Usa Gymnastics

Morgan Hamm's spot on the U.S. Olympic team is secure. USA Gymnastics said yesterday that a warning Hamm received earlier this month for getting a prescribed anti-inflammatory shot without proper clearance from anti-doping authorities did not affect his qualification to the team. "It's really a relief," Hamm told the Associated Press from Colorado Springs, Colo., where he is at a training camp with the rest of the U.S. team. "Now I can concentrate on gymnastics without having any other distractions.

Jennifer Cooper would finish her routine, come bounding off the mat and listen to her teammates' polite applause. It didn't get much better than polite last year at Southern Connecticut State, and that is one of the reasons that Cooper competed for the West Chester University women's gymnastics team this season. "I'd come off a good routine and they weren't very ecstatic," Cooper said. "I'm a upbeat person. I'm used to more. It wasn't upbeat at all. " Cooper, 19, is upbeat and excited and in tip-top form now. The West Chester sophomore will compete in the all-around competition at the USA Gymnastics Collegiate National Championships, scheduled for April 18-20 at Seattle Pacific University, after completing an outstanding season at West Chester.

The 2008 U.S. Olympic gymnastics team trials will be held at the Wachovia Center on June 19 to 22, Steve Penny, the president of USA Gymnastics, said yesterday. This will be the first time such trials have been held in Philadelphia. "The 2008 U.S. Olympic team trials for gymnastics is going to be a tremendous showcase for the Olympic movement prior to the Beijing Games," Penny said. "We are proud to partner with Philadelphia and the Wachovia Center to bring this prestigious event to the City of Brotherly Love.

Organizers said yesterday that ticket sales for this weekend's 2008 U.S. Olympics gymnastics trials at the Wachovia Center have "exceeded expectations. " John Page, chief operating officer of Global Spectrum, which operates the South Philadelphia arena, said he anticipated total attendance for the four sessions - tonight and tomorrow night, Saturday and Sunday afternoons - would top 50,000. The performances by the women gymnasts, Page said, have outsold those for the men. "That's pretty much in line with what we saw when the figure skating [national championships]

The U.S. Olympic Gymnastics Trials in recent years have had a funny way of not selecting the women's Olympic team. The trend won't end when the women's trials begin tonight at the FleetCenter because two of the country's top gymnasts are injured and won't compete but will probably make the Olympic team anyway. The outrage, however, will likely be confined to the two women bumped out of spots by Shannon Miller and Dominique Moceanu, because after switching its selection criteria before each of the past four Olympics and being blasted for its circus-like selection of the '92 team, USA Gymnastics has arrived at a relatively agreeable process.

U.S. national gymnastics champion Sean Townsend and two teammates tested positive for cannabis and were warned they could be suspended if it happens again. Townsend, Brett McClure and Jason Gatson failed the unannounced, out-of-competition test in January, the International Gymnastics Federation said yesterday. "In the event of subsequent offenses, these gymnasts could be subject to a suspension of up to two years. Gymnasts, be warned," the federation said. A positive test for cannabis does not merit an automatic suspension because it is not a performance-enhancing substance.

These are the 2008 Olympic team trials for Taqiy Abdullah. The 18-year-old from North Philadelphia is the youngest of the 17 men competing for six spots on the team that will represent the United States this summer in Athens. And while he is right in the middle of the pack, scoring-wise, this event is really about experience and development for Abdullah. "I view this as a learning experience," he said. "I'm looking more toward 2008. " It's a very realistic goal. Abdullah delivered a very good all-around performance in last night's final round, improving his scores from prelims in five of six apparatus.

Britain's Lennox Lewis has been recognized as undisputed world heavyweight champion after the resolution of a cash dispute between his backers and the International Boxing Federation. Lewis beat IBF and World Boxing Association champion Evander Holyfield on a unanimous points decision in Las Vegas Saturday in a unification fight for the undisputed heavyweight title. But he left the ring with only three of the four belts up for grabs - the WBA, WBC and lightly regarded IBO versions - after the IBF decided to withdraw its at the last minute following a dispute over a $300,000 sanctioning fee. COLLEGE FOOTBALL Bill Russo, Lafayette's career victory leader, will step down as coach after Saturday's game against Lehigh.

Shannon Miller and Dominique Moceanu received permission yesterday to skip next week's U.S. Olympic gymnastics trials, but their absence should not greatly endanger their chances of making the 1996 Olympic team. Miller, the reigning national champion, has an inflamed wrist that needs rest. Moceanu, the '94 national champion, is limping around Bela Karolyi's Houston gym with a stress fracture in her right leg. Both gymnasts petitioned USA Gymnastics to allow them to use their scores from the recent national championships as their trials scores.

