To win gold in the 2012 Olympics, all McKayla Maroney had to do was to land on her feet. However she failed to do it, ending the game with a silver medal on vault.
Her American team won gold and Maroney has the credit for qualifying the team to the Team Finals. After the competition, the 16-year old athlete stood on the media podium with a sour facial reaction.
Her American team won gold and Maroney has the credit for qualifying the team to the Team Finals. After the competition, the 16-year old athlete stood on the media podium with a sour facial reaction. Maroney was photographed and later became an overnight internet sensation.
The Impressive Olympic Journey
Everyone was expecting Maroney, who stands 5’3”, to bring home a gold medal on vault. She attended professional trainings and won big in international gymnastics contests like the World
Championships, Visa Championships, Secret US Classic and the CoverGirl Classic events.
"My mother put me in gymnastics because I had so much energy and I was always running around, so she thought gymnastics might take away some of the insane amounts of energy, " recalled Maroney.
To prepare for the London Olympics, the athlete underwent an extensive training under the instruction of Arthur Akopyan and Galina Marinova. In June, she suffered a nasal fracture and a mild concussion. She missed a landing while warming up during the Visa Championships.
Her training for the Olympics made her previous bone break in the toe of her right foot worse. She said her broken bone hurt but still managed to ignore the pain.
"Bad things happen, you just have to make the best of it," claimed Maroney.
In the Olympics, her team was qualified in first place and the team members were individually qualified in first place to the Final Vault. She won a silver medal with a score of 15.083, despite her fall on her second vault.
“You can't always be perfect. Sometimes things don't go as planned,” remarked the gymnast.
She admitted that her hands did not really touch the vaults. The gold medal was given to Russia’s Sandra Izbasa.
“For every competition, I just went in there with confidence in myself and in my team, and each day it felt like I gained more and more experience,” shared Maroney.
The Unimpressive Meme
A picture of Maroney standing on the media podium with a sour facial expression went viral on the internet.
“A new Tumblr called 'McKayla Is Not Impressed' places the scowling teen wearing her silver medal next to some iconic moments in history, though none appear significant enough to break a smile onto McKayla's face,” reported in the Daily Mail Reporter.
Among the events showed in the pictures included the capture of Osama Bin Laden and the landing of NASA’s Team Curiosity on Mars. A Twitter parody account was also created by anonymous individuals to make fun of her “unimpressed” expression.
She uploaded a picture on Twitter showing her and two teammates in an “unimpressed” reaction after their attempt to take a dip in the Olympic village swimming pool was turned down.
Mike Blake of Reuters wrote:
“Maroney is talented, funny, charismatic, and is the owner of one of the all-time greatest bitch faces in history. I want to see what her high school is like: Is she the queen bee? Is she a dork? I don't know, and it's reality TV's job to tell me.”
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