The Jade Carey who comes to the phone is not the expected Jade Carey. She’s been described as quiet, reserved, shy. Yet the woman who takes the phone in Corvallis to chat with a stranger is, while perhaps not effusive, certainly engaging. She cracks a joke about an athletic department staffer and mutual acquaintance and bounds into a conversation about her college gymnastics experience at Oregon State.
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She has, to say the least, a lot on her plate. This week, Carey, the 2021 Olympic floor exercise gold medalist, will enter the NCAA championships all-around competition tied with Georgia’s Lily Smith as the top seed, hoping to give Oregon State its first all-around national champion. Next month, she’ll likely head to Hartford, Conn., for the Core Hydration Classic and, if all goes well, move on to the U.S. Championships, and the Olympic Trials in June, where she will vie for a spot on her second U.S. Olympic team.
The double-toe dip into the collegiate and elite gymnastics world is no longer as verboten as it once was, but doing both in an Olympic year — as Carey is — remains something of an outlier. Fellow Tokyo Olympians Sunisa Lee (Auburn) and Jordan Chiles (UCLA) both stepped away from their college teams this season to concentrate on their Parisian goals, as did Kayla DiCello (Florida) who traveled to Tokyo as a replacement gymnast.
This year, the competition to make the team is perhaps as fierce as it has been in recent memory. What Carey did in Tokyo has no bearing whatsoever on her Paris chances.
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This is, in other words, a risk. Yet Carey happily took it. It has a little — very little, Carey says — to do with NIL, and certainly something to do with loyalty. Carey committed to Oregon State when she was 14; she finally competed in a meet for the Beavers 1,528 days, an Olympic deferral and a global pandemic later.
Mostly, however, it has to do with the evolution from the person people describe to the person who answers the phone.
“When I finally got here, I fell in love with gymnastics all over again,” Carey said. “I’m having so much fun, and I’ve been able to bring that side of myself out more. I think it’s made me a better gymnast.”
Brian Carey sat across from his daughter, knowing Carey was so deep inside her head that he had to find a way to pull her out. The two had gotten to that place, inside of a Tokyo training gym in July 2021, via a route that felt simultaneously fast-tracked and circuitous. In 2016, Carey was competing in the Junior Olympic Nationals, planning to pursue a collegiate career at Oregon State. A year later, she was a two-time world championship silver medalist, on the national team and knee-deep in elite gymnastics.
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Yet she was not an automatic pick for the COVID-delayed Olympic Games, opting to qualify as an individual athlete (on vault) rather than leave her spot up to the subjectiveness of the selection committee. In Tokyo, Carey did her job, qualifying second behind teammate Simone Biles for the vault final.
And then everything went haywire. Biles withdrew from all of her events with the twisties, pushing Carey into the all-around competition and placing an even heavier burden on her vault. Then it all came crashing down. Carey fell on beam, ending a shot at the all-around podium, and in her run up to her vault, she stumbled, negating her planned vault. She instead finished eighth.
Devastated, Carey returned to her room, trying to process what happened and how she would possibly compete in the floor final the next day. Brian, who’s been coaching his daughter her entire life, long ago learned how to walk the fine line between parent and coach. He knew that finding the delicate balance was especially critical at that moment. He gave her space and time, eventually texting only to see if she might want to work out the next morning. When Carey said yes, he felt a glimmer of hope but knew to tread lightly.
Brian arrived at the gym and promptly shooed away the national team coordinators and other assembled staff, leaving no one in the gym save father and daughter and a Japanese gymnast fine-tuning her beam routine. Jade talked through her worries and disappointments. Brian listened patiently, but when Jade paused long enough to allow him to insert a thought, he offered a suggestion.
“What if,” Brian prodded his daughter, “the worst day of your life could turn into the best day?”
“And then I saw a spark,” Brian said. The next day, Carey scored a 14.366 in the floor exercise and won Olympic gold.
It is that spark that Oregon State continues to fuel for Carey.
It not only takes a village to do what Carey is trying to do; it takes the very fluid desktop calendar housed on Brian’s laptop.
“Meet dates are in pen,” said Brian, who joined the Oregon State coaching staff this year. “Everything else is in pencil.”
