Lynnzee Brown registered for Pan American Gymnastics Championships while awaiting FIG license

University of Denver stand out Lynnzee Brown hopes to make her international elite debut next month at the Pan American Gymnastics Championships, set for Medellín, Colombia, May 22-29.

The event is a qualifier to September's World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Antwerp, Belgium, where Brown would, then, hope to qualify to Paris 2024.

The America-born athlete will represent Haiti, the nation from which her father hails, but has struggled with the logistics of actually registering for the event. Last week, Brown took to Twitter and asked for help reaching an International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) representative.

A friend texed her shortly after and connected her to someone who could help.

"I was mostly waiting on the logistics. The passport that I would need to prove my Haitian nationality was presenting to be a huge challenge," Brown explained during an exclusive phone interview with Olympics.com. "They are wanting me to change my last name to my dad's, and the process of changing your name takes way longer than I had to register to the competition."

Since enlisting help on Twitter, Brown has made headway toward acquiring her FIG license but still isn't quite sure where the process stands.

"I think what I'm waiting for is to see my name on the FIG website," said Brown. "I got an email this morning from the [Haitian] federation asking for more information to sign up for FIG, so hopefully we can still get FIG certification.

"But they are holding a spot for me at Pan Ams, which is great news," she concluded.

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Lynnzee Brown - Shifting gears

Brown is coming off the heals of a sixth-year season at the University of Denver, where she helped lead her team back to the NCAAs and she finished fourth all-around.

Competing elite and possibly at the Olympic Games, she says, has been something she's thought about since 2015, but "it was just kind of a figment of my imagination."

But then, Yvenel Stephan, a Haitian-born gymnast currently living in France, asked if she'd be interested in joining him on an Olympic quest.

"He reached out to me last summer and was like, 'Hey, I'm working on actually making this happen. Do you want to do it, too?'"

It was bad timing. Brown was in the midst of rehabbing her second Achilles tear in two years. Rehab was a struggle at that point, and she wasn't sure her body could handle collegiate gymnastics, much less the harder pounding of elite.

Stephan ended up suffering an Achilles injury of his own, and Brown says the two began to bond over their shared recovery.

"He's really pushing me to do it because it has always been a dream," she said.

In the less than two weeks since the NCAAs, Brown has turned her mind toward elite training. She returned home in an attempt to begin the process to change her name and stopped by her club gym: Great American Gymnastics Express, where her former coaches helped her evaluate routines.

"They were really helpful in helping me figure out combinations and what the code actually is," said Brown, who will return to Denver to train at least through the Pan Ams. "That was helpful to have more of a concrete idea, and I think it's possible to be semi competitive, like mid-tier."

No matter what, Brown is already enjoying a new aspect to her sport.

"I've had such a rigid routine the last six years, so I've been kind of playing around and that's been really fun," she said.