The 10-second 100-meter dash. The four-minute mile. The two-hour marathon. In baseball, is the 110 mph fastball the next big number to fall? What actually is the upper limit when it comes to professional pitchers throwing their fastest pitches?

There is some debate about what the fastest fastball to date has been. In the documentary Fastball, filmmakers looked at a few key moments from the past. Bob Feller threw a ball faster than an 86 mph motorcycle. Nolan Ryan was clocked at 100.8 mph by a radar gun in 1974. If you convert Ryan’s number to the out-of-the-hand methodology used to measure pitch speed today, you get 108 mph. For some, that counts as the fastest pitch on record.

We’ve been tracking major-league pitchers with the same quality of technology since 2007, though, and nobody has thrown harder than Aroldis Chapman and his 105.8 mph fastball in 2010. So Ryan’s 108 would be a large departure from 15 years of tracking pitches — and, for what it’s worth, it’s a large departure from radar gun readings over the rest of his game that day, as well as the rest of his career, which usually topped out around 96 and 97 mph.

Some Nolan Ryan gun readings to show how random Radar gun/Laser technology was back in the day. pic.twitter.com/BAuEMAbTIM

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) January 20, 2024

Since those other pitchers were clocked using outdated technology, it’s probably fairest to call 105.8 mph the modern record in fastball velocity. So that’s how fast a human has thrown the ball. But what’s the fastest a human being could throw the ball?

“When you build up a simple physics model that is essentially a series of collisions between body parts, you get a max fastball velocity of about 125 mph,” said Jimmy Buffi, who has a PhD in biomedical engineering. Buffi is a former Los Angeles Dodgers analyst and is a co-founder of Reboot Motion, a player development consultancy firm.

“We’ll need to use new methods,” said Kyle Boddy, current Boston Red Sox consultant and the founder of Driveline Baseball, a player development lab and consultancy company. “If there is a way to continue on, it won’t be with current methods. Using the best mechanics from elite pitchers, piecemeal, is unlikely to be the way we can create the 110 mph pitcher.”

Others thought about the potential for injury in this pursuit – pitching injuries have been up with velocity, after all. Maybe we’re already at the limit?

“I don’t think people are going to be able to throw that hard,” said the Dodgers’ Bobby Miller, the league’s third-hardest throwing starter, about numbers like 110 and 125 mph. “You reach a certain point where your arm will probably break.”

That’s three different answers. Let’s take a closer look at each.

The case for 125 mph

There’s a concept in pitching called the “kinetic chain,” which describes the transfer of force from the ground, and the larger muscles in the legs, up through the core and out to the end of the arm. If you work in a purely theoretical space, that chain is basically a bunch of interactions that attempt to conserve the momentum created down low as it travels out to the arm. Buffi’s job at ReBoot is to help make those transfers as efficient as possible. He created a physics model to describe them for the purposes of answering this question.

“To come up with this toy example,” he said, “I thought of the pitching motion as essentially a series of energy transfers between two masses, similar to a large ball colliding with a smaller ball. The legs are the larger mass, and they transfer energy to the torso, which transfers energy to the upper arm, then to the forearm, then to the hand, then to the ball.”

The relative sizes of each of those muscle groups govern the amount of energy that can be transferred in each interaction, just as it is in the classic physics problem in which a big ball hits a smaller ball. In the model that Buffi created, a 200-pound person putting 500 pounds of force into the ground while being 85 percent efficient in his transfers (an efficiency that is elite, but within the range of possibility, in his estimation) would throw 125 mph.

“Even though it’s a toy example, when you put in reasonable energy transfer numbers and ground reaction force values, you actually get reasonable pitching velocity estimates,” said Buffi.

One of today’s hardest throwers, Oakland closer Mason Miller, agrees that the size of the player and force into the ground was a common denominator when you look at the hardest throwers.

“Physically, I’m 230 pounds, maybe 240 at my biggest. Chapman is like 250 pounds,” said Miller. He has thrown the fourth-fastest pitch this season at 103.7 mph, which trails only a couple Chapman fastballs (one at 104) and one from Angels reliever Ben Joyce. “Force production into the ground is important, we’ve seen that from force plate testing, that’s a good measure of power production.”