The goal all season has been to do the seemingly undoable — pursue NCAA excellence, without jilting Olympic training. To the untrained ear, it sounds decidedly uncomplicated — do gymnastics for Oregon State, which in turn equates to prep for the Olympics. It is not that simple.
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At the risk of sounding crass, college gymnastics is easier. To score a perfect 10 (the NCAA still uses the old system of scoring) requires more precision and far less from Carey’s very sizable bag of tricks. It is equal parts unnecessary and borderline unwise to perform her harder skills during the Oregon State season, a far longer and more meet-heavy calendar than the elite season.
That means Carey essentially has to devise separate routines for each apparatus and train both with equal gusto. Most days, Carey does her collegiate sets and then concentrates on her international assignments. She has purposefully — and reluctantly — backed off of the number of events she’s competed in this season (she did 55 routines a year ago compared to 42 this year). Still, it’s a lot to juggle, and it’s the reason most women take time off from their college obligations during Olympic years.
“It’s not a little girls’ sport anymore; it’s a women’s sport,” said Oregon State head coach Tanya Chaplin. “You don’t have to put one aside for the other. But it’s a lot. It’s not easy. It takes special commitment and special attention. But it helped that she set this goal going into the season. Jade knew what she wanted.”
The simple question though, is why? Carey could easily streamline her life, and no one would think less of her for it. She already has given Oregon State plenty — her fourth-place finish in last year’s national all-around was the program’s best since 1993, and in her first two seasons she won the Pac-12 all-around title. In 2023, she became the 13th gymnast in collegiate history to complete what’s known as the “Gym Slam,” scoring a perfect 10 on each event. She does not, in other words, owe anyone this season.
But there is reciprocity here. Oregon State is giving as much as it’s receiving. Gymnastics is a demanding sport, but it can also feel incredibly lonely. The previously introverted Carey carried the burden solo, shouldering not just the expectations but her internal scorecard. She is a perfectionist who can, according to her father, be incredibly self-critical. Like the person he encountered in that Tokyo gym, Jade also can get stuck in self-doubt. Brian calls the Oregon State team and Chaplin “the missing piece in the puzzle,” the team providing Carey with the security to come out of her shell and the support she never realized she missed.
“Elite training, you’re pretty much on your own,” Jade said. “Here, it’s the team. I’m not used to having 20 girls in the gym with me, working toward the same thing. It’s like having a bunch of sisters to go through things with. Everything feels like a celebration.”
Yet there is, too, inherent pressure in her position at Oregon State. You do not roll onto a college campus with an Olympic gold medal dangling around your neck without people expecting you to perform. Carey is her team’s anchor, expected to hit all of her routines and score highly. In her three seasons, she has hit on 145 of 145 routines, scored 13 perfect 10s, and won 117 individual event titles.
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While it still pales in comparison to what she felt in Tokyo, routinely shouldering that load for three seasons has shown Carey that she’s capable of handling it.
“In the Olympics, every time you compete, you want to be the best and you get to that team final, everyone has to hit,” Carey said. “You feel it. You have to. There will never be a more pressure situation in my life than that. But these moments here, it’s not the same, but I think with each one, you get tougher and stronger mentally. I know I feel it.”
The question is how it will carry over beyond this week’s NCAA championships and into the pressure-packed push for a spot on the Olympic team.
There are no guarantees. In her return to elite competition at last August’s U.S. Classic, Carey finished ninth on the beam.
Carey is majoring in digital communications. She’s not sure where she wants that to take her but hopes to remain involved in sports. Because of both her team and elite competition travel, her classes are online.
Oregon State, however, is on the quarter system. Finals begin on June 10, or by Carey’s calendar, sandwiched between the U.S. Championships in Fort Worth, Texas, at the beginning of June and the U.S. Olympic Trials in Minneapolis at the end of the month.
“That’s going to be a little interesting,” she said with a laugh, adding that she will need to huddle with her dad, Chaplin, the school’s compliance director, coach, and team’s academic advisor to figure it all out.
“Yeah, I’ll just let them figure that out,” she continued. “It’s a lot to work through, I know. But no, no regrets. I wouldn’t change any of it. I know I’m stronger than before.”
(Top photo of Jade Carey competing in the floor exercise during the Tokyo Olympics: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
