Sacramone Is Still Waiting for That Call

NEW WAVERLY, Tex. — This week, for what she said feels like the millionth time, Alicia Sacramone headed to Martha and Bela Karolyi’s ranch, the home of the training center for the women’s gymnastics national team.

Sacramone, the team’s spiritual and social leader, said she has made the trip to this enclave tucked into the Sam Houston National Forest about six times a year for the past seven years.

But this time, Sacramone, 20, will probably not be giving her teammates advice on life-or-death teenage issues like: “A guy I like texted me. What should I write back?” She will not be the den mother and marvel at the giddy girls who clamor to watch “Gossip Girl” or braid each other’s hair.

This trip is much too serious for that.

On Saturday night, Sacramone will find out whether she has made the United States Olympic team for the first time. The final four Olympians and up to three alternates will be announced then after a two-day intrasquad competition that begins Friday.

Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin, the top finishers at the Olympic trials, were named to the team June 22. The rest had to wait.

“It’s annoying and nerve-racking and, really, it hurts a lot not to know already,” said Sacramone, who failed to make the 2004 Olympic team. “I just want to be able to take a deep breath and say: ‘O.K., c’mon. I’m too old for this. Just whisper it to me. I won’t tell anyone. Did I make the team or not?’ ”

At the trials in Philadelphia, Martha Karolyi, the women’s national team coordinator, had said, “This team would not be the same without Alicia Sacramone” and “I couldn’t imagine a team without Alicia on it.”

Yet only the names of Johnson and Liukin were announced after the competition and confetti fell from the rafters. Sacramone tried to smile, but it was a struggle.

She is one of the world’s best on the vault and is a former world champion in floor exercise. At the world championships last year, she was credited for rallying the team going into the last rotation, giving a stirring speech that helped lift the United States into first place over China.

But Sacramone stood there, yearning for her name to be called — and nothing.

“I was trying to will it to happen,” she said. “I was like, Say it! Alicia! Alicia! God, please.”

Karolyi, however, stuck to her plan. She named the minimum two Olympians, and is waiting until the last possible moment to complete the squad. Her goal is to make sure she chooses athletes who are healthy and in the best shape for Beijing.

After so many years of waiting while her schedule grew busier and she grew older, Sacramone said she was ready, finally. She and Chellsie Memmel are the team’s oldest members, weathered veterans of this ranch.

But leading up to the 2004 Athens Games, Sacramone was a 15-year-old pipsqueak, the youngest member of the national team. She had a few disappointing performances and did not make it to the Olympics.

To make matters worse, she injured her back and was stuck in a hulking plastic brace that summer. Her parents, Gail and Fred Sacramone, recalled that Alicia barely left her room for weeks.

“It was kind of like a death in the family,” said Fred Sacramone, an orthodontist. “You can’t say anything. You were there just to be with her when she cried and cried and cried. It was awful.

“But to move forward, you have to hit bottom. And that’s exactly what she did.”

Sacramone bounced back. In 2005, she won the world championship in the floor exercise. She then enrolled at Brown University, where she juggled classes like modern architecture, Italian culture and economics while competing on the gymnastics team.

And she kept training with her longtime coach, Mihai Brestyan, a former Romanian coach whose gym was about 40 minutes away.

“See all this gray hair on my head?” Brestyan said. “Three-quarters of that is from her.”

Early on, Sacramone was a handful, said Gail Sacramone, a hair salon owner. At 3, she bumped her head on the front door of what would have been her first gym. She started crying, then refused to enter.

Five years later, her parents took her to Brestyan. She managed to clear the gym’s doorway without any mishaps.

The Sacramones, who live in Winchester, Mass., a suburb of Boston, warned Brestyan that Alicia was not like most girls.

“She’s not a very quiet, demure, listen-to-everything and robotic kind of gymnast,” Fred Sacramone said. “She gets a lot of that from us because we’re Italian and maybe a little more expressive, maybe a little louder than most people. When the family is all together at Christmas, our house kind of sounds like a stadium.”

It did not take long for Brestyan to figure out he was dealing with a fiery girl without much focus.

Even now, if Sacramone sees someone faltering, she will stop her workout to give a pep talk, Brestyan said.

“It was a balance in building her personality because what is good for life is not necessarily good for gymnastics,” Brestyan said. “Alicia is always trying to support everyone else, but sometimes, I wish she would support herself, too. Sometimes, it hurts her because she’s distracted.”

Sacramone said that she had been kicked out of the gym “a bunch of times” for “mouthing off or not listening.” At competitions, she has stared down a judge or two. But Sacramone has too much natural talent to stay in exile.

Her power, Brestyan said, is unmatched on the team, which is why she is so strong on the vault and in floor exercise.

“I’ve been told I am a freak of nature, and I take that as a compliment,” said Sacramone, who is dating a defensive back on Brown’s football team.

To Johnson, 16, the reigning all-around world champion, Sacramone is a counselor, mentor and goddess wrapped into one. Not only because Sacramone is older, Johnson said, but because she is so accomplished.

Sacramone, a sociology major who is on leave from college, has seven world medals, second on the team to Johnson and Liukin, who each have nine.

“She’s like our big sister here because we can ask her anything and she knows the answer,” Johnson said. “When she talks, you listen.”

When Sacramone gathered her teammates at the world championships last year, the younger ones looked to her with wide eyes and worried faces.

They had just completed a disastrous rotation on the balance beam, and China was poised to win.

“I was like, O.K., change your faces. We’re fine. We can do this,” Sacramone recalled. “I said, ‘We worked too hard to let China go home with the gold,’ and it was so cute. By the end they were cheering: ‘U.S.A! U.S.A!’ ”

Sacramone was last to step onto the floor for her routine, determined to live up to her words. When she nailed her final tumbling pass, she burst into tears. Nearby, Brestyan was overcome with emotion.

Tearing up as he recalled the moment, Brestyan said: “To see that huge change in a young person, for her to go from a very social person without focus to someone who became a leader that day, it was the best thing in the world. It’s like watching your child accomplish something great. It was everything we’ve worked for.”