Morgan Hamm is almost certainly one of the top-10 male gymnasts in the world right now. It is his lot in life, however, to be the second-best gymnast born to Sandy and Cecily Hamm on Sept. 24, 1982. If not for a shoulder injury that still makes events such as the rings painful, Morgan Hamm might be every bit as good as his twin brother. As it is, Paul Hamm is the United States' best bet for an individual Olympic medal since Peter Vidmar's silver at the boycotted 1984 Games in Los Angeles.

Tiger Woods and Steve Stricker , a combined 6-1-0, will be together again when the Presidents Cup gets under way Thursday at Australia's Royal Melbourne. In the pairings announced Wednesday, they will be playing against an International team of Adam Scott and K.J. Choi , along with a fifth wheel - former Woods caddie Steve Williams , who now works for Scott and who has made news over the last three months for disparaging Woods on national TV after Scott won at Firestone and with a racial comment in Shanghai at a caddies dinner.

Kenya's Patrick Makau broke the world record to win the Berlin Marathon on Sunday with a time of 2 hours, 3 minutes, 38 seconds. Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia, who held the previous record of 2:03:59, pulled up after Makau pulled away after 16.8 miles and seemed on the verge of giving up when he stopped running and bent over, but resumed the race. Gebrselassie, 38, had won four successive Berlin marathons from 2006, and set his world record in 2008. The 26-year-old Makau also won last year's race.

PHILADELPHIA middleweight Jesse Hart hopes to take his final step to qualifying for the Olympics beginning this week at the AIBA Men's World Championships in Baku, Azerbaijan. Hart, 21, must finish in the top 10 in his weight class to earn a berth in London next summer. His first bout is Saturday against Qatar's Hzam Nabah , according to yesterday's draw. Hart, the son of former middleweight contender Eugene "Cyclone" Hart , this year has won the U.S. Olympic Team Trials and the national Golden Gloves at middleweight, and the USA Boxing national championship at light-heavyweight.

Michaela Lapent held off on the decision as long as she could. The Plymouth Whitemarsh senior's dilemma: choose from among numerous scholarship offers to compete in gymnastics or diving. She recently accepted one for gymnastics at Bridgeport. "I love both sports, and I didn't want to give one up," said Lapent, who added that the social aspects of gymnastics won out over diving. "Diving is separate [from the swim team] in college, whereas you're family with the 20 or so girls on the gymnastics team.

Fred Turoff, Temple's head men's gymnastics coach since 1976, has been chosen for induction to the USA Gymnastics Hall of Fame. "It's a terrific honor, I'm tickled," Turoff said in a statement. "The success that I've had is due to all of the hard work from the student-athletes and coaches that I've had the pleasure to be associated with at Temple University and throughout my professional career. " Turoff, a 1969 graduate of Temple, has led Owls teams to 16 EIGL/ECAC championships, and has been named the NCAA Eastern Region Coach of the Year nine times.

Morgan Hamm's spot on the U.S. Olympic team is secure. USA Gymnastics said yesterday that a warning Hamm received earlier this month for getting a prescribed anti-inflammatory shot without proper clearance from anti-doping authorities did not affect his qualification to the team. "It's really a relief," Hamm told the Associated Press from Colorado Springs, Colo., where he is at a training camp with the rest of the U.S. team. "Now I can concentrate on gymnastics without having any other distractions.

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.

It's no wonder Justin Spring's best gymnastics event is the high bar. When your father is an astronaut, you grow up with the bar set extremely high. "My father did two tours in Vietnam," Spring said yesterday afternoon. "He was a test pilot. He was an astronaut. He walked in space. When I would tell people about my father, they'd be like, What else can you make up about him?" But Sherwood "Woody" Spring is real enough. He flew on the space shuttle Atlantis in 1985 and did two space walks, totaling nearly 12 hours outside the shuttle.

The U.S. Olympic gymnastics trials, designed to create the strongest American team for Beijing, so far have been better at displaying the potential weaknesses of the U.S. men. At a news conference preceding last night's opening of competition at the Wachovia Center, Paul Hamm, the nation's top male gymnast, displayed his broken right hand and said he was confident it would be healed in time for the start of Olympic events on Aug. 9. That came...

Bela Karolyi remembers 1976 when his star pupil, Nadia Comaneci, scored gymnastics' first perfect 10. Not only was it, he said, an accurate assessment of the Romanian teenager's performance, but the score was also understandable even to those who couldn't distinguish a pike position from a pirouette. But the perfect 10, like the sport's old vaulting horses, has been mothballed. Here at this weekend's 2008 U.S. Olympic gymnastics team trials, and in August for a first time in an Olympic Games, gymnastics' complex scoring system, its revised Code of Points, will be in effect.