National Sports

American gymnast Carey not ready to give it up yet

PHOENIX -- Jade Carey doesn’t need to be at the U.S. gymnastics championships. At least, not like this.

That’s part of what makes it all so sweet.

The 26-year-old knows she could have walked away following her final season at Oregon State in the spring of 2025, with a resume stuffed with Olympic and world championship medals and her place in the history of the storied U.S. women’s program secure.

She tried, kind of. The athlete who had been going nonstop for the better part of 20 years gave her body a bit of a break after her NCAA career ended. It lasted a handful of weeks.

Then one day, she popped into the gym and, in the words of her father and longtime coach Brian, “started playing again.”

Emphasis on “playing.”

If there’s anything the two-time Olympic gold medalist has learned, it’s that taking this too seriously can quickly rob you of the joy that brought you to it in the first place.

Asked if she feels the weight of living up to the standard she’s set for herself as the Phoenix native prepares to salute the judges at the national championships for a seventh time when the women’s competition begins at Mortgage Matchup Center, Carey shrugs.

“I just feel like right now I have one more opportunity to just have fun with it,” she said. “No expectations, no pressure.”

Senior women’s competition takes place tonight and Sunday.

Maturing means understanding who she was in 2021 is not who she is in 2026. There have been times she’ll randomly come across a video of her gold medal-winning floor exercise routine at the Tokyo Olympics five years ago and think “that was pretty hard.”

Whether she can get back to that level as she makes a bid for a third trip to the Olympics is anyone’s guess, Carey’s included. Her body has held up remarkably well through the years, thanks in large part to the pragmatic approach she and Brian Carey have taken toward her training.

“I don’t know if that’s coming back,” she said. “But you never know. And I feel like training, getting back into it this year, was really hard. But I’ve kind of hit my stride, and it’s getting a little easier and feeling a little more familiar.”

Sticking with plan

Carey finished second in the all-around to 17-year-old Reese Esponda at the U.S. Classic a few weeks ago in her first elite competition since leaving the 2024 Paris Games with a pair of Olympic medals. She did it with routines that are designed to serve as a foundation as she methodically builds toward the summer of 2028.

The plan is to add difficulty as she goes along, but only when she’s ready. In her mid-20s, Carey is not the same gymnast who took a circuitous path to the Tokyo Olympics that ended with the floor routine of a lifetime and the most precious of medals around her neck.

The amount of time she spends in the gym on a given day depends on how she’s feeling. She and her father have an understanding that as long as she hits her numbers -- meaning, how many times she works on an assignment -- it doesn’t matter how long she’s there.

Some days she can knock it out in three hours. Some days, it’s more like eight. On the days she’s not feeling it at all, they’ll work on a plan that spreads the workload out over a longer period of time, though that remains a rarity.

“Normally, it’s like she’s so fine-tuned with her skill, she just gets up and knocks it out,” Brian Carey said.

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