But there are some flaws in this case. Ground force reactions north of the ones Buffi used have been recorded already by athletes at Driveline Baseball, and they didn’t throw 125 mph. It’s way out in front of what’s been observed, as well.

Said Miller: “125 seems like it’s way out of our current existence.”

“Oh my goodness, 125, that’s crazy,” said Twins’ closer Jhoan Duran, who has topped out at 104.8 mph.

The case for 110 mph

The study of biomechanics, or the mechanical laws relating to the movement and structure of living organisms, has unlocked velocity for a lot of today’s hard throwers. The average four-seam major league fastball, measured by the same technology and methodology, has increased in velocity every season since Major League Baseball started tracking it, all the way from 91.1 mph in 2007 to 94.1 now.

Sam Hellinger of Driveline Baseball shared an example of how this understanding of the body has helped players train to get more velocity. Justin Thorsteinson, a former Division I pitcher hoping to sign on with an organization, came to them throwing 87.7 mph in June and by August was throwing 91.5 mph, and his changing how his shoulder moved was key. Scapular retraction — in rudimentary terms, how far back the throwing shoulder reaches before coming forward — has been linked to velocity by biomechanics studies because it creates a big separation between the hip and the shoulder. As that separation snaps back like a rubber band, torso speed is accelerated, which is then transferred to the arm. That was a big focus for Thorsteinson.

“Based on Justin’s bio report, we determined that his most glaring need mechanically was his arm action, specifically his max shoulder external rotation and scapular retraction,” said Hellinger.

After some work with weighted balls and specific drills, Thorsteinson improved his scores in the specific biomechanics that they were targeting, as you can see also from this picture, which shows how much he improved his shoulder retraction.

Before (left) and after (right) for Justin Thorsteinson, showing more shoulder retraction after the drills. (Driveline Baseball)

So could a 250-pound monster of an athlete refine each of his movements to the best of current knowledge and bust past the 106 mph ceiling towards the 110 mph that Boddy thought possible?

“If you’re getting bigger than Chapman, who throws 105, if you get any bigger, you lose coordination,” said Dodgers starter Walker Buehler. “He’s as big and as strong as you can be, and his delivery is all about velo.”

Boddy is also not sure that a big dude, plus the best piecemeal mechanics of our time, was the right way forward.

“We’ll need to use new methods, like simulation of human movement with millions of synthetic data points using machine learning and artificial intelligence to explore the entire latent space of possible mechanical outputs and muscular contributions to the throwing motion,” said Boddy. “This is something Driveline Baseball has been working on for years and is rapidly becoming a priority project — primarily for durability improvements over performance gains, though we anticipate breakthroughs in both realms over the coming years from our Sports Science and Research teams.”

In other words, instead of taking our mythical 250-pound flamethrower and then giving him what modern research thinks is the best mechanics in the legs, the torso, the shoulder, and the arms, Boddy is hoping that AI could help us think of new ways those body parts could move in concert with each other, in order to identify even better possible mechanics.

Could AI do this? Given the rapid rise of that technology, it seems plausible that we could see gains from re-evaluating current processes, even ones that involve the movement of our bodies.

The case for 106 mph

Let’s flip over to a different sport for a second. Over in the 100-meter dash, we have records going back to the 1970s. If we track the best times by year, it looks like we’re hitting a bit of an asymptote — instead of large gains like we saw in the 1980s and ’90s, we’re fighting over smaller increments of change.

If you altitude-adjust these numbers — running higher up can shave some milliseconds, as we saw with a couple of record-breaking runs earlier this century — we’re zeroing in around 9.7 to 9.8 seconds as perhaps the fastest a runner can manage in a neutral setting. This is seen by some to show that modern training, nutrition, and equipment have pushed the body as far as it can go. There are similar graphs in other running sports that suggest the same.

A few examples from other sports:

100m sprint, marathon & 1 mile world record progressions pic.twitter.com/6z5nhPPbdP

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— Ben Brewster (@TreadAthletics) May 28, 2024

The maximum pitch velocity seems to be following a similar trajectory in baseball. Chapman threw 105.8 mph in 2010 and since then, the average best fastball has been 104, with a peak of 105.7 (Chapman again in 2016) and a nadir of 102.2 (in 2020, of course). The best non-Chapman fastball is around 104 mph in any given season.

