Alicia Sacramone has decided to go to Brown and compete college gymnastics there while also still training for the Beijing Olympics. They compare it kind of to Amy Chow, but she was retired at Stanford and then did a comeback to make the US team in 2000 - she took a year off though. And I don't think she competed for the Stanford team, right? Here's the article: "Balancing act Winchester's Sacramone will compete for Brown while maintaining her focus on Beijing Olympics" - http://www.boston.com/sports/articles/2007/01/03/balancing_act/ The plan is: [quote]Doing both means going to class, practicing with her Brown teammates (whose season begins this month), then zipping up to Ashland ("95 to 495 to 126 -- 40 minutes") twice a week to work out with longtime coach Mihai Brestyan at his American Gymnastics Club.[/quote] But there are regulations on how many hours of practice a gymnast can have in college gymnastics, which really is much less than even club gymnastics, let alone elite gymnastics! Guess it's like an off-time or rest-time for her then and then when college season is over she can practice more?! There's a typo on the 3rd page of the article: "Maybe Sacramone will decide to take a year off, as Chow did from UCLA." lol! she went to Stanford for undergrad and grad; they had it right in the first page though. Amy did some pole vaulting there, I don't know if it was for competition though.

Ya, most club elite gymnasts have practice like it's a full time job - like 40 hours a week, club gymnasts have practice like a part-time job usually - like around 20 hours a week, college gymnasts I think only can do 3 hours of practice like 5 days a week - something like that. Maybe that amount of practice is enough for during the NCAA season, and then she can have more practice after the season.

That's really cool!

One reason more guys go to college and don't think that they have to put aside their elite career and that it's over is that the average age and the peak age for men is higher than it is for women in competitive gymnastics. Also, men practices are more geared towards quality than quantity while women's is so much about quantity - maybe they should train differently, like how a lot of the gymnasts say that now that they are in their twenties they do in fact practice differently - like Dominique Moceanu, Jordan Jovtchev. For this World Championships, there was a lot of speculation that the U.S. women's team had too many camps and overly-repetitive training that was not tactfully planned yielding to a lot of the gymnast getting injuried. There are over-stressed injuries that can occur. The Hamm twins have gone to college and are considering making a comeback for the Beijing Olympics. Even Blaine Wilson is. Amy Chow, when she did her comeback said that she was not even practicing that much and she still made it - they were talking about it all during the Olympics on tv.