Rejuvenated Jade Carey seals second Swiss Cup title
The Tokyo 2020 Olympic floor exercise champion took top spot for the USA alongside Yul Moldauer in Zurich, Switzerland.
Artistic Gymnastics
Jade Carey helped secure victory for Team USA at the Swiss Cup gymnastics event alongside Yul Moldauer on Sunday (5 November).
The event takes a knock-out format, with the last two teams being eliminated after the first rotation and the bottom four after the second. Once the final four pairs are determined, scores are reset, and the top teams go head-to-head until a winner is crowned.
Carey, who won floor exercise Olympic gold at Tokyo 2020 in 2021 but has suffered with inconsistency in 2023, looked to have recovered her best form at a sold-out The Forum in Zurich.
The 23-year-old recovered from an early bad landing to score 13.750 on the vault, 13.050 on the floor, 13.200 on the uneven bars, and 13.700 on the vault again.
Together with world team bronze medallist Moldauer's sensational scores in the 14s and 15s, the USA duo ranked first from start to finish to land their second Swiss Cup title each.
Moldauer teamed with Addison Fatta to win in 2022, while Carey took the 2019 title alongside Allan Bower.
"I think Yul was great. He came out here, did his routines, did a great job and it was just fun being by his side," Carey said after the win.
"Having a partner just makes it even more fun. We had pressure, but we really just wanted to come out here and have fun."
Carey finished the 2023 NCAA season as the nation’s top all-arounder with a national qualifying score of 39.820. She had a season’s best score of 39.875.
But the Oregon State University athlete's place at the Olympic Games Paris 2024 was under threat after some indifferent form that saw her ranking 13th in the 2023 World Championships qualifiers, and finish with bronze in the vault in the US national gymnastics championships.
“I think the past month or so has been pretty challenging for me,” admitted Carey in an exclusive interview with Olympics.com on 11 August 2023. “I was to the point where I had all my skills and everything was going great, but getting the final routines together has been a little bit of a struggle for me.
“But after this week,” she continued, “I’m feeling a lot better about it.”
A redo in Paris for the American
Carey is, of course, hoping to end up at next year’s Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
“Since going to the Olympics was really never something that I thought I was going to do and to have made it the first time and now being motivated to want to make it back and prove to myself that I can do it again and prove it to everybody else, too, I think that would just be really special,” continued Carey to Olympics.com.
She says she has dual motivation in seeking a return trip to the Games: first, Carey wants to show the world she’s more than the floor and vault specialist she began her international career as, and second, she’d like to erase the memory of a mistake during the vault final in Tokyo.
That memory – the moment when Carey misstepped on her approach toward the vault – devastated her at the time. With hindsight and the passage of two years, Carey thinks about that moment with the context of knowing she shook it off, dusted herself down, and won the floor exercise gold medal the next day.
“I still think of it often,” said Carey. “If I’m having a bad day, I try to use it to motivate myself, like you’ve had a bad day before and you can come back from it. I think just going through that has really made me mentally stronger because I know that even if something doesn’t go as planned or expected, it doesn’t mean it’s all over, that you will live to see another day and keep fighting toward your dreams.”