There are some differences between pitching and running, though. Here’s where Glenn Fleisig, the director of biomechanics research at the American Sports Medicine Institute, comes in.

“Fifteen years ago I was quoted as saying that I didn’t think top velocity or the ceiling going up, but I foresee it getting pretty crowded at the ceiling,” said Fleisig. “It wasn’t a lucky guess that I pulled out of my butt.”

“When others talk about the ceiling, they talk about physics and statistics. Maybe by the laws of physics, maybe people could throw faster. Maybe the highest number could keep going up like it (did) for runners, because the training can improve, the mechanics and biomechanics can improve, the nutrition and supplements can improve,” he continued.

“The difference here is that we’re pushing this little ulnar collateral ligament to its limit. We are strengthening our muscles and improving our mechanics and nutrition, but based on how the body is built, the ligaments and tendons don’t improve proportionally to the other parts of the body and the process.”

When that ligament tears, the pitcher needs Tommy John surgery to get back on the mound, and those surgeries are more common than ever. How much stress that ligament can handle might be up for debate.

“No one really knows how much stress a UCL can really take, because of a problem I call cadavers and robots,” said Randy Sullivan of the Florida Baseball ARMory on a recent podcast. “We determined how much stress a UCL can take through a cadaver setting where we found that it tears at 35 newton-meters of torque, and then we used motion capture to determine that it can tolerate on a single pitch, it has to accept 70-75 nM of stress.  We got the bottom number from a person who wasn’t alive; living tissue wouldn’t react the same way. And we got the top number from a model, a mythical robot.”

Fleisig, who authored the study that looked at how much stress the UCL could handle in cadavers, saw that second number in a slightly different light.

Throwing high-velocity pitches puts a great deal of stress on a pitcher’s UCL. (Drew Jordan / The Athletic)

“That 70-75 nM dynamic stress from biomechanics analysis is on the entire elbow, and the UCL does about a third of that resistance, your bones and tendons help with that resistance,” he points out. Taking a third of 75 nM leaves the current stress on the elbow within the 35 nM maximum we see in cadavers.

The sport might be telling us something with the spike in arm injuries. All those torn ligaments, which are increasingly tied to top-end velocity by the best available research, seem to suggest that we are running up on the physical limits of that little tendon. Maybe 106 is all that we can do.

“I’ve thought about it before,” said Joyce, the Los Angeles Angels pitcher who has thrown the hardest this year and also had a fastball tracked at 105.5 mph in college. “I would think someone will hit 106.0, but I don’t know if there is much more than that.”

Where do we go from here?

The work to improve the ceiling will go on, no matter what injuries say, because of the reward system in place for pitchers who can throw hard. The highest draft picks, the biggest free-agent contracts — those go to the fastest fastballs, and that’s not likely to change in the short term.

Joyce has an identical twin who tops out at 98 mph, with similar mechanics and identical genes. So what separated Ben from his brother Zach?

“I didn’t do anything specific,” said the harder-throwing Joyce. “I just always wanted to throw hard, so I tried to throw harder every day, kept throwing harder and harder, and it eventually worked out.”

Joyce pointed out that he hadn’t really optimized his mechanics or done anything special in that regard. He’s just throwing 103 and 104 on pure willpower. He’s also a little smaller than Miller and Chapman. Maybe the next kid is 50 pounds heavier, has that same iron will, ends up as a reliever where he can max out on fewer pitches, and also optimizes his biomechanics. That scenario seems likely to push the top-end velocity some … but how much higher if that little ligament is taking all it can handle already?

If that combination of inputs only pushes maximum velocity forward a tick or two, it might behoove young pitchers to consider other goals as they come up the ranks. In other words, if we get to a point where everyone throws harder than 94 mph in the big leagues, but nobody really throws harder than 106, maybe the best way to stick out in the future will be to demonstrate a pitch mix with varying velocities and movements, with good command. Maybe the success of softer-throwing pitchers such as the Royals’ Seth Lugo, who throws eight different pitches from two different arm slots, and the Phillies’ Ranger Suárez, who keeps the ball on the ground with great command, can provide new role models for young pitchers.

