BY LIZ CLARKE, RICK MAESE
AND EMILY GIAMBALVOWithout access to a pommel
horse, still rings or other essential
equipment since Stanford closed
its gym last week, gymnast Akash
Modi is doing backflips and hand-
stands in his parents’ New Jersey
backyard to maintain Olympic
form while he seeks a better solu-
tion.
In Long Beach, Calif., the de-
fending Olympic champion U.S.
women’s water polo team started
practicing Wednesday in groups
of five rather than its customary
full-squad workouts of 17, reduc-
ing the inevitable contact in a
contact-laden sport. On Thurs-
day, even those pared-down prac-
tices were shut down.
And at her training base in
Monte Gordo, Portugal, Ameri-
can triathlete Summer Rappa-
port struggles to maintain the
protein-and-carbohydrate bal-
ance that’s key to peak perfor-
mance because local grocery
stores have been wiped out of
fresh produce, eggs and meat.
“If it really came down to it, we
could go to the bread-and-peanut
butter diet,” Rappaport, 28, the
first athlete to qualify for the 2020
U.S. Olympic triathlon team, said
in a telephone interview, “but it’s
not optimum for training.”
These are just a few pages from
the rapidly evolving playbook of
would-be U.S. Olympians in a
world transformed by the novel
coronavirus pandemic four
months before the 2020 To kyo
Olympic are scheduled to start.
For years, Olympic hopefuls
have led highly regulated lives,
gearing every aspect of their
sleep, workouts and meals toward
peaking for To kyo. But as univer-
sities, private gyms and indoor
pools have shuttered their doors
in the interest of public safety,
many of these elite athletes are
scrambling for alternatives with
no clear game plan.
Swimmers Katie Ledecky and
Simone Manuel, who still train at
Stanford despite having turned
pro, are among the displaced.
They ended up at nearby Menlo
Circus Club, best known for its
equestrian facilities, as guests of a
member — for one day. The club
has only a short-course pool, and
the two Olympic champions were
exploring other options by mid-
week. The immediate pressure is
off, however, because an upcom-
ing meet in Mission Viejo, Calif.,
was canceled this week, meaning
they probably won’t compete
again until May.
The latest blow affected nearly
200 of their peers, when the U.S.
Olympic and Paralympic Com-
mittee announced Tuesday it was
essentially shutting down its two
primary training sites in response
to escalating health and safety
concerns. The shutdown came
just two days after the USOPC
restricted access to its training
center in Colorado Springs.
On Tuesday, it went further,
citing a directive from Colorado
Gov. Jared Polis (D) that all gyms,
restaurants, bars and many other
public places must close to slow
the spread of the virus. Athletes
got the news via a Te am USA
communication app informing
them that the center’s pool, velo-
drome, gyms and strength and
conditioning areas would be
closed and not reopened for at
least 30 days.
The closure scuttled Modi’s
best hope of getting his training
back on track after he took a
red-eye from San Francisco to his
parents’ home in New Jersey. He
was among nearly a dozen dis-
placed male gymnasts petition-
ing for the right to train at the
Colorado Springs facility when
the closure was announced.
Also displaced was former
Oklahoma gymnast Colin Van
Wicklen, who went on a nomadic
odyssey in search of an alternate
training home after learning the
university was closing its gym.
Van Wicklen and three other elite
athletes had continued to train at
the Sooners’ gym with Coach
Mark Williams.
With no warning, they all had
to scramble for alternatives. Van
Wicklen reached out to his former
club in Houston, whose owner
said he could practice there. So
Van Wicklen packed as if that
might be his home base until the
Olympic trials in June.
Minutes after arriving in Hous-
ton following the six-hour drive
home, Van Wicklen received a text
that the gym was closing. He
turned to Instagram, asking for
help finding an open gym in town.
He trained at a different club
Monday and Tuesday, but that
facility closed, too.
