When Team USA heads to Paris this summer to compete in the Olympic Games, Gabby Douglas won’t be among its ranks. The three-time Olympic champion has withdrawn from this weekend’s Xfinity U.S. Gymnastics Championships, her last chance to qualify for a shot at 2024 Olympic glory.
The 28-year-old Douglas told ESPN she had suffered an ankle injury in training for the meet.
“I love this sport and I love pushing my limits,” Douglas told the network on Wednesday. “I hope I can inspire both my peers and the next generation of gymnasts that age is just a number, and you can accomplish anything you work hard for.”
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“When you come back as an older athlete, things feel a lot different in competition,” Chellsie Memmel, USA Gymnastics' women's program technical lead, told USA Today. “I’m bummed for her, but her body is her top priority and that’s smart.”
Douglas’ withdrawal marks an end to her bid to mount a long shot comeback after an almost eight-year absence from competition. She last competed earlier this month at the U.S. Classic in Hartford, Connecticut, but struggled on the uneven bars in her first rotation and quickly scratched, or withdrew from the rest of the event.
“I honestly didn’t do the best that I wanted,” she said after the Classic, her first elite-level competition since the 2016 Rio Olympics. “But I have to give myself a little grace because it’s been so long.”
Still, though she failed to qualify as an all-around competitor, Douglas was slated to compete in three of the championships’ four events after her April return this season: vault, uneven bars, and balance beam.
Had she qualified for next month’s Olympic trials, Douglas would have been the oldest American woman to compete at the Olympic level in gymnastics in more than 70 years. She also would have been the first American woman to make three Olympic teams since the legendary artistic gymnast Dominique Dawes.
Douglas isn’t ready to hang up her leotard just yet, however, telling ESPN that she still has her eyes on qualifying for the 2028 Olympics, which will be hosted in Los Angeles.
“It would be such an honor to represent the U.S. at a home Olympics,” she said.
The gymnast rocketed to international stardom after winning the all-around and team gold at the 2012 London Olympics, becoming the first Black woman to clinch the all-around title. In Rio four years later, she won the team gold again, but did not make the cut to advance to the all-around final.
She told NBC News in February that she decided to get back on the mat after watching the 2022 U.S. Championships.
“I was like, I miss competing... I found myself in the gym, and I was like, all right, maybe I could do this again,” she told the network, which reported that she was focusing particularly intensely on “her signature event”—the uneven bars.
The USA Gymnastics Championships will run Thursday through Sunday in Fort Worth, Texas.