As the injuries mount in the search for velocity, chasing a maximum number that might not even be possible may not be the best plan for a young arm interested in making the most out of his talent.

— The Athletic’s Sam Blum contributed to this story.

(Top image: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photo of Paul Skenes: Justin K. Aller / Getty Images)

DETROIT — Miles Russell’s pants don’t fit. He didn’t mean to show off his ankles during Thursday’s first round of the Rocket Mortgage Classic. It’s just, the inseam he was measured for recently no longer applies. He hit a growth spurt soon after and now measures 5-foot-7, but stuck with pants meant for a wee 5-6. His waist, meanwhile, remains near-nonexistent. At 120 pounds, he wears a 28-inch waistline “with a scrunched belt.”

So there was Russell on Thursday, walking around Detroit Golf Club, flashing those ankles with each step.

Such is the life of a 15-year-old.

Russell made his PGA Tour debut at the Rocket Mortgage, shooting a 2-over 74. Born in 2009, he signed autographs for 7-year-olds, 10-year-olds, 15-year-olds and some adults. He took every swing with a PGA Tour Live cameras a few feet behind him. He held a press conference the day before his first round and afterward. He played from tees measuring 7,370 yards. He played in a field with 10 of the top 50-ranked players in the world.

And the strangest thing about it all?

It felt oddly normal.

This year has already seen two 16-year-olds make the cut on the PGA Tour — Kris Kim at The CJ Cup Byron Nelson, and Blades Brown at the Myrtle Beach Classic. Last year, 15-year-old Oliver Betschart survived a 54-hole qualifier to play in the Bermuda Championship, becoming the youngest player to play in a PGA Tour-sanctioned event in almost a decade. He was three months younger than Russell is now.

First birdie on TOUR for 15-year-old Miles Russell 🤩 pic.twitter.com/5tLfnf5HuW

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) June 27, 2024

Now it’s Russell at the Rocket Mortgage. In April, he played in the Korn Ferry Tour’s LECOM Suncoast Classic, shooting rounds of 68 and 66 to become the youngest player to make the cut in the developmental tour’s history. Headlines followed. Then Russell followed with rounds of 70 and 66 to finish T20. The winner, Tim Widing, was 11 years older than him.

Tournament organizers from the Rocket Mortgage took notice and contacted Russell following his performance at the Suncoast Classic, hoping to capitalize on the story. Because that’s what a tournament like the Rocket desperately needs — attention, however it can get it. Big names are scarce in Detroit, so compelling storylines are required. The Nos. 2, 4 and 5 ranked amateurs in the world — Jackson Koivun, Benjamin James and Luke Clanton — are all in this year’s field. Clanton is making his PGA Tour debut, as is Neal Shipley, the low amateur at the Masters and U.S. Open who recently turned pro. As Shipley walked off the course on Thursday, he was told next week’s John Deere Classic, another non-elevated PGA Tour event, has a spot for him.

Those names are all at least in or out of college, though.

Russell just finished his freshman year of high school, even though he doesn’t attend a physical school. The Jacksonville Beach, Fla., native began playing at 2 years old, broke par at 6, and has been on a prodigious path ever since. He is home-schooled and already operating as a small business. He has an agent and holds Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) deals with TaylorMade and Nike.

Because 15 sounds so jarring, there’s the tendency for some to see Russell as a novelty.

In reality, this is all less and less uncommon.

Russell did not come to Detroit like some kid looking to high-five his heroes.

Rico Hoey, one of Russell’s playing partners on Thursday, was on the practice green after their round and still in a bit of disbelief. Now 28, he was trying to break 80 at Russell’s age. Coming into the first round, he assumed he and Pierceson Coody, a 24-year-old PGA Tour rookie with three Korn Ferry wins to his name, would need to keep things light and easy for the young star. Then they met him.

“As a 15-year-old, I’m sure I’d be pretty nervous out here, so we tried to make it easy on him, and make him feel comfortable, but, really, I don’t even know how much he needed that,” Hoey said. “He was cool. His short game is really good. He has a lot of length for his size. His game is just really good and he’s really calm.”