So Van Wicklen drove through
the night back to Norman, Okla.,
while his two huskies slept, arriv-
ing at 3 a.m. His current plan is to
train with the other former Okla-
homa gymnasts, including 2019
U.S. all-around silver medalist Yul
Moldauer, at a local facility run by
1984 Olympic gold medalist Bart
Conner. But even that, he said,
will be “more of just doing as
much as we can to stay loose and
keep our body going.”
Gymnastics isn’t a sport you
can do just anywhere, Van Wick-
len noted. “If you're a basketball
player, while it's n ot ideal, you can
still shoot hoops in your front
yard,” he said. “But there's no way
to go to a park and find a set of
[parallel bars].”
But an extended layoff is un-
fathomable. Apart from days off
on Saturdays, Van Wicklen
doesn’t think he has missed a day
of training for two years.“A fter three weeks of no gym-
nastics, all those injuries — the
little mild injuries that you’ve
been pushing through and kind of
can deal with and keep at bay —
they really blow up on you,” Van
Wicklen said. “Your wrists swell.
Your ankles stiff. Your shoulders
hurt. And it makes it so difficult to
come back.”
Equally disruptive for many
Olympic hopefuls have been the
cancellations of domestic and in-
ternational competitions they
had counted on to gauge their
readiness, impress judges and, in
some cases, qualify for the U.S.
Olympic team.
Phil Dalhausser, a three-time
Olympic beach volleyball player,
landed in Sydney on Saturday
night for a FIVB World To ur event
in Gold Coast with just that in
mind. Dalhausser, a 2008 Olym-
pic gold medalist, and his partner,
Nick Lucena, have yet to qualify
for To kyo.
About 90 minutes before he
boarded a connecting flight to the
Gold Coast, Dalhausser received
the news on his phone: He hadtraveled around the world only to
learn that the tournament had
been postponed because of the
virus.
“I mean, it’s a ll just so crazy,” h e
said.
With the world seemingly com-
ing undone, Dalhausser, 40, im-
mediately booked a flight home to
Orlando, worried he might not be
able to get back otherwise.
Members of the U.S. women’s
water polo team started 2020
with their competition calendar
mapped out on an Excel sheet.
In late March, the defending
Olympic champions were to trav-
el to Japan for a “test” tourna-
ment at the site of the To kyo
Games. In April, the squad was to
host a scrimmage with Canada,
host a game against Australia and
travel to Indianapolis for an inter-
nationally sanctioned tourna-
ment that included Australia,
China, New Zealand and Japan.
All that is now canceled, and
the team faces the prospect of
entering the Olympics without
having played a competitive game
since late February.But team captain Maggie Stef-
fens, a two-time Olympic gold
medalist, said the squad is repur-
posing the motto it set at the
season’s o utset — “ Game by game,
quarter by quarter, moment by
moment” — t o apply to each “new
normal” d ictated by the coronavi-
rus.
“We had a few days that were
really eerie; things kept getting
canceled, and mentally and emo-
tionally it was a really odd time,”
said Steffens, 26. “Who knew
what the next thing was? But this
is our work, and it’s also our life.
This is the dream we have. And
that dream is what gets you
through tough times.”
For many, the uncertainty is
the biggest challenge. The “new
normal” s eems to shift daily, com-
plicating efforts to remain fit and
motivated for a competition that
may or may not take place as
scheduled.
Weightlifter Mattie Rogers, 24,
said she has been working toward
the summer of 2020 for the past
six years, living and breathing the
same goal each day. She just
missed a spot on the U.S. team
four years ago but returned to
training immediately and reset
her sights on To kyo.
Now an American record hold-
er, Rogers is all but assured of a
spot on the 2020 U.S. team — if
there is a 2020 Olympics.
“It’s hard to train for the Olym-
pics when you don’t know when
the Olympics are going to be,”
Rogers said Wednesday after fin-
ishing her daily workout at her
gym in Orlando. The gym was still
open, but Rogers had no idea
about Thursday and beyond.
