Jade Carey has done it again.
For the second time, the Phoenix native and 2018 Glendale Mountain Ridge alum will be part of the Team USA at the 2024 Paris Olympics as part of the women’s gymnastics team.
Carey made the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which were held in 2021 because of the pandemic, where she wowed audiences with her performance in the floor exercise as she won the gold medal as a 21-year-old. She returned home to Sky Harbor Airport with a flood of people awaiting her arrival, even requiring a police escort.
At the 2024 U.S. Olympic Gymnastics Trials hosted in Minneapolis, Carey came in fourth in the all-around with a score of 111.350. Carey, a junior at Oregon State, will be joined by Simone Biles, Suni Lee, Jordan Chiles and Hezly Rivera in Paris.
“This is the most stressful meet I’ve ever been a part of in my life,” Carey said, during Sunday’s NBC broadcast. “Those past experiences really helped me, reminded me why I’m doing this sport and where I wanna go and I couldn’t do it without my family, my coaches, my friends, even these ladies right here, so I’m ready to rock it in Paris with them.”
While Carey was an individual competitor at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, she will be in the team competition for Paris.
It’s another full-circle moment for Carey and her parents, who are former gymnasts themselves. Carey’s mother, Danielle Greenberg, is a team coach at Gold Medal Gymnastics, which has locations in Tempe and Chandler. Carey’s father, Brian, is the owner of Carey On Gymnastics.
The two parents, knowing the pitfalls of going all-in too much on one sport, carefully guided their daughter in her gymnastic career. If anything was going to happen, it was going to be because Carey wanted it to happen. Not the other way around.
“My philosophy from the beginning was I just wanted her to love the sport on her own,” Danielle Greenberg told The Republic in 2021. “Her dad and I never pushed. We let her guide the ship all the way through. We didn’t talk about gymnastics at home. She could really just develop the way she wanted to.”
Brian is still her coach to this day. That role allowed him to watch his daughter compete in person at the Tokyo Olympics – a privilege not afforded to her mother or her two younger siblings, Taeva and Xandon – due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
That will change as the Paris Olympics are a full-go. The U.S. will be aiming to improve on their showing at the Tokyo Olympics, where the Americans finished second in the team results to the Russian Olympic Committee.
“This means everything to me,” Carey said to NBC TODAY’s Hoda Kotb. “I think they’ve been saying, we all have some sort of redemption that we want, so it’s just incredible to be sitting here today and truly enjoying the gymnastics that I’m doing and having fun with all these girls. And I’m excited for Paris.”
Logan Stanley is a sports reporter with The Arizona Republic who primarily focuses on high school, ASU and Olympic sports. To suggest ideas for human-interest stories and other news, reach out to Stanley at logan.stanley@gannett.com or 707-293-7650. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter:@LSscribe.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Phoenix’s Jade Carey joining US gymnastics team for Paris Olympics