Some will always be inherently uncomfortable with young mega-watt talent being expedited to play among pros in any sport. But that’s never stopped it from happening. And golf appears to be revving more and more, and going younger and younger. It’s reasonable to expect someone soon emerging to surpass Michelle Wie West as the youngest player to ever tee it up in a PGA Tour event. She was 14 years, three months and seven days old when she played in the 2004 Sony Open.

What’s most eye-opening isn’t the ages, but how narrow the gap is between the kids and the pros. Russell is not some beefed-up bomber. He is instead elastic and has crafted a swing with his coach, former Korn Ferry player Ramon Bascansa, that generates enough clubhead speed to hang with the pros. He averaged 292 yards off the tee on Thursday, tied for 78th in the 156-man field.

But that doesn’t mean everything surrounding him isn’t still misfitting. He is technically not old enough to use Detroit Golf Club’s men’s locker room, though exceptions are made this week. He is not able to drive, let alone rent a car or check into a hotel alone. One group behind Russell’s, 36-year-old Rafael Campos played his round while ripping a few cigarettes — a vice that Russell can’t legally buy for another three years.

Afterward, Russell played along with questions about the experience, but was really only concerned with the golf. He talked about unforced errors and missing some makable puts. He said he learned watching Coody and Hoey how tour pros manage to “grind it out and shoot a couple under.” He said, sure, he was nervous to start the round. How much out of 10? “I’d probably give it a seven.” But sort of shrugged off the idea of being intimidated.

Russell’s voice was soft and he was obviously still a little peeved. A missed 3-footer on the final hole left him with a closing bogey.

“We live, we learn, we move on,” he said, sounding like someone who is not only used to playing on tour, but damn near expects to.

Maybe, for better or worse, that’s not so crazy anymore.

(Top photo: Raj Mehta / Getty Images)

The garbage can didn’t have a chance. Alicia Sacramone Quinn, captain of the 2008 U.S. Olympic silver-medalist gymnastics team and winner of 10 World Championship medals, had just been told she hadn’t made a long-since-forgotten gymnastics team, so she reared back, channeled her fury into her foot and unleashed it on the bin.

Now a mother of four and a dozen years removed from her last competition, Quinn shares that story to reiterate a simple message: “I get it,” she says. This week, she undoubtedly will incite ire and agony in equal measure. Sixteen women will compete in the U.S. Olympic Trials in Minneapolis; only five will be chosen to compete in Paris, and Quinn, the national team’s strategy lead, will help make the painful cuts.

Yet those three words — I get it — are why she and Chellsie Memmel, the technical lead, are here. They were not obvious choices. For the last 25 years, the women’s national team program has been led by older coaches with a wealth of experience. Quinn, whose focus is planning the overall strategy for the national team, worked on the development staff a decade ago and served on the board of directors for the Athlete Assistance Fund, a not-for-profit that provides financial assistance and counseling for gymnasts who were victims of sexual abuse. Memmel, tasked with ensuring routines are designed to maximize points values, is a respected judge. Both are just 36.

But after a much-needed reckoning awakened the sport to reconcile its ugly past and restore its future, Quinn and Memmel represent the pivot the sport’s leadership intentionally sought. They are athletes-turned-administrators, young enough to recognize the damage the sport incurred, mature enough to improve it and just insouciant enough to not care who gets offended in the process.

“Ultimately, I want these athletes to be able to look back on their careers and be happy about it,” Memmel says. “I want them to be able to look back and have fond memories, to be proud of their accomplishments and not just be like, ‘Well, I did it, but what did I have to do to get there?’ I don’t want that, that cost.”

Asked to describe Quinn, her co-worker, co-conspirator and “work wife,” Memmel considers the question carefully. This is not surprising. She is the stereotypical Midwestern girl — thoughtful, even-keeled and sweet. The Wisconsin-born daughter of two gymnastics coaches, she naturally gravitated toward the gym, where her tactical exactness quickly separated her from the pack. Memmel is, in other words, ideally suited for her current position to nuance a routine and find and maximize the values hidden in the complex code of points.

