At 4 years old, Evita Griskenas begged her mother to take her to gymnastics and then pouted when she got her wish.
With one look at the balance beam, Griskenas knew this is not where she wanted to be.
“This is the wrong gymnastics,” she said, refusing to participate. “There is no ribbon!”
Sixteen years later, Griskenas’ preschool demands have her on the cusp of U.S. Olympic history. When her preliminary round began Friday morning, it marked the first time since rhythmic gymnastics’ debut in 1984 that the United States qualified a full team — two individuals and a group — for the Summer Games.
It’s a watershed moment for the country’s athletes, who always have toiled in the enormous shadow cast by artistic gymnasts, their federation siblings who flip, vault and dominate NBC’s coverage.
Griskenas, 20, arrived in Tokyo having placed seventh at the last world championships, the best-ever finish for an American woman. Laura Zeng, 21, landed 10th but won the U.S. Olympic trials in June. The full group — five members who perform a synchronized routine — finished 10th.
Neither gymnast advanced to the final after Griskenas placed 12th in the preliminary round Friday and Zeng finished 13th. Moral victories, however, can be just as hard-won.
“For the U.S. to have two spots and the full group is a really, really big deal,” said Griskenas, who lives in Orland Park. “It’s a historic moment and I’m glad to be living in it.”
Zeng, who finished 11th in Rio, expressed disappointment in her performance during the qualifying round. Her regrets, however, speak well of the U.S. program’s future if its best athletes are more than just happy to be here.
The 6-time national champion has been accepted to Yale and her future in the sport remains uncertain, though she said she hasn’t ruled out competing in Paris three years from now. She knows whenever she retires, she’ll leave the U.S. program stronger than when she joined it.
“I started doing it when I was 7,” Zeng said. “So it’s been my whole entire life. To be able to see it grow as I’ve grown means everything to me.”
For all their strides forward, however, rhythmic gymnasts still toil in obscurity in the United States. The entire Olympic team comes from the North Shore Rhythmic Gymnastics Center, which rents space in a suburban park district building to train the country’s best.
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A few members of the U.S. team, like Griskenas and Zeng, grew up in the Chicago area. Most of them, however, moved here to train because of the center’s reputation for producing national champions.
The Sachs Recreation Center in Deerfield is a clean and modern building, but the ceilings aren’t particularly high so ribbons frequently get caught in the beams. During one training session before leaving for Tokyo, Griskenas halted training at least three times to fish her ribbon from the rafters a pole.
“Did I?” Griskenas asked. “I’m so used to it, I don’t even notice.”
Relying upon a park district for training space proved difficult during the pandemic, when the facility shut down for nearly three months. Griskenas — who had taken a gap year from Columbia University in 2020 to focus on the Olympics — practiced in her parent’s basement, scraping the ceiling and breaking few light bulbs in the process.
The lockdown unsettled Griskenas, whose days had long been swallowed by training sessions and schooling. With neither happening the traditional way, she read books, wrote in her journal and tried her hand at watercoloring. Anything, she said, to fill all those unstructured hours.
“For the first time in my life, I had all the time of the world,” she said. “And there was nothing to do.”
When training resumed, Griskenas enrolled at Columbia for the semester. The school reverted to remote learning during the fall and spring semesters, meaning Griskenas could attend classes and still train with her coaches. She listened to lectures each morning before practice, then again during breaks.
A couple of times a week, her mother drove the hourlong commute to Deerfield so Griskenas could attend classes over Zoom from the car. She finished her freshman year, remotely, while competing in Uzbekistan.
“Not the typical college experience,” she said, laughing. “But nothing is typical these days.”
As she packed up her gym bag after practice in Deerfield, Griskenas looked at a picture on the wall. It’s an old team photo taken more than a dozen years ago.
It’s a standard group picture, with girls in ballerina buns smiling widely — some of them with teeth missing — for the camera. They’re all about 7 and wearing blue leotards with sparkly pink flowers. Medals hang around their necks.
She points to three girls in the picture: herself, Zeng and group gymnast Liza Merenzon. Those three little girls are still teammates and are now in Tokyo.
Would those girls have believed their future as trailblazers?
“They would have,” Griskenas said, laughing. “But I’m not sure anybody else would have.”
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