Sam Donnellon: Sacramone has character to make women's Olympic gymnastics team

TEAM CAPTAINS, named and implied, are nothing new in sports. It's a big factor in baseball, a well-earned letter on a hockey sweater, a facet of team competition that can be neither measured nor denied.

But there's a newness to it in women's gymnastics, an offshoot of age restrictions that have pushed the average age of potential medalists into at least the second half of their teenage years.

Before Athens, someone like 20-year-old Alicia Sacramone might have even been shooed away from the sport. A Brown University junior who had messed up even a chance to compete for the Olympic team 4 years ago, she was already beyond the preferred age as preparations began for Beijing. She hurt her back. She joined her college team. People like Bela and Martha Karolyi, who made household names of kids barely in high school, might not have even given her a second look.

So it was a little strange to hear Martha, the United States women's gymnastics coach, yesterday declare, "This team would not be the same without Alicia Sacramone," after the U.S. Olympic Gymnastics Trials concluded at the Wachovia Center.

Strange because Sacramone, who hails from the Boston suburb of Winchester, was not named to the Olympic team. Not yet anyway, or at least not officially. Only the top two all-around gymnasts from this weekend's competition, Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin, got that nod, and Karolyi made it clear that she wasn't too keen about that either.

"If it was up to me, I'd like to select nobody today," she said.

That's because she's all about team gold in Beijing, all about assembling the six gymnasts most likely to accomplish that. Karolyi's long-held view, now shared (more or less) by USA Gymnastics, is the closer to the Olympic Games a team can be selected, the better. Injuries do or don't heal, gymnasts fall in and out of shape, dynamics can change with just one wrist sprain.

Still, Karolyi clearly named five of her preferred gymnasts yesterday, provided nothing changes between now and when the team is finally picked after next month's training camp concludes in Houston. And Sacramone, despite finishing 13th overall and skipping the parallel bars entirely, is one of them.