Jade Carey is centering herself, but she is not self-centered

Jade Carey is taking an unconventional path to the Olympics. But she’s not self-centered, she’s making the most of an absurd set of rules.

The journalist Nancy Armour wrote in a story last Tuesday that the American gymnast Jade Carey was “self-centered” and creating “chaos” in her quest to earn an Olympic gold medal by securing herself two different paths to representing the U.S. in Tokyo. What is the point of being an athlete? Of going to the Olympics? What is an athlete’s responsibility, if any, to the other athletes in her sport when it comes to making (or not making) an Olympic team?

And frankly, why would you leave a decision this momentous up to USA Gymnastics, the sport’s American governing body, which has proven itself over the quadrennium (plus one) since the last Olympics to be somewhat less than receptive to athletes looking out for themselves. The notion that a single athlete is causing more chaos within USAG than USAG itself has caused nearly all of its athletes over the years is ludicrous. USAG has been through three CEOs and three women’s team coordinators just since the organization imploded in the wake of the biggest sex abuse scandal in sports, and its team selection processes continue to be fairly opaque, despite a lot of lip service otherwise.

USA Gymnastics (USAG) laid out two paths for qualification to the Tokyo Olympics in 2018, based on the criteria established by the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG), the sport’s global governing body. Athletes could vie to go to that year’s world championships, where the top three teams would qualify a team (but not necessarily themselves) automatically to the Olympics. Or an athlete could compete in a series of eight World Cup meets to secure a nominative spot — that is, a spot for herself as an individual competitor, not for the United States — if she won enough points on a single apparatus. (The United States also qualified a sixth athlete after the women won the team gold medal at the 2019 World Championships. She will be named along with the four-person team at the conclusion of the Olympic Trials on June 27.)

The catch: You couldn’t do both. If you went to worlds in 2018, you could not then compete for a spot at the apparatus world cups.

Jade Carey chose not to attend the 2018 worlds and instead to challenge for a nominative Olympic spot through the apparatus world cups. This caused a tempest in the teapot that is the gymternet, the tight-knit online fan community, at the time, because it seemed that Carey was sacrificing what seemed like a sure gold team medal from worlds for an uncertain, albeit highly likely given her talent, outcome at the world cups.

The thing about Jade Carey: Her strengths are vault and floor. These are the same strengths as one Simone Biles, in whose shadow Carey seemed destined to live if she did not go rogue. Be the country’s second-best vaulter and tumbler, albeit with some job security (or at least team-gold security), or position yourself as the best at a series of meets for which Biles, as a 2018 Worlds team member, was ineligible, win enough times, and get a spot no one could take away from you? It’s not hard to see why Carey chose this route.

Jade Carey is making the most of the options that were available to her

Carey has mathematically clinched the vault spot through the World Cup route; she knows the spot is hers and it is a matter of time and bureaucracy and COVID-19 that it is not yet written in stone.

Lots of things are to blame for the pickle in which USA Gymnastics now finds itself, but the pandemic ranks right up there. Had the world not shut down in 2020, the World Cup series would have concluded last spring, well before the U.S. planned to hold the women’s Olympic Trials. Carey would have had to make a decision about her spot and, if she had chosen to take it, would have had no reason to compete in the Trials.

Because of the pandemic, the final meet of the World Cup series is now slated for June 26 in Doha, after the American Olympic Trials are underway. Because Carey does not officially own her own spot yet, she has hinted strongly that she will compete for a spot on the four-woman American team at the Olympic Trials. And USAG did not stop her from making that decision. If there is any blame to be laid here, it is squarely on USAG for either not seeing this coming, or seeing it coming and allowing it right on into the station. USAG could have forced Carey’s hand, told her to make a decision between her individual spot and a team spot, and that would have been the end of that. I’d say Carey exploited a loophole, but what she did is not really that cagey. She never had to make a choice, and so she didn’t.

Despite all of this, despite Carey’s acting in her own best interests as an athlete, despite her showing precisely the competitive nature and ambition that likely propelled her to become one of the world’s top gymnasts, her refusal to commit to her presumed nominative spot at the expense of competing at Olympic Trials prompted Armour to call her selfish. It prompted Tom Forster, the women’s national team coordinator who also oversees team composition and selection for the Olympics, to say, somewhat derisively, that “we live in a world of athlete-centeredness.” Armour uses Forster’s quotation to back up her own hypothesis about Carey, but Forster is actually getting at the deeper truth behind Carey’s actions. What Jade Carey is doing, in time-honored American fashion, is looking out for number one. She is centering herself, but she is not self-centered.

Carey posted on Instagram yesterday that she has “every intention to accept the individual spot” but will also compete in the Olympic Trials. Her post is worded carefully; she has left both doors to the Olympics open for herself. She is still not telling us whether she will reject that individual spot if she places in the top two at Trials. But this post will take some of the heat off her heading into next weekend.

Armour is playing into some pretty time-worn stereotypes of female gymnasts in her assessment of Carey’s motives, and of Carey herself. And because it is the Olympics, there is perhaps some jingoism at play as well. If Carey makes it onto the four-person team for the Olympics, her individual spot will not go to another American, and the American delegation will be five women total instead of six. This has prompted many to suggest that Carey is costing one of her American national teammates her Olympic dream. But she’s only sacrificing that spot for herself, and only if she has a chance to compete for that team gold medal.

Say what you will about being a good sport, playing fair, sharing is caring. I would rather see an athlete who knows how to play by the rules, no matter how many times those rules are rewritten against her, and to come out on top.