Suburban Chicago rhythmic gymnastics team makes historic Olympic mark

The U.S. rhythmic gymnastics team finished last in the Olympic qualifying round Saturday, leaving its five gymnasts crying as they walked off the floor.

But they were happy tears.

Really.

By their very presence here, the women — who train in suburban Chicago — made history as the first U.S. rhythmic gymnastics team to ever qualify for the Olympics. And despite three dropped ribbons in their first routine, they performed cleanly in their second.

For nearly three minutes during the second round, they tossed clubs and hoops in time with a bouncy samba beat that the Brazilian crowd appreciated. It went so smoothly, in fact, the judges placed them ahead of error-riddled teams from Greece and China in that phase of the competition.

It wasn’t enough to pull the Americans out of last place overall, but the Games always offer more moral victories than medals.

“Once we finished with the clubs and knew we had done it cleanly, we let the emotions flow,” said Natalie McGiffert, who lives in Northbrook. “We knew it was our last time together, so we just let it all out.”

The group formed four years ago after the U.S. gymnastics federation sent out an email seeking elite gymnasts to tryout for a new national team. After a long selection process, the five athletes — McGiffert, Kiana Eide, Alisa Kano, Monica Rokhman and Kristen Shaldybin — agreed to give up their individual rhythmic aspirations to become a team.

Still in their teens, they relocated to the Chicago area and trained with former Belarusian national team coach Natalia Klimouk at North Shore Rhythmic Gymnastics in Deerfield. Rio was not in anyone’s plans when they arrived.

A U.S. team had not competed at the Olympics since the Atlanta Games in 1996, when it received the courtesy berth given to all host nations. The United States had never qualified on its own merit.

“We didn’t have the Olympics in mind when we first started,” said Glencoe’s Kano, 21, the only team member born when the U.S. team last competed in a Summer Games. “We were just taking it day-by-day to see how it would work out.”

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The women toiled in obscurity for seven hours a day, six days a week, dedicating themselves to a sport few appreciate or understand. Making fun of rhythmic gymnastics has become an unofficial Olympic event in North America, with its detractors insisting that no real sport could possibly include a hula hoop or a stick with a 6-meter ribbon on the end.

Looking like a pastime enjoyed by the fairies in a “Midsummer’s Night Dream” — the Italian team, which is fourth heading into Sunday’s final, is known internationally as “the Butterflies” — rhythmic gymnastics combines ballet and acrobatics with a bit of synchronized swimming on land. The gymnasts spin, jump and dance to music as part of a group routine that can incorporate ribbons, hoops, clubs and balls.

Rhythmic gymnastics requires as much hand-eye coordination as any sport in the Summer Games, though that can be easy to overlook when the athletes are dressed with the bedazzled subtlety of Eastern European ice dancers. Instead, the rhythmic athletes in the United States stand quietly in the long shadow cast by artistic gymnasts, their federation cousins who vault and flip and appear on cereal boxes.

“We hope being here helps rhythmic gymnastics grow in the United States,” said Eide, 17, of Northbrook. “We want people to see us here and think it’s fun to watch.”

The U.S. team qualified for Rio after finishing 13th at the world championships last year, the highest placement of any group from the Americas. The team also medaled at the Pan American Games in 2015.

They have been working on their Olympic routines since September, when they learned the apparatuses involved in these Games would be five ribbons in the first round and six clubs and two hoops in the second. They listened to the same two pieces of music over and over again for 11 months, to the point where they sometimes heard it in their dreams.

They scored 30.224 points in Saturday’s competition, more than 5.5 points behind the top-finishing Spanish team. It wasn’t their highest score ever, but it was enough to make for a happy ending.

The team will disband after these Games. Most are headed to college and are ready to put their competitive careers behind them. They’ll stay in touch, they say, through the group text messages they constantly exchange now.

“We weren’t really thinking of scores or placements today. We just wanted to end on a good note,” McGiffert said. “After four years, we’re a project that’s finally complete.”

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