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2000 Exhibiion with Kristal UzelacWritten September 2000 © Stephanie SchneiderLocation: Galleria (Johnstown, PA)
Date: August 27, 2000
I thought it was appropriate to include this in here because I realize that many people would die to have the opportunity to perform with a gymnast at this level. I will admit, I thought it was an honor, but it wasn’t exactly to the same extent as most people probably would have felt because I’ve known her for a long time. Anyway, Kristal and her family were visiting Johnstown for a few weeks, and our mall was having a gymnastics exhibition for her since she had just won her second straight junior national title.
Her dad came out and introduced her and when he was giving all the statistics on what she has accomplished in the past few years, I could tell a lot of people were surprised. I don’t think they realized just what a tremendous gymnast we have coming from our town. He even said that she had the opportunity to make the Olympic team but was too young to go to trials, and everyone greatly applauded that. It was so cute to see her standing there listening to all that her dad had to say; it’s clear that she’s still not used to all the attention she’s been getting. Anyway, after that she did her floor routine to a classical version of “Yankee Doody Dandy.” She was injured (plus the floor was not a spring floor; it was very hard), so she only did a roundoff back-handspring for each of her tumbling passes, but the level that she is at was very evident in everything else that she did. She has a level of maturity in her dance that a lot of juniors just don’t usually have.
After she did her floor routine, her parents tried to explain what her tumbling passes actually are, and I don’t think anyone actually knew what they were talking about except me. Oh well. A little later, we all did some stuff on the air track, but I was mostly watching Kristal. She was doing piked double backs, double fronts, even a few triple fulls; it was really cool to watch. Her brother was doing some stuff too; he’s not quite at her level, but he’s a very good gymnast as well.
After a few of my teammates and I did our floor routines, she did a short question and answer session, during which I was mad because everyone around me was being loud and I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Anyway, after that she did an autograph/picture session. They had tons of gymnastics stuff on display, and I had a blast looking at it all. They had videos playing of her competitions, TONS of pictures of her and a lot of the other national team members, a bunch of magazines that she’s been in, and tons more. They even had all of her competition numbers that the gymnasts have on their backs at elite competitions in one of the albums. It would have taken me hours to really look through it all, but I looked at as much as I could. I always feel weird asking Kristal for an autograph, but she signed a picture for me, and I got my friend’s mom to take a picture of us only to discover that my camera was acting up. Later I realized that my battery was dead (I must have worn it out at trials :) ). Eventually we got it to work; it was kind of embarrassing because we must have tried five times, but she was really nice about it.
I got to talk to her and her parents for a little bit, which was really nice because I don’t see them all that much anymore due to their very busy schedule. Hopefully, I’ll have more experiences like this one in the future because it really was a lot of fun.