Quinn is none of that. She jokes that she is here for comedic relief, and when asked about her recurring and ever-evolving roles within gymnastics, she likens it to being in the mob. “Once you get in, you don’t get out.” Born in Boston to an orthodontist dad and hairstylist and salon owner mom, Quinn only found gymnastics after she decided the best way to travel about a mall for a shopping trip with her mother was via cartwheels. She succeeded on equal parts dogged determination, moxie and verve, which make her equally well-suited to be the front-facing person for her sport.

“Spicy” is the word Memmel finally settles on to describe Quinn. The descriptor relayed back to her, Quinn nods in approval but adds — “Chellsie can get spicy, too, if she needs to. I’ve seen it.”

They grew up in the sport in lockstep, albeit via different routes. Memmel stayed the traditional elite course, where she grew into an excellent all-arounder (she won the 2005 world championship gold medal) before a rash of injuries conspired to chronically mess with her timeline. Quinn developed into a floor and vault event specialist and took what was then an unorthodox turn when she opted to compete for Brown University and still train at the elite level.

They crossed paths frequently in the small community that is top-flight gymnastics, and in 2004, shared a room for the first time — at the World Cup in Birmingham, England, where Memmel won uneven bars and Quinn the vault. Quinn also was part of that 2005 world championship team — she won a gold on floor and took third in vault — and in 2008, they both were named to the Olympic team.

It is both their wildly opposing personalities and those shared experiences that prepared them for their current gigs. When Memmel frets, lost in rabbit holes of possible meet outcomes and their potential effects on team selection scenarios, Quinn yanks her out and reminds her to let things be. When Quinn flies off the handle, Memmel restores calm. They have, at times, needed both.

Selecting a team does not earn anyone popularity points, and more than once Quinn has fielded calls from angry coaches, distraught that their gymnast didn’t make a cut. She uses Memmel’s measured approach when she can, but she’s smart enough to know when someone is trying to bully her. Memmel and Quinn acknowledge they are young, they are new, and they do not know all of the answers.

That does not mean they’ll be pushed around. When the measured Memmel approach doesn’t work, Quinn isn’t afraid to use a little Sacramone Italian flair. “I have no problem telling someone that they’re not going to talk to me like that and if they don’t stop, I’m going to hang up and we can continue this conversation at another time,” she says. “I know I’m young. I know I may not have as much experience as someone on the coaching side, but you’re not going to disrespect me because I’m younger.”

Memmel and Quinn have, in a lot of ways, more experience than most of the coaches they’re dealing with, especially when it comes to the nuances of the national team and its antiquated system.

At the 2008 Olympic trials, Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin finished 1-2 in the all-around, cementing their previously presumed spots on the Beijing teams. Memmel slotted behind them in third and also finished second on uneven bars, her signature event. Quinn took second only to Johnson on vault and fourth on floor, her specialist apparatus.

Neither, however, left Philadelphia as members of Team USA. They didn’t secure their positions on the six-person team until a month later, when they competed in an invitation-only, all-or-nothing meet at the Karolyi Ranch in Texas.

Because that is the way Marta Karolyi, the national team coordinator, wanted it and that is how USA Gymnastics operated. From 1999 until 2021, elite gymnastic decisions wrested at the discretion of one person — first Bela Karolyi (1999-2000), then his wife, Marta (2001-2016), followed by Valeri Liukin (2016-18) and finally Tom Forster (2018-2021). The national team coordinator essentially chose the team based on his or her standards and preferences. Marta Karolyi, it was long rumored, would nix an athlete if they fell so much as once during a selection competition.

Neither had the Olympic experience they envisioned. Designated to compete on all four events in the team final, Memmel instead was rendered a bars specialist after injuring her ankle days before competition. It was only after the meet that Memmel explained that her “minor” ankle injury was, in fact, a broken ankle. Quinn, in the meantime, fell on both the beam and the floor, and when China overtook the U.S. for gold, she largely blamed herself.

“We didn’t come back with the color medal we wanted,” Memmel says. “And it took me a long time to be able to look back and be fully proud of what we did. It’s taken many years — not just one or two — to be able to say, ‘Look at what you did. You were still able to do it.’”

