SAN JOSE, Calif. — One week every month, Hamlet’s Ashton Locklear travels to Houston to train with the other gymnasts who have a chance of making the team for next month’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
The gym belongs to Marta Karolyi, who with her husband Bela defected from Romania in 1981 and built the U.S. women’s team into a consistent Olympic medal contender. And among the athletes who train there is Madison Kocian (her last name rhymes with “ocean”) from Dallas, whom Ashton considers one of her best friends.
Karolyi, as the national team coordinator, has more say over which five athletes will make the Olympic team than anyone else. And Kocian, 19, is 18-year-old Locklear’s biggest competition for the team’s fifth spot.
The most important question to be answered at the U.S. Olympic Trials on Friday and Sunday in San Jose is whether Locklear or Kocian will get that position.
“I try not to think about that too much,” Ashton said.
“It’s pretty nerve-wracking,” said Ashton’s mother, Carrie.
Since they were both chosen for the U.S. team at the 2014 World Championships, Locklear and Kocian have competed on the uneven bars at the same meet seven times. Locklear has outscored Kocian in six of those meetings, including both times this year.
The permanent consequences of Locklear’s twice-fractured spine lie at the heart of why the Olympic decision is still up in the air. The injuries, discovered in 2013, forced Locklear to give up two of artistic gymnastics’ four disciplines – floor exercise and vault – and focus almost exclusively on the uneven bars, although she still competes on the balance beam.
Countries may enter six athletes at the world championships, which is why Locklear and Kocian were on the same roster two years ago, but Olympic rules have allowed only five on a team since the 2012 Games in London.
The aim in selecting the U.S. Olympic team is choosing the group of athletes who will give the United States the best chance of winning as many of the six gold medals at stake as possible. A maximum of four athletes per country will be entered in each of those six competitions.
The individual all-around gold medal in Rio will go to the gymnast with the highest combined scores in all four disciplines. The team gold medal goes to the country whose top three gymnasts in each of the four disciplines accumulate the highest total score. And then there is a gold medal awarded to the athlete with the highest score in each of the four disciplines.
Either Locklear or Kocian is good enough to win it.
Simon Biles of Spring, Texas, has won the all-around at the last three world and U.S. championships and is a lock for the Olympic team. She’s also America’s No. 1 on floor, vault and beam.
Aly Raisman from Needham, Massachusetts, won two golds and a bronze at the London Olympics and is coming back this year after finishing second to Biles as the national all-around champion. She’s No. 2 in the nation on beam and floor. She’ll make the team, too.
Gabby Douglas of Tarzana, California, is the defending Olympic all-around champion and Laurie Hernandez of Old Bridge, New Jersey finished third to Biles and Douglas in the national championship all-around as well as third on vault and floor. They’re also heavily favored to make the Olympic team.
Yet despite these gymnasts’ competitive credentials, none is as good as national bars champion Locklear or runner-up Kocian in that event. One of them will give the United States its best chance for a gold in bars.
“Both of them are extremely good bar workers,” Karolyi said Thursday. “Kocian’s start value (the difficulty of her routine) is two tenths higher, but sometimes Locklear’s execution scores are higher. So they are pretty much neck-and-neck. The decision maker probably will be who functions better on their apparatus and who can bring something else to the team besides a bar routine.”
Kocian said “I do have the highest start value of all the girls here, but I try not to think about that. I just try to do my routines like I do back home. I try not to let any of the extra pressure get to me, just think of it as another competition.”
Locklear and Kocian each will also compete on the balance beam primarily to show they can fill in there should one of the other beam performers get injured before the Olympics.
In the 2014 nationals, officially named the P&G Championships, Locklear and Kocian finished 1-2 on bars. The highest bars finish among Biles, Raisman, Douglas and Hernandez was Biles’ fourth place.
Last year, the nationals were Locklear’s only meet because she was recovering from shoulder surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff. Even though Locklear cut back the difficulty of her bars routine because of the surgery, she still finished second to Kocian. Douglas and Biles finished 4-5.
Kocian then went to the 2015 world championships and, in an unprecedented finish, wound up in a four-way tie for the gold medal on bars with China’s Fan Yilin and Russia’s Viktoria Komova and Daria Spiridonova. But their scores were barely above Locklear’s fourth-place world’s finish in 2014.
Two weeks ago at the 2016 nationals, Locklear returned to first place ahead of No. 2 Kocian. Hernandez was third, Biles fourth, Douglas sixth and Raisman 12th.
San Jose will serve as the “tie-breaker” of a competition in which Locklear really holds a 6-1 lead. Neither gymnast can afford a misstep.
“Obviously she’s my biggest competition,” Locklear said of Kocian. “We both are very competitive with each other but also are best friends. We want each other to do their very best. I want to compete against someone that’s doing their very best. I don’t want to win because someone fell.”
NBC will carry coverage of the gymnastics trials at 9 p.m. tonight and Sunday’s final day of coverage, including the team announcement, at 8:30 p.m.
Jody Meacham, a journalist for the Silicon Valley Business Journal in San Jose, California, will cover Ashton Locklear in this weekend’s Olympic trials.
Ashton Locklear practices on the uneven bars in the SAP Center in San Jose, California, site of the U.S. Olympic Trials for women’s gymnastics