BEIJING — Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin have been the glamour girls of the U.S. Olympic gymnastics team, the ones who got the pre-Olympic hype, the ones who figured to contend with the formidable Chinese stars for the all-around gold medal.
But the U.S. squad might not be the reigning world champion and strong contender for Olympic gold if not for the spirit of feisty Alicia Sacramone.
At 21, she’s the oldest on the team. Hailing from Boston, she brings a little East Coast Italian attitude to the mix. Sometimes a “hothead,” by her own admission, she gave the team a pep talk at worlds last year when the team gold medal seemed to be slipping out of the Americans’ grasp.
It worked.
“Before the world championships, it was Nastia and Shawn,” said Sacramone’s father, Fred, an orthodontist. “World championships was her place where she elevated herself. Someone had a nice quote, ‘Nastia and Shawn are the beauty and grace, Alicia is the heart and soul.’ ”
Sacramone is majoring in sociology at Brown University, where she previously competed and now assists in coaching. She’s not afraid to use a little psychology on her teammates.
“Somebody has to do the dirty work,” Sacramone said. “If I can handle it, I might as well do it.”
At the world championships last year in Stuttgart, Germany, the U.S. women were in command after vault and uneven bars, putting them on the verge of winning the team’s first world championships team gold medal and sending a message to favored China a year before the Olympics.
“Then we went to beam, I think we got a little ahead of ourselves, and we made a couple of mistakes,” Sacramone said. “We were in shock, like, ‘I can’t believe we just did that, how did we make such silly mistakes?’ ”
Sacramone pulled the team together, not knowing what she was going to say but knowing something had to be done. Her words came out in an emotional rush, fueled by anger, nerves and the excitement of the moment.
“I was telling them, ‘You’ve got to get together, we’ve got one more event and we can’t mess it up, we have to go out and hit,’ ” Sacramone said. “They pulled it together. They were really mentally strong.”
She can be stubborn and difficult and is seldom bashful about speaking her mind. She owns an English bulldog and grew up in a loud Italian house. Visitors sometimes wonder: Why is everyone shouting at each other?
“We got a Mother’s Day card from her, and it’s a picture of a mother and a girl looking at each other, screaming at each other with rollers in their hair,” Fred Sacramone said. “Inside it says, ‘Where did I get this attitude from?’ I guess it comes from the family.”
She has been known to butt heads with her coach, Romanian Mihai Brestyan. He’s thrown her out of the gym a few times. She happily takes credit for turning his hair gray.
“We clash, but it’s just because we have such similar personality types, we fight over stupid stuff,” Sacramone said.
Brestyan concedes some of the qualities that make her difficult help make her the competitor she is, too.
“That’s the good thing,” he said. “That’s why you don’t impose your personality. You try to use what is good to be constructive. It’s easy to impose your personality, ‘No, I’m the coach, I decide.’ Yeah, you decide, but you can change, too. That’s the right way.”
John Meyer: 303-954-1616 or jmeyer@denverpost.com