Still, Memmel and Quinn believe they were the “lucky” ones. Mercifully, neither was part of the cycle of abuse exposed during and after the Larry Nassar investigation. That reckoning not only led to Nassar’s imprisonment and the exposure of others, but called into question the wisdom of allowing one person to wield so much power.

In 2021, after Forster resigned, USA Gymnastics officially decentralized control. They turned the one-person job into three, creating strategy, technical and developmental directors (Dan Baker is the third member of the current team), and then subcontracted it even further, appointing a three-person selection committee to fill out competition rosters (the top finishing all-arounders automatically qualify).

It was already better under Forster. That Simone Biles could own up to and ultimately remove herself from competition because of the twisties is progress. But he did not always communicate well, and Memmel and Quinn believe that it is as much the minuscule, seemingly inconsequential, mistakes that ultimately led to the fracturing of the old system as much as the more global problems.

Gymnasts, quite simply, weren’t considered. They were the cogs in the very successful gymnastics machine, told when to show up, and what to do, with little thought about what they wanted to do and almost no explanation as to why they had to do it.

Team mealtimes, for example, were set without any input from the athletes about when best to fuel their bodies. Quinn and Memmel ask their gymnasts before cementing competition schedules. Under the old regime, little to no time was spent with the athletes individually to understand their personalities, their quirks and their fears. Upon getting their jobs a year ago, Quinn and Memmel set up individual meetings with each gymnast and her personal coach.

Microaggressions left unchecked led to major inflection points. Unlike similar individualized sports, such as swimming and track, gymnasts compete for a team medal. That team, however, is composed of individuals trying to win their own medals, too, and to do that they have to beat each other while simultaneously winning for their country. Consequently, Quinn, who witnessed the infighting firsthand, intends to make team dynamics and chemistry an immediate focus.

“Our sport was stuck in its ways for so long,” Quinn says. “We’re finally modernizing and progressing to take things like nutrition and mental health into consideration, things that were shoved to the wayside or viewed as unimportant before. It was always like, ‘We’re winning, why fix it? Is it broken?’ Well, yes. It was. And it still could be better.”

This is going to be hard. Of the 16 women in Minneapolis this weekend, four were on the Tokyo Olympic team (and Kayla DiCello was an alternate) and five others on the most recent world championship squad. “We could send a B or C team and still do well,” Quinn says.

But building an Olympic team is complicated; it’s not as simple as picking the five best all-around athletes. The Olympics run off the “three up, three count” format — meaning each team sends three athletes to each apparatus for team competition, and all three scores count. Specialists, in other words, matter. Despite the wealth of talent and experience at trials, there are, besides Biles, no obvious choices.

Shilese Jones, widely considered the other most likely all-around candidate, withdrew from the U.S. Championships last month with an injured shoulder (she tore her labrum in 2022). Sunisa Lee is the defending gold medalist in the all-around, but she’s been fighting the lingering effects of a kidney disease. Jordan Chiles fell on both floor and beam at championships, and Skye Blakely, while solid at that meet, stumbled elsewhere. DiCello is generally solid in all four events, but Jade Carey likely will perform skills on floor and vault that no other athlete will attempt.

This is not a test. There are no right or wrong answers. Just incredibly difficult choices. The U.S. won gold in 2012 and 2016 and silver in 2020. Without Russia this year, the Americans will be heavily favored again. “It is a ton of pressure,” Memmel says. “An incredible amount of pressure.”

If anything has caught both women by surprise in their new jobs, it is how emotionally fraught selections are. As athletes, they felt it singularly; they wanted to make the team. Now they’ve spent months watching 16 women at various camps and competitions who all want to make the team. Memmel likens it to watching her own daughter compete. “Only this isn’t Level 3,” she laughs.

Adds Quinn: “I’m like everyone’s crazy aunt. I want them all to do well. I try to stress to them that this is going to be one of the hardest things you’re ever going to do, and more than half of you will be disappointed. It kills me, but I want them to know this is only one step on their journey, one page in their book.”

In other words, Memmel and Quinn get it.

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic;  photos: Tim Clayton, Xavier Laine, Aric Becker / Getty Images)