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 attended Steven's Forest Elementary School in Columbia, Maryland and went on to train 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 5cm 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. She is currently a performer in the Cirque du Soleil, where she is a member of the Cadre team in the Las Vegas resident show "O". [ [http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/CirqueDuSoleil/en/showstickets/o/O-acts5.htm "O" - Cirque du Soleil Official Website - Show] ]

Trivia

Elise Ray has three uneven bars skills named after her in the "Code of Points":

*Ray I: Facing inward, a stalder backward with release and counter movement forward in flight to hang
*Ray II: Toe-on Tkatchev release move (rated D in the most recent "Code of Points")
*Ray III: Double twisting double layout dismount rated f--the second highest difficulty rating possible

Elise Ray graduated from the University of Michigan with the most All-America honors (14) in the program's history.

Elise Ray is the Big Ten Conference's all-time leader in Gymnast of the Week citations, earning nine in her career.

External links and resources

* [http://www.usa-gymnastics.org/athletes/bios/r/eray.html USA Gymnastics biography]
* [http://umgym.com/team/bios/eliseray.html University of Michigan Q&A]
* [http://www.mgoblue.com/section_display.cfm?section_id=189&top=2&level=2]

References