She warns them: “If you’re not 10 minutes early, you’re late. That’s Marta time.”
But at home, Sloan is a typical teenager. In Pittsboro, a town outside of Indianapolis with about 2,600 residents, she attends Tri-West High School. There, she said, she is not treated like a gymnastics star. She recalled one of her teachers finally noticing how good she was in the sport.
“Ooh, I Googled you,” Sloan recalled the teacher saying. “Look at you, you’re pretty good.”
At school, Sloan’s typical outfit is a T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. She blends in.
“I am just another kid,” she said. “I still have to park up at the middle school, not in the gravel parking lot closer to the school.”
“The gravel lot is reserved for seniors,” she said, sighing.
Over the last year, her mother, Mary, has noticed a marked change in Sloan, who is the youngest of four children. The girl who would climb out of the backyard by scaling the fence at age two had blossomed into a leader, she said, adding: “I feel like it just happened overnight.”
When asked if she thought her daughter would stay in the sport and train for the 2012 London Olympics, Mary Sloan said: “I just want her to be happy with how she does, and what she does.”
For Bridget Sloan, trying for the 2012 Games would mean excelling in gymnastics while trying to move on with other aspects of her life. She said she had not decided whether to go to college or to try for her second Olympics — or both.
For now, she is trying to focus on living a somewhat normal life, she said, because she is “still just a kid.”
Part of that life includes keeping in touch with friends. While in New York earlier this month, Sloan posted a note on her Twitter page, wishing happy birthday to Ivana Hong, another member of the national team.
Sloan wrote: “We can go see R rated moves by ourselves now.”
She ended the post with a smiley face.
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