic Festival three weeks ago in San Antonio.
Miller says she will not water down her routines for the national championships. "I've put all the difficulty back in my routines," she says, adding that's partly because it's a more important meet and partly because the back is feeling a little better.
Miller, in fact, has been working on a new vault and will add a skill to her floor exercise routine for this meet.
"It kinda pretty much bothers me all the time," she says of the undiagnosed back ailment, "but it's something I can work through, and after Championships I will have some time off to rest it," she says. She doesn't know how the problem started.
Miller has been a gymnast for 10 years and first came to prominence in 1988 by winning the junior all-around, vault and beam championships at the U.S. Classic in Athens, Ga. The same year, she was second all-around in the Junior Pan American Games in Puerto Rico and runner-up all-around in the American Classic in Phoenix. In 1989, she won the junior all-around, floor, beam and bar at the American Classic in Oakland, Calif.
A trip to the Soviet Union in 1986 for a gymnastics camp, part of the junior elite development program, paved the way for that 1988-89 success. "It was really neat," she says, remembering the Soviets' discipline and the important skills they did. "After that was really when I started focusing a lot more on competition and gymnastics; that's when I went to Steve's gym," she says.
Before being impressed by the Soviets, Miller wasn't serious. "I just had fun, whatever, doing flips and stuff."
At the 1993 World Championships, Miller says she "just did what I was trained to do." She says she could have done better on beam, where she was eighth. Since the Worlds in April, she has also won the Hilton Challenge, a three-country meet with Belarus and Russia, in Los Angeles and the Olympic Festival.