“I feel like the days are num-
bered for that,” she said. “We’ll be
lucky to make it through the
week. And then after that, I don’t
have a solid plan yet. Everything
is day by day right now.”
She will figure out a way to
work out at home if she must but
can’t really say what she’s work-
ing toward. The final Olympic
qualifying event, the Pan Ameri-
can championships scheduled for
next month in the Dominican
Republic, was postponed indefi-
nitely.
“It’s pretty much canceled ev-
erything,” she said. “We still don’t
have a lot of information, I guess,
because nobody knows what’s go-
ing on and we don’t know what
any of this means. That’s the
worst part: the uncertainty of
everything.”
Dalhausser, the 2008 gold
medal beach volleyball player
seeking a spot on a fourth Olym-
pic team, likened the state of
confusion to “a mini-offseason.”
“Mentally, I’ve taken my foot
off the gas pedal a little bit,” Dal-
hausser said. “There’s n o answers,
and we probably won’t g et a ny f or
a while. It’s something I’ve got tofigure out how to put the foot back
on the pedal.”
For now, Modi, the former
Stanford gymnast and 2019 U.S.
high bar silver medalist, just
wants to figure out how to get
back in a gym.
“Gymnastics is a very, very fin-
icky sport,” Modi said. “You take
two days off, and you really feel
like you’re losing your technical
ability and the body awareness
you need. So taking three, four
weeks off is very difficult. It’s
pretty bad. I’ll do my best to stay
in shape at h ome, but you can only
do so much. My level of routines
are many, many times harder
than anything I can do at home.”
At 24, Modi has eyed the 2020
Olympics as the capstone of his
career. It’s an open question
whether he can maintain his form
throughout whatever delay lies
ahead. It’s an even murkier ques-
tion whether he can reclaim his
form if the 2020 Games are de-
layed six months or pushed back a
full year.
“This was intended to be my
last go at making the Olympics,”
Modi said. “If they get pushed
back, depending how far, I don’t
even know if I would still try to go.
I have to come to terms with that.”
This week, veteran water polo
coach and author Jack Bowen, an
alternate goalie on the 2006
Olympic team, offered 10 tips for
athletes unable to compete or
train because of coronavirus pre-
cautions. He cited physical and
mental exercises, gave dietary
tips and, above all, stressed the
importance of outlook and appre-
ciation.
Said Bowen, in a telephone in-
terview: “By being forced to step
away from your sport — some-
thing, by definition, none of these
athletes have done for 10 years —
you can come back rejuvenated if
you really are intentional about it.
You can say to yourself, ‘In 30, 60,
90 days, I’m going to come back
with double the effort because
this is what I really love.’ ”
For Rappaport, the triathlete
who has clinched her spot on the
2020 U.S. Olympic team, the chal-
lenge of navigating the weeks and
months ahead feels similar to
transitioning from swimming in
pools, as she did as an NCAA
standout at Villanova, to swim-
ming amid the open-water chaos
of a triathlon start.
“You have to be prepared for all
kinds of conditions and all kinds
of courses,” Rappaport said, “so
we as athletes are used to having
to make adjustments. I don’t
think any of us have ever made
adjustments on this scale before.
But I think we have all accepted it.
It’s just what we’re going to have
to do.”
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[email protected]Olympic hopefuls can’t find their place
With Tokyo Games still on schedule for July,
Americans are having difficult time finding
open training facilities amid virus shutdownsULRIK PEDERSEN/ASSOCIATED PRESSJASON FRANSON/ASSOCIATED PRESSKLMNO
SPORTS
SATURDAy, MARCH 21 , 2020. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/SPORTS. PAGE C8 RE
MADDIE MEYER/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Gymnast Akash Modi, at top, has been doing the best he can
to prepare in his parents’ backyard. Triathlete Summer
Rappaport, middle, is having trouble finding the right foods.
Katie Ledecky, above, is looking for a pool in which to train.