NCAA Women’s Gymnastics Championships: Olympians follow the path of a pioneer

The focus of this week’s NCAA Women’s Gymnastics Championships is largely on Tokyo Olympians Suni Lee, Jade Carey, Jordan Chiles and Grace McCallum. It’s the first time that four U.S. women went directly from the Olympics to college gymnastics.

Lee, Carey and Chiles have said they plan to return to elite, Olympic-level gymnastics before the 2024 Paris Games. McCallum is undecided.

If any of the four makes back-to-back Olympic teams, she will be the first U.S. woman to compete collegiately in between Olympic appearances in more than 50 years. Most Olympians retire from competition after the Games, turn professional to give up NCAA eligibility or compete collegiately and never return to elite-level gymnastics.

Linda Mulvihill is the outlier.

In a 10-year span in the 1960s and ’70s, Mulvihill, then Linda Metheny, made her competitive gymnastics debut, made three Olympic teams and competed collegiately while earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Illinois.

“That’s a huge amount of work no matter what decade it is,” said 1980 and 1984 Olympian Tracee Talavera, who as a kid spent six years living in the Mulvihills’ home, with many other young gymnasts, while training at the Mulvihills’ National Academy of Artistic Gymnastics in Eugene, Oregon.

Mulvihill grew up in Tuscola, Illinois, a town of 3,000 people that’s a half-hour drive south of the University of Illinois.

She taught herself one-handed cartwheels in the backyard and begged her mom for dance or acrobatic lessons. Grandma finally relented, signing her up for $1/week classes in a nearby woman’s basement.

After one summer, Mulvihill had a back handspring down and took her talents to Champaign, where Illini men’s gymnastics coach Charlie Pond ran a