American gymnast Jade Carey has had an incredibly successful couple of years since her elite debut and added to her list of achievements at this month’s Swiss Cup event, where she won the gold medal alongside teammate Allan Bower. Jade managed to keep her cool, despite the highly pressured atmosphere in the stadium, and had a clean competition, where she showed routines on balance beam and uneven bars as well as on her best apparatus, the vault. We caught up with Jade after the competition and she explained how she decided to take part in the event.
They just came to us and asked if we wanted to do it and it sounded like a lot of fun, so we decided to come and I’m really glad we did. It was a fun, different experience and I liked it a lot.
The format of the Swiss Cup (teams of one male and one female gymnast and teams being knocked out as the competition progresses) makes it very different to most other competitions. Jade found that this changed how she prepared and warmed up for the event.
Yeah. You wait a little bit longer [to compete] sometimes. [The start list on each event] just kind of just depends how you end up [in the rankings for each round], so you just really have to be smart and make sure you’re warmed up before you go.
Another feature of the Swiss Cup is the necessity for gymnasts to choose a strategy which maximises their scoring potential in each round of competition. Jade told us how she chose which apparatus to compete in which round.
We wanted to start on vault because that’s my highest scoring event and then we knew that the second event and the first event would be added together, so we went for bars, just because I’ve never competed bars internationally, so we weren’t quite sure how it would score, but it was good… and then I’ve never done beam internationally either, so we just wanted to make sure we’d [progress in the competition], so we did it after bars, and then we wanted to end with a strong event [vault]!
The European Gymnastics Blog 