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ELISE RAY
Mary Elise Ray (born February 6, 1982 in Tallahassee, Florida) is an American gymnast who represented
the United States at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and the 1999 World Championships.
Ray trained at Hill's Angels club in Maryland under Kelli Hill, former coach of Olympic medalists
Dominique Dawes and Courtney Kupets.
She earned her first US national team berth as a junior in 1996 and turned in a strong performance in her international debut,
the 1996 Junior Pan American Championships, placing second in the all-around and winning gold on the uneven bars and floor
exercise. She continued to excel in the years that followed, picking up an uneven bars silver medal at the 1998 Goodwill
Games. At the 1999 World Championships in Tianjin, China, Ray was the highest-ranked American of the competition, finishing
eighth in the all-around.
Ray won both the US National Championships and the Olympic Trials in 2000. At the Sydney Olympics, Ray was the only
American woman to qualify for an event final, balance beam. In spite of this, she would encounter major difficulties at the
Olympics. In the all-around finals, officials mistakenly set the vault apparatus 5 cm too low; the situation was not remedied
until the competition was halfway over. The change completely altered gymnasts' entry and postflight and caused several crashes.
Ray was one of the gymnasts who vaulted before the error was discovered; consequently she fell on both her warmup and competition
vaults. On one of her warm up vaults, she came inches away from crashing on her head. Although Ray escaped injury, the experience
left her shaken, and she also fell from beam. It is impossible to tell how much her subsequent performances were affected.
Gymnasts who had vaulted on the incorrectly set apparatus were invited to redo their vaults at the end of the session;
Ray accepted this offer and ended up in 13th place with her revised score. Like most gymnasts who had used the incorrectly-set vault,
Ray felt that it had a negative effect on her performance. She opined during a post competition interview with NBC that she
could have medalled had it not happened.
After Sydney, Elise attended the University of Michigan on a full athletic scholarship, where she majored in English.
She crowned a very successful NCAA career by leading her team to the Super Six finals in 2005, and winning a silver on beam.
Previously, she tied with Onnie Willis of UCLA for the All Around title in 2001, and won golds in the balance beam (2002)
and uneven bars (2004) events. Currently she is a member of the
Cirque du Soleil.
For more information, visit her biography at www.usa-gymnastics.org or
her profile page on the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique website.
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