TOKYO — Whenever she looks at her left hand, Grace McCallum gets a reminder of how far she's come in seven months. She still can't straighten the middle finger she jammed in January, the last remnant of a hand injury that almost derailed her quest to make the Olympic team.
"It's a work in progress,'' the Isanti gymnast said. "But it's getting there.''
Just like everything else. McCallum, 18, has been working on a new bars routine and integrating upgrades on other events since last month, when she was one of four gymnasts named to the U.S. women's team for the Tokyo Games. She's hoping to show some of those fresh moves in Sunday's qualifying round, as McCallum, Simone Biles, St. Paul's Suni Lee and Jordan Chiles begin Olympic competition at Ariake Gymnastics Center.
McCallum's goal is to compete in at least three of the four events during team competition. She believes she can boost the U.S. score on floor exercise, and that her upgraded bars routine can also help. As she prepared for the Games, McCallum also worked to "fix a few things'' in her beam routine and trained two different vaults.
Coach Sarah Jantzi dubbed McCallum "Amazing Grace'' before the Olympic trials, confident McCallum would live up to the name. Jantzi had seen her do it before.
"She had a lot of setbacks with the injury,'' said Jantzi, coach at Twin City Twisters in Champlin. "She worked so hard to get herself back to where she was.
"That's in our gym's DNA. We preach to our kids that we don't give up. Grace stuck with it, and she knew the results would show if she put in the work.''
McCallum has been part of the U.S. women's national team since 2018, when she moved up to the senior level. Though she was only 15 years old, she won the all-around at the Pacific Rim Championships in her first international meet as a senior and helped the U.S. to team gold. She celebrated her 16th birthday that year atop an awards podium at the world championships, after the Americans won the team title.
